"See, Solve, Scale” by Danny Warshay: Brown University Book Launch & Discussion

All right, good afternoon, everyone. Really, really nice to see you, and thanks for being here at this really terrific— maybe I should lower this— terrific book launch from our dear friend and colleague Danny Warshay. My name is Rick Locke. I am a professor of political science and international public affairs, and I currently serve as provost here at Brown. And it's my great pleasure and honor to be able to share the stage with Danny and talk about this really amazing new book that he has published. Which is great. Prior to coming to Brown, I taught at MIT for 25 years. And in that past life, I was a professor of entrepreneurship. the Alvin Seidman Family Professor of Entrepreneurship. Hey, Bill, nice to see you.

Good timing.

And as part of the work that I did, I co-founded a course called the Global Entrepreneurship Lab. I taught it for a decade. It's still going strong. And so I know a little bit about what Danny does in his teaching, but also what he he wrote about, and it was really wonderful, too. I can't promise— I can't admit that I read the whole book, but I actually did read sections of the book, and it was really great. So let me just tell you a little bit about Danny, and then what we're going to do is have sort of a guided question and answer with some multimedia coming in at different times, and then we're going to open it up for general question and answer. So as I think everyone in this room knows, You know, Danny, he doesn't really need an introduction, but just to give you some highlights, he is a very proud graduate of Brown University. He's a celebrated professor of entrepreneurship and engineering, and is the inaugural and still-going wonderful director of the Nelson Center of Entrepreneurship, which this year celebrates its 5th year. And I still remember our conversations when I was trying to recruit Danny to become the director of the Nelson Center. And we were talking a little bit about, like, what's your concept of entrepreneurship and how do you think it should fit in a liberal arts education? And actually, much of what you said is later on codified in this book in terms of the process.

Oh, thank goodness.

What a relief. And things like that. You know, let me just say a few other things about Danny. As all of you who had a chance to read the book know, but if anyone has spent time with Danny, he has built a career as a lifelong entrepreneur, starting when he was a student. So this is a great thing, starting a company which then gets sold to Apple. Continued as a co-founder of several companies in an array of different fields— software, advanced materials, consumer products, and media. And he teaches this incredibly successful course called, not surprisingly, The Entrepreneurial Process. which the Critical Review, which is the kind of student-run teaching evaluation organization, not the one that we run as a university, and they have ranked it as the top class at the university a couple years ago, which is really an achievement and a testament to your strength as a teacher. It's really, really great. And I've had the great fortune to travel with Danny a couple times to New York, San Francisco, and it's like— it was actually like walking across campus Barrett, it's like being with like a movie star. Like, you know, all these people are kind of like, you know, gravitating, and they have wonderful stories. And it's really, really, really great to be your colleague. You know, in addition to teaching here at Brown, Danny has also taught entrepreneurship around the world. He teaches in Tel Aviv University's MBA program, but he's also taught workshops around entrepreneurship in China, in Portugal, in Egypt, in Slovenia, South Africa, just to name a few. And he has won several awards for his amazing work. He was given the Natalie Rutherford Pierpont Prize from our Career Lab, Brown's Career Lab, which is our sort of career services office, mostly for undergraduates, but for graduate students as well. And they gave him this award for your mentorship. and the incredible work that you do with the students. He also won, and I only learned this today, the Dave Zucconi Pride Award from Brown's football team—

Wow.

For his loyalty and support of our student athletes, which is really, really wonderful. But I think, you know, what Danny brings, I think, to the field of entrepreneurship, and certainly to Brown, is a couple things. One is not just his knowledge of entrepreneurship and the methodology through which he teaches it, you know, focusing on a problem, figuring out a problem, seeing the opportunity, etc., which is great. But I think that what you bring, which is so wonderful and I think distinctively Brown, is all of your work, whether it's your scholarship or your teaching or your citizenship, is anchored in really deep values of doing this because it's the right thing to do. It's a way of improving the world. And to do it with this wonderful mix of incredible capabilities and humility. So thank you for being an amazing colleague. Thank you for writing this great book. And we look forward to having this conversation today.

Wow, thank you.

Thank you so much. That's enormously humbling. I appreciate it.

All true.

Thank you. You know, I want to acknowledge so many people in the room who've been part of the journey that you just described. Certainly my family that's here, and my wife and I were classmates at Brown. We met in Young Orchard living across the hall from each other. So Brown has given me a lot. The most important is my relationship with Deb. So— and Deb is a faculty member in the med school faculty and has her own identity at Brown as well. I have 2 children, one of whom surprised me by being here. Today, I have 3 children, 2 of whom are here today, one of whom is online. Maren is a junior, Matthew is class of 2020, and Gabrielle out there is my oldest too. So it's— you're right, I think my values start with my family. I highlight a number of those influences in the book. I mentioned my father, who you remember unfortunately passed away right when I started teaching here. And my mother is online, so I believe—

That's great.

