This is my most recent lecture, so naturally it is the most polished one and the one I like best. I gave this one-hour lecture at Sloan to my fellow MBA students in 2000. I got some great feedback and demands for another session, so I gave the same talk again the following week.

This lecture comes with lecture notes, which are embedded in both presentations. Either download this Powerpoint slideshow, entrelec.ppt (1.34Mb download), or just click to proceed into an HTML slideshow.

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Hello! Welcome to the Startup Triathalon, a cute way to think about the stages of starting a company. I'm Jon Monsarrat, and I'll be speaking today primarily about advanced entrepreneurship. I've been to too many lectures where they say "OK, a business plan is a plan for your business." Instead, this lecture is going to skip the book stuff and describe the hard stuff that tripped me up when I started my own business.

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After a brief self-introduction, I'll sketch roughly the stages that a startup goes through, and then hop right into the pitfalls to watch out for. I've got a top ten list that I packed nearly 20 items into.

Finally, we'll wrap up with some soul-searching about whether entrepreneurship is for you and I'll dispell some common myths.

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OK. So, who am I? Again, I'm Jon Monsarrat. I do lots of things, but my major accomplishment in business was founding and running a startup company named Turbine. I started out an engineer at Brown University and while being Turbine's CEO managed to transform myself into a businessman. I ended up going back to MIT to get my MBA, among other things playing the mascot, the MIT Beaver. Now I'm an independent business consultant.

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Turbine is an Internet company focused on making computer games. When I wrote this lecture I was on Turbine's board. In 2009, Turbine employs 350 people, and has a number of hit games, including Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online.

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At the time I wrote this lecture, our big game was called Asheron's Call, and was and is a massively multiplayer game. That means that thousands of people, potentially 100,000 people, can interact online in a virtual world. Sort of Dungeons & Dragons set on the Internet.

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OK, enough about me. Here are the basic stages of a startup. First, at the B.S. stage, you're just kind of talking without really meaning it. Usually you gather for lunch with your buddies. Then one day you have a meeting without going to a restaurant. Suddenly, you're getting serious!

You should give a lot of thought to your founders. These are people you'll be relying on and working closely with for years.

Then go to a corporate lawyer and get the incorporation paperwork. There are fewer forms to fill out than you might think.

At this stage, don't quit your day job. Everyone's working part-time and you're building some sort of demo. Here starts the cycle. You're building demos based on very little money. But as you get better and better demos, you can raise more money, and that extra money helps you pay people to create better demos. Eventually somebody goes full-time.

Eventually, you have to find a business partner. Almost no company, except consultancies, provides a "whole solution" to the customer. For example, at Turbine, we make a great game, but we need Microsoft to distribute and advertise the game &#151 that just takes too much money and business clout for any small company.

Finding a business partner usually involves going to a computer conference. You get a hotel room and set your demo up there. Then you collar important executives on the show floor and drag them back to your hotel room demo. If they like it, you get to fly out to their HQ and do it again -- and hopefully they are paying airfare.

Finally you sign a partnering deal, like Turbine signing with Microsoft. Getting "blessed" by a company in your industry makes you much less risky, and at this point you can probably raise real Venture Capital, serious money in the millions of dollars, which sounds like a lot until you're running a company of 30 people.

Finally, you finish the product, ship it, make some more deals, ship some more, and eventually either sell the company or "go public". Discussing this in detail is basic stuff outside the scope of this lecture, but suffice it to say that none of the stockholders gets a penny until the company either sells or goes public, so everybody wants this to happen at some point.

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An Elevator Pitch is a cute phrase meaning that you have to speak clearly and concisely about your company and its strenghts. For example, if a venture capitalist were stuck on an elevator with you, you might only have 30 seconds to convey your basic message and secure a follow-up meeting. I have actually done this in elevators by declaring "Well, this is an elevator so I might as well give my elevator pitch." Usually they laugh and then let you do it. Once this actually worked for me.

Anyway, here is an example of what an elevator pitch might be like. I'll do Turbine's in two slides. 30 seconds. Have your stopwatch handy?

Slide one. Turbine is a hot Internet startup dedicated to Internet computer games. Unlike car racing games (left) where you can't really interact with the other race car drivers, our games (right) involve 50,000 or more people interacting in a virtual world. It's like a Country Club, because it's social, but we also give players something to do.

