04.30.24-Startup-Ecosystem-Conference-Opening-Remarks

GAYATHRI SRINIVASAN: Good morning. After that video, I always get inspired, although I've seen that video a few times. And every single time I get very, very inspired. Welcome to the 2024 MIT Startup Ecosystem Conference. I'm Gayathri Srinivasan, the Executive Director, MIT Corporate Relations.

MIT Corporate Relations has two programs. Many of you already know them, but it's the Industry Liaison Program and the Startup Exchange. Through these programs what we try to do is to build your engagement and footprint and understanding within the MIT ecosystem around research and innovation that is being done by MIT faculty, researchers, and students.

We try to build these conferences and interactions so that you, as large organizations, can understand, see, and experience the vibrant research that's happening, the vibrant innovation that's happening, and also see the student talent here at MIT. We hope that you will observe, learn and use us as your liaison to get into what's happening within MIT. With that, I would like to ask all the program directors and Startup Exchange team members to stand up so that you know who they are, so that you can learn a little bit about them and also reach out to them to learn about MIT and how you can engage with MIT.

So let me start. There's Steve Whitaker, the newest and the shiniest. That's Irina, Yuri, Hong, Natalie, Todd, Teguan. Graham, Jose, Yui, and Mickey. Did I miss somebody?

Now the Startup Exchange team-- oh, there's Olivier behind, and I can't see you-- John, there he is. OK.

And then we have the Startup Exchange team, Irina and Catarina. All right. So these are the people you need to engage with, not me, but these people. OK?

Beyond that, what are we here to do. I mean, MIT's charge is to advance knowledge and its application to industry and commerce. And our job is to help you make the connections. Today's conference, you will hear from pitches or showcases of 14 different startups. And you'll see them in the room behind us so you can engage with them specifically to learn more about exactly what they do. But they are going to be pitching you today in two different sections.

Beyond that, you will see me moderate a panel. We'll be talking to the tech transfer leader at MIT and a startup founder and a corporate leader. And similarly, there are other panels and talks throughout where you learn more about what's happening in the ecosystem around innovation, what are the challenges, and such. With that, I give you the Startup Ecosystem Conference and hope you have a wonderful time today. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

CATARINA MADEIRA: Thank you very much. Gayathri. Hello, and welcome everyone in here and watching the live stream. My name is Catarina Madeira, and I'm the director of MIT Startup Exchange.

I'm absolutely delighted to be here with you today and welcome you to the conference we organized for you. This is the one day of the year when we bring people together to celebrate MIT entrepreneurship, our peers across campus, startups, innovators, corporate innovators, and entrepreneurs.

We are going to cover many topics throughout the day, all focused on entrepreneurship. And you're going to meet many amazing people throughout the day here on stage and over the breaks. It will go fast, and it should be incredibly inspirational for you.

Startup Exchange supports MIT-connected startups grow, expand, and solve the world's great challenges. And we do that by fostering collaboration and partnerships with industry, such as ILP corporate members, as well as with the MIT innovation ecosystem and beyond. The startups supported by our program are all MIT-connected. And this connection might come through the founding team, the technology, or their affiliation to our peers, such as CSAIL, Engine Ventures, or START.nano, just to name a few.

When it comes to origination startups in our program, some of them were created in the classrooms, while others can come out from any of the five schools and one college, centers, labs, programs, collaborations, MIT researchers have ongoing with known MIT organizations. And we also see startups graduating from the many peer programs that exist on campus, such as Deshpande Center, Sandbox, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, and many others.

Today, there are about 80 entrepreneurship programs across campus. This slide features only a sample. Impressive, isn't it? All have nimble teams like ours. At Startup Exchange, we're four, full-time. Each one has its own skills, expertise, and offers a specific set of benefits to entrepreneurs.

One of the many amazing things about it is that these resources build upon one another. They are designed, structured to support PIs, students, entrepreneurs throughout their journey. There are student clubs, competitions, accelerators.

Some offer mentorship. Others focus on customer discovery. And altogether, we support entrepreneurs and founders since ideation all the way to commercialization. We help them create real solutions, go to market, and they change the world.

Startup Exchange shows up later in the curve. We are between acceleration and escape velocity. And we typically start engaging with the startups when they reach pilot stage. And for us, pilot is when they have a technology or a product that is ready to be tested or used in real environment.

When we find them before pilot, we definitely keep an eye on them, but we always refer them to one of our peers. We have the right resources to support them in the earliest stages. If they are past pilot, they can stay in the program for as long as they are a startup. But even when they are well-established, we love to have them coming back to share their experiences and best practices, especially with the earlier stage companies.

So at Startup Exchange, everything we do is to help entrepreneurs get ready to engage with industry. And we expose and connect them in a highly creative way. For that purpose, we organize virtual demo days, startup lightning talks at conferences like today, speed networking events, curated meetings, and we also take the startups to other markets and connect them with key local players.

We organize workshops and trainings with our peers. In fact, we have a training coming up. It will focus on pilots. For all corporate representatives in the room, if you'd like to get involved, please talk to me or any of my colleagues because we're still looking for speakers.

So the goal of these interactions is to help startups validate, pivot, scale, find a second or third customer, and expand as well. Today you'll hear from 13 startups on stage, and you can meet them at the exhibit. Our peers, featured in this slide, will be at the exhibit as well, along with our friends from professional education and breakthrough tech AI at MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. Please make sure to stop at their booths to learn more.

And, again, these slides and the banner outside feature only a sample of our peer programs on campus. If you'd like to learn more about our ecosystem, please do reach out.

But this is not all. Throughout today, we'll be talking about tech transfer, breakthrough technologies, startup and corporate engagement, entrepreneurship and investment. And you can participate in all these discussions by sending us your questions. We'll be using Pigeonhole Live, where you can submit questions to speakers.

You can also vote on any questions that interest you. Questions with the highest number of votes will stand a better chance to be answered by the speakers. So please scan the QR codes that are showing up on the screens, or launch your internet browser at pigeonhole.at Next, key in our event passcode, which is STEX24. Once again, the passcode is STEX24. If you have any questions throughout the presentations, feel free to submit them through Pigeonhole.

So I started by saying that today we are celebrating entrepreneurship in our community. But besides that, we want this conference and all the testimonials you'll hear today to inspire you and to motivate you to get even more involved with startup exchange, our peer programs, and entrepreneurs. So let's dive right into it.