Liz is nodding. She sees that she's online, and we have a whole bunch of people online, so we would use up the whole hour if I thanked everybody individually, but I can't tell you how much it means to me to see everybody in the room here, former professors, Peter Haywood, who I had as a first year, Barbara Tenenbaum, who I had as a senior, Actually, her colleague Nancy Dunbar, who is online today. And so many people in this room contributed to this book, as you read through it, and even wrote pieces of it, because I thought it was so much better in their own words than in my words. My editor, who's also a Brown alum, Tim Bartlett, is here from St. Martin's Press. And I also want to especially highlight Barrett Hazelteen. who is here with his wife, Mary. Let's give Barrett a hand, please. You know, I tell the story— I hope it's okay to mention briefly that I tell the story in the book. How the heck am I sitting here today? Where was I 17 years ago when I got a completely unexpected tap on the shoulder from Barrett Hazelteen? Who was my professor when I was here as an undergrad, and Barrett said, we'd like you to come to Brown and teach entrepreneurship. And I said, first of all, I think you have the wrong guy. I've never taught anything. And he assured me, and this is so true of good professors, good teachers, good mentors, they know something in you that you don't even know about yourself. And Barrett knew that in me, that I would really value teaching and that I would be a good teacher. I didn't know that. And teaching anything, and teaching at Brown, has been the most rewarding part of my whole career. And I hope it shows. I have several of my students here today. I have my 2 teaching assistants from my 10.10 class here with me today. But Barrett knew that. And then I also said, well, what do you mean teach entrepreneurship? Is that even a thing? And, well, I think it is. think get into that with some of the initial questions.

Yeah.

But I'd love to talk about that, what my early recognition was about the whole process of teaching entrepreneurship, and especially doing it at a place like Brown that doesn't have a business school, where you might not think that entrepreneurship would fit. But it fits at Brown better than anywhere else I've been, and better than anywhere else I've taught. And as Rick said, I've taught in lots of places over my career. I would love to get into that discussion to unpack that a little bit about why does teaching entrepreneurship work here.

Yeah.

So anyway, with that, enormously grateful for everybody here in person being here today. And I don't know how many people are online, but I know over 400 people signed up and there's over 200 people with us online. So thank you for all the support you've given me for all these years and especially the last 4. since I dared to write one word in a Google Doc, and 4 years later, it's published in a book. I hope that's a reasonable place to start. It's great.

It's a great place to start. Let's start with the book and tell us what motivated you to write the book.

I love that question.

Go from that Google document to actually—

Right. I like to say I never would have had the chutzpah to teach at a place like Brown except for that tap on the shoulder from Barrett. I never would have imagined being the head of a center for entrepreneurship except for that tap on the shoulder you gave me in the summer of 2016. I never would have had the chutzpah to think about writing a book if not for my students. It's really my students, and they came to me in fairly big numbers through the years and said, you are not doing this. You are not scaling. The teaching that you exposed us to had such meaningful impact on our lives, and you should do that in bigger numbers, not just limited to 35 or 40 people each semester. And I thought, that's interesting, how should I do that? And they said, you should write a book. And again, I said, I don't know how to write a book. But I'll never forget, it was, you know, 4 years ago almost, to the day when I had just gotten back from teaching in Israel, and I just started. I just said, all right, how hard could this be? Now that I look back on it 4 years ago, and I thought, well, I should try to express what I have been teaching in the classroom, and I quickly learned it's not as easy as that, but I quickly wrote 10 pages, and I thought, 10 pages, my history professors would have been proud of me with 10 pages, and then I got to 50 pages, and I thought— I've never written a paper 50 pages long, but my favorite history professor, Mary Gluck, would have been super proud of me. And before I knew it, and I had no time to do this, but I was up late at night, as Deb can attest, and I stayed up on weekends. And before I knew it, I had a manuscript of 350 pages, and it attracted an agency, and then I got paired up with Tim Bartlett at St. Martin's Press. Tim, I'll never forget, said to me, your book's in really good shape, it just needs a little bit of polish. And I thought, and I remember saying that to Deb, Tim thought my book's in such good shape, it just needs a little polish. And then Tim proceeded to rip it apart into different pieces and perform major surgery on it, and I thought, my poor manuscript. And I once, I remember I said to Tim, you said my book was in pretty reasonable shape. He said, well, It was really well written, but it needs to be well edited, and if I had told you the shape that it was really in, I would have freaked the heck out of you. And so we had a really good editing and writing partnership, and this book bears very little resemblance to that 350-page manuscript that I dared to write, but I'm really excited about it for the reasons that the students asked me. That it is the potential to scale the impact of the kind of teaching that Brown has afforded me over all these years, and to spread the type of entrepreneurship that has taken hold at Brown, a dominantly liberal arts environment, which is unusual, I think, for entrepreneurship. Again, we lack a business school, so there was no There was no business environment. There was no dominantly tech environment guiding me to define entrepreneurship in a specific way. And maybe we'll even get to what that means. I wonder if we should play the—

Why don't we ask one more question, and then we'll play the— so tell us, because you've just mentioned this, the distinctive way of teaching and writing about entrepreneurship. And I made reference to— and it's in your course title— the entrepreneurial process. So describe that process.

Sure. I remember when, Barrett, you asked me. And I puzzled, and I thought, well, what does that mean to teach entrepreneurship at all? And then what does it mean to teach entrepreneurship at a place like Brown that is so dominantly focused on liberal arts? And it dawned on me— remember, my appointment is in engineering, which is kind of funny. My father was a PhD chemical engineer, like a real engineer. I know nothing about engineering. But that's where my appointment is. And I thought, well, imagine if we needed to teach somebody how to build a bridge.