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Slide two. Our company will lead the market because we have proprietary Internet technology to increase customer appeal, and the content tools necessary to keep customers returning to the game month after month.

Done. The basic idea of the elevator pitch is that if you can't keep it short, the message is probably too complex. You need to use the right buzzwords (Internet and proprietary) and avoid jargon that businesspeople won't understand. Note how using a country club metaphor makes the customer appeal (i.e. competitive advantage) clear without my having to talk about Dungeons & Dragons, which is a subject to complex for the elevator.

Going through this exercise is more than good communication. I think you'll find it forces you to rethink and be very clear with yourself about where your company is targeted.

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OK. So here are Jon Monsarrat's top ten things about entrepreneurship.

1 Use Introspection. That means you should pay attention to what's

around you. When a problem comes up, instead of shrugging it off, try to think, at a meta-level of abstraction, "Why did that happen? How can we keep that from happening again?"

Part of this notion is to try to evaluate yourself and change where you think you need changing. Another part is to take a disagreement and break it down into its fundamental components. Usually two reasonable people who disagree turn out to have differing assumptions. Sometimes you can test these assumptions, or carve ways to reduce risk and satisfy everyone.

Being introspective also means sharpening your social perception. Everyone already has social perception of course, but I'm talking about really keeping your eyes and ears open for subtleties.

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Once you start paying attention to introspection and social cues, you'll see even more personality quirks than you normally see, and you'll see how they connect to the efficiency of your business.

Some examples include:

• Not wanting to hurt somebody's feelings, and ending up crippling your business by not holding people accountable
• Letting the businesspeople and the technical staff grow apart and build an us/them barrier
• Letting someone with an ego problem run with a bad idea because it's too much emotional stress to talk them out of it
• Allowing someone to take on a management position when they don't really want to manage, but they like the fancy title.
• Some people talk more than others, or speak up or interrupt more than others. It's important to calibrate this so you get heard by the speak-a-lots and allow the speak-not-muches to get a word in.
• Watch out for people who really are lying to you on purpose.

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"Bill Gates Doesn't Dance" refers to life-long goals. Some people, like Bill Gates, succeed because they pour their heart and soul into their business. It becomes their life.

It's tough to compete with these people. They'll give up everything and as a result they have more time than you. You're trying to keep up a social life and not stress yourself to an early grave. People who boast about how little sleep they're getting (and I used to be one of these people) should wake up and realize that you're more efficient overall if you're getting proper sleep nightly.

The solution here is obvious but it's funny how people don't seem to follow this notion. Don't try to compete. Figure out what life-long goals you want to achieve, and go for them in whatever appropriately balanced way you choose.

Some CEOs feel they "must" work until their eyes pop out. This is the delegation fallacy. You can always delegate work and take some time off. If you really think you can't delegate, I have to ask why. If your product idea is a good one, you should be able to raise a little more money and hire some extra help. If your product idea isn't that good, why are you killing yourself over it?

Planning to get a life around 2035. Some people have this notion that they'll work really hard to "build a career" and then kick back and enjoy life later on. How much later on? Sometimes they lose track of time and hit retirement without really having smelled the roses.

Balance isn't just about career and hobbies. It's also balancing short- and long-term goals. For example, I used to work in biotech. In the long-term, it was great to work in a field where I could potentially help save lives. But in the short-term, I hated it. It's not very interesting to be a programmer in a field dominated by biologists.

In the reverse way, I loved the day-to-day work when I ran Turbine, which is a games company. But I realized I was not accomplishing much in the long-term except making some kids happy, which is what some people want as their life's legacy, but not me.

Finally, I just came across a notion I hope will help you. Usually whenever there's a lull in my life, I get bored and start getting excited about new projects. I make a ton of commitments and suddenly I've overpromised to everyone and I'm pulling all-nighters trying to complete all the projects. That's no fun.

What I need to start doing instead is, when I'm bored, it's OK to take on a bunch of new project, but some of them should be optional projects &#151 things with no deadlines, or with scattered and spread-out deadlines. That way I never get too much to do at any one time. I can always drop the optional stuff when life gets too hectic.

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Getting organized is all about making lists. I love lists, and highly recommend that you write everything down. Everything. Think of it this way. Let's say you're in the supermarket. You think of an idea for your company.

