Apple co-founder Steve Jobs once described computers as bicycles for the mind. What MIT’s Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship just released has a little more horsepower.
“It’s not a Ferrari yet, but we have a car,” said Bill Auret, the center’s executive director. The vehicle is the MIT Entrepreneurship JetPack, a generative AI tool trained on Auret’s 24-step Disciplined Entrepreneurship framework that inputs prompts into a large-scale language model.
When you pitch a startup idea to Eship JetPack, “it’s like five or 10 or 12 MIT undergrads immediately running out and doing all the research on the question and coming back with the answer,” says Aulet.
The tool is currently being used by entrepreneurship students and is being piloted outside of MIT, with a waiting list for potential users to join. The tool is accessible through the Trust Center’s Orbit digital entrepreneurship platform, which was launched for student use in 2019. Aulet says Orbit grew out of a need for an alternative to the static Trust Center website.
“We didn’t follow our own entrepreneurial protocol,” he says. “We met students where they were, and more and more of them were on their phones. I said, ‘Let’s make an app that’s more dynamic than a static website. That’s how we’re going to reach students.’”
With the help of Paul Cheek, Trust Center’s executive director, and Doug Williams, its head of product, Orbit has become a one-stop shop for student entrepreneurs. On the back end of the platform, Center leaders can see what users are clicking on and what they are not.
Aulet and his team have been studying that user data since Orbit launched. That has helped them learn how students want to get information about course offerings or startup competitions, as well as guidance on ideas they’re working on or ways to connect with a community of entrepreneurs and advisors. The team also got advice from Ethan Mollick SM ’04, PhD ’10, an associate professor of business administration at the Wharton School and author of the new book, “Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI.”
Official work on the Eship JetPack began about six months ago. The name was inspired by the acceleration provided by the jetpack and the need for humans to utilize the boost and provide direction.
“As we shifted from focusing on gathering information to providing guidance, MIT’s Disciplined Entrepreneurship and Startup Strategy Framework was the perfect place to start,” Williams says.
One of the earliest beta users, Shari Van Cleave (MBA ’15), demonstrated how to use the AI tool in a YouTube video.
She submitted an experimental idea for mobile electric vehicle charging, and the AI tool suggested market segments, bridge markets, business models, pricing, assumptions, testing, and product plans in seconds—just seven of the 24 steps in the Disciplined Entrepreneurship framework she explored.
“I was impressed by how quickly the AI could generate recommendations on everything from TAM (total market size) to lifetime customer value models with just a few details,” Van Cleave said in an email. “Having a high-quality draft allows new or experienced founders to execute and raise money faster.”
And the tool can also be useful for entrepreneurs who already have an idea and are well along in the 24-step process, Aulet says. For example, a company might want insights and estimates on how to improve its performance or determine if there are better markets to target.
“Our goal is to advance the field of entrepreneurship, and having tools like this will help more people become entrepreneurs and become better entrepreneurs,” Aulet said.