We—

and then I thought, you know, a lot of people have heard, you probably have all heard the phrase entrepreneurial spirit. And I thought, I don't know what that means. And I certainly don't know how to teach a spirit, so it can't be that. And I thought, well, imagine in engineering if we were to teach somebody how to build a bridge, we wouldn't say, you know, just go out there and have the bridge-building spirit. And if, you know, you put up a bridge and it falls down and the cars and trucks fall to earth, then just go out there and have more spirit. Of course not. In bridge building, there's a beginning, a middle, and an end. It's a very structured process. You can distill elements that are common to any bridge, even though there's lots of room for variation in bridge building. And I thought through my own experience that you alluded to, and I did some research, There's a similar process that I think I could devise that's appropriate for developing an entrepreneurial process. And that's what I did. And that's what's embedded in these 3 steps. The definition that I used back then, when, Barrett, you asked me, that I thought was so perfect for a place like Brown, given the students who self-select to come here, given the kind of interdisciplinary nature of our curriculum, is that entrepreneurship is a structured process for solving problems. And that that's not only something that anybody could learn, but they could master it, and then they could apply it to solving a very wide variety, a very wide range of problems that all Brown students come to Brown with interest in addressing. And the 3 steps are these. C, solve scale. First, find the problem. Too often entrepreneurs are plagued by the curse of being a solution in search of a problem, and that's often true in technology. It's true in places that fall in love with their tech, and it's just by sheer luck that they would happen upon a solution to a problem to solve. So I spend an enormous amount of time, my students here will probably laugh at how much time I spend in class on the nature of this C step. Bottom-up research to find and validate an unmet need. The solve step is the creative approach. It's the fun step where you iteratively solve it. You fail a little bit. You do it on a very small scale where you're not investing lots of resources. And only then, when you're really clear about what that small-scale solution is, then you evolve that solution in a big way to have large-scale impact. And so that seemed to me then, and it has proven true through the years, to be a methodology that would work really well at Brown. And it has proven true, especially at the Nelson Center. It is basically the methodology that my colleagues I see here smiling are used to sharing with students of all types throughout the whole university.

That's great. So should we turn to the video?

Yeah, let's turn to the— so we wanted to share the perspective and voice and picture of several of my students as well as Barrett, and we're going to highlight a few of those, just very short snippets, and use that as the launching point for having a little bit more conversation. So can we cue up the One with Barrett Hazeltine. You know, I discuss in the book, See, Soft Scale, a little bit about when you asked me to teach, I had to think pretty carefully about how do you teach a topic like entrepreneurship at Brown, which is dominantly a liberal arts institution. Even engineering has a kind of a liberal arts feel to it, where we don't have a business school. And I thought about Entrepreneurship being a structured process for solving problems, which tends to appeal to every type of Brown student. We already told people what we're teaching here is problem solving, and we're using management and business as a vehicle to improve people's minds. encourage them on the one hand to think precisely and analytically, and on the other hand to be creative and resourceful. Most gratifying thing about working at Brown is the students and their engagement and their energy and their enthusiasm and, and, and, and their friendship.

Really great.

Yeah, I think one thing I'd like to add to that is I think it's clear to everybody online and here too, but I want to stipulate that it's— my arrival to teach entrepreneurship here, and even the Nelson Center, we are not inventing entrepreneurship at Brown by any means. Brown has always been fertile ground for entrepreneurship. It's been a place that attracts students who want to chart their own course, who want to make their own rules, who want to identify problems that the world needs to be solved. And so I feel like I'm helping to steward and champion that back to when Barrett first asked me, and the Nelson Center's certainly trying to do that, but we're not inventing it. And one way I know that is I was Barrett's student when I was here as a student in the '80s, and I had— that is 2-minute, or however long that was, maybe a minute of what turned out to be, I think, about an hour-long conversation with incredibly golden nuggets. And we're gonna release the full version because there's so much interesting history and information about how Barrett even came to— that is really interesting— how Barrett came to teach general management, which my classmate Thanos Chaltas is now also teaching. What a legacy to have to follow. But the idea of teaching general management at Brown was also revolutionary, and so I'm following some very big footsteps, and I want to make it clear that we're continuing to champion something that was long established. I think the entrepreneurial emphasis, the entrepreneurship bent, problem solving per se, that's maybe a little bit more intense given our approach and given our mandate, but Again, Barrett had started this much before.

Yeah.

So it's nice to be in that tradition.

And Barrett's an incredible legend. And I had heard about Engine 9 and Engine 90 even before I set foot on this campus, which is amazing. But tell us— and by the way, we don't have a business school yet.

Oh, okay.

So let's just be clear. But so you've been teaching this for 16 years. How has it changed?

That's really interesting. How has it changed? Well, first of all, to the point of not having a business school, that may—

Yet.

