Preface

MEMSI is not a hackathon. MEMSI is not a business case competition. Heck, MEMSI does not even have monetary or opportunity prizes. No. The goal of MEMSI is to educate what entrepreneurship is like through simulation, immersing into one industry (for my year, it’s the aviation), and using the framework of Disciplined Entrepreneurship.

Teammates

MEMSI filters their participants. There’s a simple interview and threshold one must pass (Year 3 and above). This ensures the participants are

  • Very much pass the honeymoon stage of college life
  • Interested in being an entrepreneur

This distinction is very important. There’s a base level of maturity and laser-sighted focus that the participants have. Yet, the brand name of MIT being attached to the program ensures everyone are humbled and open-minded to being taught. All these are important, as if you are here to look for a teammate, ideally you want someone that’s smart, energetic, and ethical. MEMSI did the work for the first two. You’re here to spot the creme de la creme and see who you can work with. Interestingly enough, 2 weeks is a great amount of time to ensure most people drop their nicey mask by then, which allows for a better observation of whose who.

Entrepreneurship through Education

The programme uses the book Disciplined Entrepreneurship. It lays down the 24 steps it believes will drastically improve the odds of any attempt at entrepreneurship. I personally have been reading a lot of startup books: Zero to One, The Lean Startup, The Hard Things about Hard Things, etc. But none have attempted to lay it out as methodically as this book attempts to.

The key lesson I’ve reapt from it, is the importance of validation.

I am a self-taught computer engineer and a Physics students. The thing about engineers is that we believe that validations can only be done after we have a good enough proof of concept (POC). What is good enough? Frankly, I don’t know, but what I know is it’s never good enough. Which causes me to spend a lot of time learning new frameworks, coding, ironing, making my sites robust, etc, before I validate. What happens then? Either

  1. My good friends tell me it looks good, suggests 1-2 small suggestions, which I go home to edit in hope of making it “good-er enough”. It might gain traction, but it’s slower that I hoped it would be.
  2. I’m straight up told that they won’t use it.

The benefits of validating include

  1. Ensuring the pain point and your solution is something people actually want (I.E. will pay for!) Else, why build something if no one actually wants it?
  2. Steering the solution iteratively to ensure it solves problems
  3. Continuous motivation when people spread the word of your solution around

Always validate. These are wisdoms learnt from past lessons I supposed. But I sure wished I picked up this book a lot earlier.

Hardware

I learnt so much about robots and how advanced HKIA is in advancing the airport infrastructure. Previous years went to Shenzhen and had an upclose look at the Shenzhen manufacturing process. The HK MIT Innovation Node is jampacked with 3D printers, eye tracking cameras, raspberry pi’s, etc. If you’re exploring the possibility of building a hardware product, MEMSI is gold.

Should You join?

All in all, if you’re here wondering whether you should apply for MEMSI, then it comes down to three factors.

  1. Are you looking for teammates for future startups?
  2. Do you believe that the chances of success in entrepreneurship is improvable through education?
  3. Do you intend to learn more about hardware development and manufacturing?

If for any of the three questions above, your answer is yes, then I’ll highly recommend MEMSI.

First, some caveat into why I might be biased. Our team won MEMSI. I believe what I’ve more importantly won is finding the teammates that I intend to develop something with going forth. So, with all the bounties I walked away with, I am definitely biased.

Join MEMSI.