Yet. It may eventually prove to be a really good fit, and it sounds like maybe in the works, and that would be wonderful. It was an advantage at first not to have a business school, and it's a good illustration of one of the principles that I teach, which is the benefits of scarce resources. And having constraints is often part of the entrepreneurial process that helps result in a breakthrough insight that you wouldn't see, that you wouldn't be able to achieve if you had all the resources in the world. I mean, I even think about the Nelson Center. Very gratefully, we were in a small little office at Hillel when we first got started, and thank you to Rabbi Bolton and the whole Hillel staff for their being wonderful hosts. That was an amazing thing, to be constrained with not enough space. I'm thrilled that we are in the Nelson Center now with quite a lot of space and other resources. So, you know, it is this evolution. It is see, solve, scale. And that may be one of the answers to your question too, which is the develop— it was development of entrepreneurship through the years. I remember some of the very first students I had, I was basically taking one of my— I went to Harvard Business School— basically taking one of my business school courses and morphing it a little bit to fit in ways that I thought would be appropriate at Brown. And the students knew it, and they were really open to it, and we kind of figured it out together. I'd say that one way it has changed, it has become a much more significant staple of the Brown curriculum than it was in those days. In those days, it was, oh, isn't that interesting, Brown's teaching entrepreneurship, and people embraced it. It is very common for me and my colleagues to get phone calls and emails from prospective students, lots of them, who know about Brown's reputation for teaching entrepreneurship and for its ethos in general being entrepreneurial. And so I think we've— entrepreneurship has become much more institutionalized at Brown in a way that has become, therefore, a staple of its curriculum rather than something that was just kind of— and I think that's good. We used the entrepreneurial process even in our own evolution. We didn't wanna be a solution in search of a problem, so we did our own bottom-up research to figure out, okay, what are the problems that we could solve using entrepreneurship teaching. We've partnered with lots of people on campus, the Swear Center, the Carney Institute, lots of groups on campus who have learned that entrepreneurship can be helpful to them too. There's an anecdote in the book about my colleague Liz Malone sharing with Don Operario, one of the deans in the School of Public Health, who didn't know really what entrepreneurship was or that it would be a fit for the School of Public Health, and she realized that, in fact, it was, and she helped Don realize why it was. I'm looking at Lina Frusetti, with whom I had the pleasure of traveling to Portugal one summer, and the two of us taught a course on cultural entrepreneurship in Portugal. And so, again, I think at first we were a completely pure startup, iterating and learning, and over time we figured out that not only is it an, in fact, great fit for Brown, maybe better than in other places, But we figured out the very Brown way to have it be a good fit here.

No, that's great. So maybe we should start hearing from some of the students?

Yeah, why don't we play the first video, which I think is with Emma Butler. Not only is Emma online with us from Paris, but her father is with us too, sitting right behind Professor Tenenbaum, and we're really thrilled to have the Butlers online and also in person. So let's hear from Emma.

Great.

The book, as you know, is See, Solve, Scale: How Anyone Can Turn an Unsolved Problem into a Breakthrough Success, underscore anyone. And you always come to mind. In fact, I describe you in the book as a reluctant entrepreneur. Can you rewind and just share with us the short story about Your first exposure to entrepreneurship in my course?

Absolutely. I had no idea that I was ever going to be an entrepreneur. I didn't know what entrepreneurship was. I didn't know anything about what the methodology of becoming an entrepreneur was. As a visual arts and French student at Brown, I really didn't think I was prepared to do the financial modeling, to think critically about entrepreneurship, to do the Harvard Business School case studies. didn't think I had anything in me, let alone after the course to build a company. But as I walked in, quite literally shaking because I was so nervous that I was going to be called on or that I was— it was going to be too hard on the first day, and I was gonna have to drop out right there and then, it'd be so embarrassing. I sat there, and you briefly explained a little bit about this See, Solve, Scale methodology. And I thought, I can understand that. That's something that I can digest. And that's a great First step, see, I can do that. I can find a problem. I know a problem and it's unmet need. Okay, I got that. And so being able to break it down into these digestible steps was really great for somebody like me that was really starting at ground zero. The problem with Intimately, it was a personal one. About 10 years ago, my mom became disabled and it became extremely difficult for her to find clothing that she could get on independently that was both functional and fashionable. And so the problem that we're solving is Making sure that the 600 million women worldwide that have some sort of disability that affects the way they dress have options in clothing that is both functional and fashionable and can bring them confidence. And intimately, we're in the scale stage. We just closed our seed round of $1 million led by the British Fashion Council as their very first investment. I'm currently based in Paris. Our team of about 5 full-time women who are both disabled and non-disabled are living in the States. We've just released our first line that was launched in Vogue Business, Business of Fashion. We've been in Forbes, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and we're ready to take this scale and go all the way with it.

That's great. That's great. You know, I think about your question about how does entrepreneurship fit in this curriculum. Nobody can explain entrepreneurship better than it better than students, right? I mean, you experience that all the time among your students.

Yeah.

Forget about what I say, forget about what I read, you know, you listen to 2 minutes of Emma Butler and how many of us don't have a tear coming to our eye? And I remember when I proposed that Emma write this part of the book herself to Tim, and we both thought, yeah, how could I possibly— how could Tim even substitute for Emma's own voice in telling this story. And you think about other wonderful places— MIT, Stanford, Wharton, Babson— that teach entrepreneurship. I think Emma is such a good illustration of what entrepreneurship at Brown is all about. It's so clear she has found not only a problem that the world needs to have solved, but one that matters so much to her. And that is so true in terms of the way I want Brown students to embrace something that they want to address, which is it has to be— and I talk about this in the book. We even have an image right outside this room, thanks to Sheila. It's this Japanese word, ikigai, which has these 4 components. And Emma is such an ambassador for this. The 4 things are— it's about— ikigai in Japanese is living a meaningful life. And this is what I talk to my students all about. I know many other Brown professors talk to their students about this. The 4 components are drive, or do something you're really good at; passion, or do something that you really love; purpose, which is do something that's gonna have meaningful impact on the world; and also do something that's gonna pay you fairly for the value you add. And we're gonna hear from 2 other students as well, but I think in all of them— and I see other students here today. I see Jack Schaefer, who was my student and is working on Medicircle, which is just an incredible enterprise looking to help cancer patients afford oral chemotherapy. That is the staple of what I think you find in common among Brown entrepreneurs, that they're doing something they're good at, that they love doing, that's going to have meaningful impact on the world, and it's going to pay them something fairly for the value you're adding. And so in some ways, And in the book, I talk at some length about ikigai because I think it is so important for entrepreneurs to be familiar with that and also for them to pursue opportunities that hit each of those 4 quadrants.

So let me just ask you a little bit more about— I mean, listening to Emma is amazing. And I love this story. I mean, it's such a quintessential Brown story of a student who was double concentrating in about visual arts and French, and becomes a successful entrepreneur, again, with this purpose, which is really interesting. But a lot of people, when they think about Brown and the Open Curriculum, they don't think of it as like this is a curriculum that can produce entrepreneurs. So how do you think about how our Open Curriculum is aligned or maybe not so well aligned to producing more people like Emma?

Yeah, it's interesting. I never hear any doubt about that from Brown alumni, from Brown parents, from Brown affiliates in any way. The only time I hear any skepticism is from people who aren't affiliated with Brown, and they think, wait a minute, entrepreneurship and Brown? Brown's a liberal arts school, and you don't even have a business school. And then I go into the whole benefits of scarce resources, and entrepreneurship is a structured process, and could you imagine building a bridge just with spirit, and they get it. But I don't have that. In fact, I remember when you asked me to be the head of the Nelson Center, and then I met with President Paxson. She wondered, will I hit pockets of skepticism? And I'm proud to say that I don't on campus or when I'm traveling around meeting with Brown-affiliated, again, groups or especially alumni. I mean, if you asked the several hundred people who are online right now, does it seem odd that Brown has entrepreneurship as now a staple of its curriculum? No one would. And why? Again, because Brown, for much longer than I've been affiliated with Brown, has had that reputation that it will attract people who self-select, who are themselves interested in paving their own educational pathway, and in some ways that makes them entrepreneurs in their own educational way. And so, again, I think I never have to defend it when people who are affiliated with Brown ask me. Occasionally, like if I'm traveling to Israel, as I usually do in the summers to teach, Tel Aviv University's MBA program where I teach, is very different. You know, it's very professional, pre-professional, meaning like focused on professions, and they don't get it. They're like, wait a minute, Brown entrepreneurship? But no, when I'm on campus or speaking to Brown groups, it's never an issue.

That's great. So should we hear from another?

Sure, let's hear from— I think we're going to hear from Gwen Mugodi.

As I was reading Cecil's scale, The thing that stuck out to me the most was the idea of like a need that is kind of like a need that the customer feels they need to badly solve. I think it's described as like hair on fire. For many young children who are growing up in places like Zimbabwe, if you— where the language of instruction is English, but the language that you speak at home is a different Indigenous language. So for me, that language was Shawna. So if you're a Shawna-speaking child and you're coming into school and immediately from the first grade you're expected to transition to learning in English, that transition can be very hard. So the solution that we came up with was an idea to start a publishing house that publishes children's books in different Indigenous languages, and that way it would solve as kind of like a bridge for the language that the child knows at home to the language that they would then later speak on— speak in life. When we published the first book, which was called Greedy Gadi, the plan then was to sell a copy of that book for $12. But by the time that I moved back home, I think I moved back home in September, And sometime 2 weeks after I landed, the exchange rate— I think basically the economy tanked, and the exchange rate that was previously 1 as to 1, 1 US dollar as to 1 Zimbabwean dollar skyrocketed. And a book that was previously $12 became over $1,000. At some point you're like, maybe the timing isn't right, or maybe something isn't quite right. So I actually started working on a completely different venture, and I'm sure I'll be using some of the techniques that I learned and that I'm now reminded of reading your book. So my experience with Toreba was instrumental, I think, in kind of making me think that I can go ahead and now work On this new venture that I'm working on, which is called dobadoba.com. It's kind of an e-commerce site. The idea, I guess, to put it would be kind of like an Amazon for Zimbabwe. It's one of those things where you're like, I see the value that a company like Amazon brings to a country, right? And it's a shame that we don't have that. And it's also an opportunity. And it started in the middle of last year, and I think even already I can see just how much quicker we've been able to move from, like, see to solve and now to thinking about scale.

So again, this is such a great story, and what I thought was particularly wonderful about it was failure first before launching the second venture. And that's usually something really tough for people. So how do you guide your students to that? Like, it may not work out, but that's okay. You're going to learn something from it. How do you get them to think about, like, when it's time to pull the trigger?

Well, first of all, the whole concept of failure is not something that most Brown students have experienced very much in their life. if they're here. And, you know, in some ways that's unfortunate because so much of Brown's curriculum is designed to encourage people to take risks. And yet it's hard to take that first risk. In the book, I devote a whole bunch of the teaching to this concept of learning to feel comfortable with failure. In fact, a good friend and mentor of mine from Harvard Business School, Theresa Amabile, is an expert in this field and has written on it and has published about it and advised me about it and embedded some of her teaching in the book. So that's a whole issue that we could deal with separately, but it is inherent, especially in this second stage. You have to be comfortable iterating and taking small steps and making small bets. And that's really the strategy, which is, first of all, Be sure that you are focused on a problem that needs to be solved, and again, not being a solution in search of a problem. Assuming that's true, don't leap immediately to scaling something. Sometimes I see big organizations do that wrong. They have resources, and this is the mirror image of the benefits of scarce resources. It's the burden of abundant resources. And they leap to scale something prematurely. So I tell my students, it's not failure, it's learning something if in this second stage you're not betting the whole company. You're establishing hypotheses that you're testing on a small scale. You're not layering in huge resources because you don't have huge resources. Again, the benefits of scarce resources. And so I think if you do this, in the right order, and you just realize that part of the process is iterating and failing on a small scale, then you get the confidence to do it. In some cases, as in the case with Gwen in Toriva, you may decide— it may be, as in her case, contextual issues that you have absolutely no control over. She couldn't control the exchange rate or the economy at large.

Right.

And so she said, all right, let's move to a different venture entirely. She, as she said, learned a lot about the process from her first not bet the whole household on that first startup she embarked on. And she's now translating what she learned into the next one. That is true in what we teach at the Nelson Center. It's true of what we, among my colleagues here, try to teach our students in class. I remember some of my early students who were going to, it looked like, launch something, and they said, what's the chance we're going to be super successful? And I said, how do you define success? Are you going to be a billionaire? No, I doubt it. But that's probably not the right way to define success. Are you going to learn something? You already have learned something, and so you can't fail. You've already been successful. And I think that gave them the confidence to realize, okay, this is just inherent in the process. I think there's probably other disciplines at Brown too that have a similar kind of discourse, whether it's art or, you know, the first draft of something doesn't look right. Writing a book, you think the first draft was publishable? Tim will tell you for sure not. So I think that's about growing up and maturing in any discipline is to realize that That kind of failure is part of learning. It's not easy the first time you experience it, but that's why there's a whole section in the book devoted to it.

That's great.

Should we move to the last student? The last one is Ben Chesler from Imperfect Foods.

Imperfect Foods really came out of an organization we ran in college called the Food Recovery Network, and we were recovering food from college campuses and bringing it down to dining halls in the community. And through that work, we learned about the problem of food going to waste on farms and how 6 billion pounds, or 1 in 5 fruits and vegetables, never made it to a human mouth. And we didn't believe it. So what we did is we went out and we, we walked the farms, and the farmers took us on tours and showed us the cabbages and the cauliflower and the broccoli and the carrots that were left in the fields and just basically tossed away in bins to rot. And we knew that we saw the problem firsthand and we had to do something about it. And so we set up Imperfect Foods with a pretty simple mission of recovering that food from going to waste and delivering it to your door as a consumer for about 30% less than the grocery store. And you could do your part in helping prevent global warming and still save money at the same time. And we started out with this little warehouse in Emeryville, and we rented a forklift. And I remember every Friday the staff would pack boxes ourselves. And we kind of grew organically over that first year, and the outpouring from the community was— outpouring of support from the community was incredible. And we knew we were onto something. And so we raised some venture capital to scale the business. And over the next 5 years, we grew it to have over 1,500 living wage jobs across the country. We now serve, I think, 40 or 43 different states. We raised around $200 million of venture capital. And what I'm most proud of is we recovered over 100 million pounds of produce and groceries from going to waste. So there's a long way to go to fight food waste, but we took a big dent out of it and we're continuing to do even more every year. That's great.

That's really great.

Yeah, I mean, this is another example where I said, I cannot do that story near the justice that Ben would. Tim, let's have him write that section of the book. And so those of you who've read the book will note that it's— that section is written by Ben. And Ben is a different kind of entrepreneur, a little bit more classic entrepreneur. who was pretty clear about the problem that he, at least on some ikigai level, felt was his purpose. And he did all 3 steps of the process. In the longer version of that interview, he talks at length about doing his C step, the bottom-up research, where he went to farms and he saw these big piles of apples on the side and he said, what are those? there for? And they said, oh, those are going to waste. They don't look good. And he said, hmm, could I do a deal with you to buy them directly from the farm and then repackage them and sell them directly to consumers? And now, you know, doing a quarter of a billion dollars and having raised $200 million and saved over 100 million pounds of food. I mean, again, I think such a good example of a brown entrepreneur. And It's so wonderful too that all these folks are now back mentoring students. Ben is a member of our advisory council, was just a judge for the Brown Venture Prize competition last week, or else he would have been here today. He said, can't do it twice in 2 weeks. But so proud of Ben, so proud of Gwen, so proud of Emma, and so proud of all the students. I mean, when Barrett asked me to do this, Again, 17 years ago, I couldn't possibly imagine a Nelson Center, a book, all these students who are changing the world in ways that we desperately need to have it changed. And so, you know, overjoyed about all that. I know there's some questions.

Yeah, I was gonna say we should turn to questions, but just before we do, I think it's very obvious that the students are really proud of you, as all of us are as well. This is wonderful, really, really wonderful to see the impact that you have. And that last anecdote or the clip was amazing because that's a— people were doing this for centuries and somehow they saw that there was an opportunity there. And so this is really great, really, really great. So we have a little time for some questions, comments from people here. If you want to just sort of raise your hand and I'll call on you, and if you can just introduce yourself.

We also have people online who I know have some questions too.

Okay, Howard. Howard, introduce yourself please.

Yeah, I'm Howard Anderson. I teach 2 courses here, one Managing Diversity and the other Sales and Sales Management. We look for models. What model did you find that you may have used and maybe passed, discarded, and what were the early models and what are the models today? When you say— so the question is, often in— Organization or teaching or whatever you thought was a very good model when you started and did it evolve? Yeah, so the question is, what models have we used at Brown in teaching entrepreneurship and You know, I think first of all that reference to bridge building, which is not exactly what I think you're asking, but it was a model in my head that occurred to me that was a good metaphor not only for helping me understand how I should teach as a structured process, but also to, as I've said, communicate with others. A big part of model for us in what we teach here at Brown and also what we espouse at the Nelson Center and is a huge emphasis in the book is the model of diversity and the model of inclusion as a companion for diversity. I talk a lot in the book about that being a model for the most successful teams, frankly in anything, but especially in my field of entrepreneurship. There's really good evidence indicating that the most successful teams in entrepreneurship are the most diverse. diverse in all ways. They represent different backgrounds, different kinds of experience, different skill sets, different races, different genders, different personality types. Linda Hill, who's a wonderful professor at Harvard Business School, talks about creative abrasion. She actually— I was very proud she gave me a shout-out on LinkedIn yesterday about publishing the book, and nice as her former student. Creative abrasion, I think, is a staple of what we think of as a model for entrepreneurial teams when we think about helping teams form here at Brown. And it only makes sense, because Brown is so interdisciplinary itself. The reason, we could go into some length, but I'll just mention briefly, but diversity is not enough. You need inclusion, because you can spend a lot of time and a lot of effort recruiting through your weak ties, not your strong ones, really good people who can help technically check a diversity box, But if you don't embrace what is authentically different about all those people on your team, then unfortunately, actually, the evidence shows that homogeneous teams outperform diverse teams. For diverse teams to really succeed, the people who are at the table have to be invited to actually participate in their true authentic self. I think we could talk about other models, but that's one that I want to emphasize because it is such an important staple of the book. It is behind the subtitle that we agonized over, which I'm really proud of, and is How Anyone Can Turn an Unsolved Problem into a Breakthrough Success. And this means lots of people who've been ignored, neglected, and in many cases, unfortunately, discriminated against in the world of mainstream entrepreneurship. And I look at my colleague, Professor— Professor Banu Özgürzenk Pan, who has an expertise in this area, as well as my colleague, Professor Jennifer Nazarino. So proud of the fact that at the Nelson Center, it is a bedrock expectation that in the way we teach entrepreneurship, it espouses both diversity and inclusion. And I think it's also one of the ways that distinguishes the center from other, again, really good places all over the world. And so, to me, that's the one top of the list I would think of in terms of a model. Do we want to see if there's an online question?

So in the book, you say entrepreneurship is no longer for just business. And there's a few questions coming in here. Larry Rand, class of '64, asks, how do we incentivize entrepreneurs to concentrate on cutting-edge medical research? Judith Potts asks, can you use your process to preserve the democratic process of American elections? And Rebecca McKinney, class of '95, Does your model work for nonprofits and social problem solving and organizational building?

So I have a theme here. Yes, you do, and thank you to Larry and to the rest of the group. Larry is a member of our advisory council and a tremendous contributor to the Nelson Center. Absolutely, in fact, that's again one of the reasons that students asked me to write this book. In fact, there's a name tag, there's a bookmark floating around here that my wife was, The Genesis Of that says entrepreneurship is not just for business anymore, and it is so true, especially at Brown and at the Nelson Center. We are agnostic about the particular type of entity that you might form. It could be a nonprofit, it could be a government entity, it could be the Carney Institute for Brain Science, with whom we've collaborated to help improve the trajectory of brain science through the entrepreneurial process. There are many examples in the book. My work with a peacemaking organization with Palestinians and Israelis called Seeds of Peace. The outcome there is not sell a bunch of widgets. The outcome there is enabling Palestinians and Israelis to make peace with each other. That is a pretty heady aim. And when Lina and I went to Portugal and taught cultural entrepreneurship, I'm not sure either one of us really knew what that meant, but we took it upon ourselves to— Teach. Advance people's learning of this entrepreneurial process that they could apply in all sorts of different contexts. One of the examples I have in the book is of another Brown alum entrepreneur, a woman named Jayna Zweiman. Jayna Zweiman is the founder of the Pussyhat Project, not intended to be a business or commercial enterprise the way that most people would conceive of entrepreneurship, Its mission was to promote women's rights and to empower lots of people, not just women. I was part of this movement, as I know Tim was, and lots of you in this room, by doing something that she thought was important because she herself had a constraint, which is a disability that wouldn't allow her to travel to Washington. The outcome there was remarkable. I mean, talk about the scale step having big and long-term impact. The pussyhat is now an icon, it's a brand, and it's also the first stage that she used in creating similar kinds of movements that are political. And I'll tell you 2 that are a priority at the Nelson Center in terms of our themes. We collaborate with the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity to empower students with grants and other teaching ability to address issues related to anti-Black and systemic racism. That is one of the high priorities that we've established that you know about and that you encouraged us to. The other is climate change. I don't know the answers there, but I know the methodology that'll help us get there. And so students in big numbers are embracing all the kinds of things that those listeners described. To do so in ways that are not typically commercial, or that you would see in a business incubator. Nothing wrong with business. I have an MBA, and I've spent most of my time doing business, as have many of you. But entrepreneurship, especially designed to be amplified through this book, and through our teaching, and through this center, is a process for solving problems of all kinds. And this scale step I deliberately don't call a business model. In the book, I call it a sustainability model, because there can be all sorts of ways of sustaining yourself and having big impact over the long term that may or may not be only related to business. So let's take serious what— seriously what my wife Deb has on that bookmark: entrepreneurship is not just for business anymore. I hope that answers that question.

That's great. I think we have time for maybe another question.

Yes.

Hold on one sec while we get you the mic.

So I'm retired from a business school entrepreneurship program in the United Kingdom. And I just am really inspired by listening to what Danny is saying today. It seems to me the philosophy is very humane, very human and humane, very practical. logistically even oriented, and just— and not oriented toward just the end product of making huge amounts of money. And in my experience, this is just not what is normal in a business school. Certainly it's not normal in the business school I came from. And that the type of thing that you see there tends to be, in my humble opinion, very formulaic, very finance-oriented. And very much about making money and not making a living and not living— not making a life, if you will. And so I'm wondering, because I know you circulate among business school faculties, when you talk to them and you share how you look at this, what's their reaction? Do they— I imagine some of them think you're crazy. And they shouldn't, because I think this is so much more likely to be successful. So I'm just interested.

That's great. So Linda Scott is a member of our faculty at the Nelson Center. It happened somewhat accidentally. Linda said, hey, I'm in town because my daughter's in med school there. And by the way, I'm a faculty professor emeritus from the Oxford Saïd School. Might I be able to teach something? And we said, yeah, when can you start? Not quite that easy, but We embraced her interest, and Linda teaches a really popular course that we've partnered with gender studies on called Women, Gender, and Enterprise, I think, or Gender, Women, and Enterprise, is an international expert on that topic. I love that question. Yeah, in some ways, sometimes people look at me a little cockeyed and wonder, wait a minute, you're teaching entrepreneurship as what? But then again, I talk to them about bridge building, and I talk to them about all the rest and the metaphors. Sink in, and I don't think I've met a single one of those— it could be colleagues at Tel Aviv University, or for a little while I taught at the Yale School of Management, I still have ties with Harvard Business School— most of them are really interested in it, and most of them are really intrigued to hear about the more expansive footprint that entrepreneurship has found and established in Brown's curriculum. And I think they do understand the benefit of scarce resources of, at least yet, not having a business school and realizing that it gave us much more flexibility and insight into the way we could conceive of entrepreneurship and teach it. You don't have to look much further. Don't believe me. Don't believe anything I say. Again, that's why I have students well represented in the book. Believe what Ben and Gwen and Emma say and what they've done. And I think any of those business school faculty members, some of whom are with us today, would be really proud to have any of them as their alumni in their schools. Most of those places, I mean, why does Tel Aviv University ask me to come there and teach? There's plenty of well-qualified people at Tel Aviv University. Because they are interested in the Brown brand of entrepreneurship that we've established here, and that I hope does take root in other places. I was exchanging email with a former colleague at Yale, and, you know, why did they have me come to Yale and take the train down once a week? It was because they were interested, they had heard about, and they were interested in the distinctive nature of Brown, and why did those students in big numbers yank at me and say, hey, you've gotta scale this in a book, because they know it's different. I don't know, I mean, when Tim and I first talked about this book, he kept asking appropriately, how is this different from entrepreneurship elsewhere? And the more we began to talk, I think the more, especially as a Brown grad, he knew that yeah, our approach to teaching entrepreneurship, in my classes, through the Nelson Center, would be really different and really attractive in a book. So I hope the book does do what you're talking about and helps to amplify and spread around the world in business schools and elsewhere the way that we take seriously the approach to entrepreneurship.

That's great.

We have a very quick last question.

All right. Danny, I believe that there's a 4th S in your book, and it is spirit.

See, solve, scale, and spirit. Because I, I worked through the dot-com era up in Boston, and it was about grinding out profits or nothing. It's like profit or bust. But during my time here as an EIR and with you and your staff, I really saw, like what you just said, this brown version of entrepreneurship where there is a spirit of that success can be a win-win scenario and beneficial and good. So I think though I'll bristle again against a little bit against the word spirit if it's tied to entrepreneurial spirit, but I hear your point. I think you're right. It is embedded in that word that you'll see as you adjourn, which again Sheila was good enough to embody on a canvas out there because it's so important. It is such an important part of the book, and that's that word ikigai. I think we always advise students to measure what they're thinking about pursuing against those 4 elements. If it were just, you know, this is a good way to make a quick buck, this would be a business incubator, and I don't think many students would be here. We'd still be in that tiny little office at Hillhouse. The reason we're bursting at the seams here is because of what you just said. It's because Brown students care about all 4 of those. In fact, I think to some extent they care most about 3, which are, is it something that you love doing? Is it something you're really good at? And to the point that we see, I think, all over those 3 startups that Gwen and Ben and Emma have established, that you saw when you were an entrepreneur in residence here, is they care about purpose, and maybe that is rippling through the questions that we heard Larry and Judith and others ask. I want to end by saying an incredible thank you to everybody in this room and everybody online. There's no— I always say when you look at me, you're looking at 25% of our full-time staff at the Nelson Center. We're doing a lot with a little, and it's because of everybody in the whole Brown ecosystem that is pitching in to mentor or come to class. I look at Bill Stone and Bob Johnston, who have set the record by coming to my class every single time I have taught it since 2006. I look at Barbara Tenenbaum, who likewise— we couldn't do anywhere near what we do at the Nelson Center. I couldn't have possibly written this book. I think I set the record for the longest list of acknowledgments ever published. Because it is so true. To the point I said before, entrepreneurship is a team sport and is one that embraces diversity and inclusion. And I hope that's something that we at the Nelson Center are living and that you'll see echoed throughout this book. Thank you, Rick, for all of your support as well. We really appreciate it.

Please join me in thanking Danny.

Excellent.

That's great.

Thank you.

Excellent.

That was really excellent.

It was really fun.