If you write it down, you can forget about it. The list will remind you later. If you don't write it down, you have to keep it in your head. You might forget it, and you'll probably worry that you'll forget it. Trust me, it's less stressful just to keep some paper in your pocket and write things down as you think of them.

I would also recommend keeping a log of what you do every hour of every day. Sounds like overkill, but it can be valuable to see how you're spending your time. One thing I discovered is that nobody really works 16-hour days. What about real work, not counting goofing around although you may happen to be in the office? The most anyone can really work over a sustained period is 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. One month I average 12 hours, 7 days a week, and it nearly killed me.

Another way I've used introspection recently was in figuring out employee problems. You're an even-tempered, forgiving person I imagine. Let's say you've got a problem employee who says angry things in team meetings. This only explodes once a month or so, with a variety of minor incidents.

The problem here is that it's impossible over a six month stretch to remember all the little incidents. As humans, we just tend to forget and not be very good at correlating this stuff. So, by writing down the incidents, I was able to track the problem, identify it as a trend, resolve the problem, and then watch to see if the problem got better, worse, or stayed the same (frequency and severity of 'events').

Another thing I've done in list-making was to resolve a household chores bet with a roomate. She bet me that she was doing more work around the house than me. I thought she was wrong.

OK, so we sat down with a spreadsheet and figured it out. Each chore had a "difficulty / grossness" rating, a "number of minutes" time factor, and a "frequency" setting how often the chore had to be done. Multiplying those things out gave us some semblance of how much effort we were each putting into chores.

OK, I can hear you laughing out there. What a weird and geeky way to think about chores, by putting them in a spreadsheet. I can tell you this though. That spreadsheet helped us to resolve an issue that our intuitions were not good enough for. It was a complex situation and we figured it out. How often can you say that about human interpersonal relations?

So my advice is, stop chuckling and give it a shot sometime.

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People tend to act in their own best interests. You've heard the expression "step into their shoes". Great, but how many of us really follow this through all the way?

One example of this in action in when companies expect their employees to do backbreaking overtime, without compensation. Usually they want the employees to "do it for loyalty". Well, guess what. Employees are usually working for their own careers. They want to benefit themselves. Sooner or later the employees will figure out that "loyalty" just means a one-sided relationship. Or they don't figure it out, work like dogs, and get burned out.

Another example is when you're proposing a deal to someone, start from their perspective. Lead with what you can do for them. It makes them much more receptive when you get around to what they can do for you.

Finally, it's important to be a little paranoid and make sure you understand the motivations of the people around you. Trust your mother, but watch her.

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Every industry has certain success factors, called market drivers, that your company must have to succeed. Usually they are tied to customer appeal. It's vital to think of your company as achieving success by hitting market drivers.

For example, at Turbine, our games are attractive because there's a huge community of people playing the game, and they can interact with each other. Obviously, we want to have great computer graphics, but we really have to stress community &#151 that's the market driver that's even more important to our success than graphics.

This is a complex concept, so let me illustrate with another example on the next slide.

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I've heard people say that when you're choosing the market for your company, you want to choose the largest market that you can dominate, which hopefully is large enough for you to make some real money in.

For Turbine, we inhabit the massively multiplayer games market, which is part of Internet games, which itself is a submarket of the overall electronic entertainment market.

Drivers include content -- it's gotta be fun, interactivity, and community.

I get a lot of people who come to me with a business plan, wanting me to read over it and give some feedback. Rarely are the market drivers spelled out in a concrete way like this. I recommend it highly.

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You have a great idea for a company? Great! Let's say your idea is that cell phones are booming in Brazil. You want to go to Brazil and sell wireless minutes.

Wait a second. Do you have any experience in cell phones? Do you speak portuguese? Maybe you're good at marketing, but are you really going to be able to out-market Cellular One and AT&T Wireless? You need to have a core competency; some edge over your competitors. Otherwise, this great idea is really a great idea for someone else. There is no excuse for starting a company without at least one experienced person from the industry involved.

Now that I've just slammed the entrepreneur with no background, let me speak in defense of this very same person. You sort of have to have a delusion both of over-confidence and under-confidence at the same time. Over-confidence is needed because who but a flaming ego would try to start a company? But under-confidence is required or you won't learn from your own mistakes and your company will go bankrupt. Try to cross your eyes and do both at once.

Finally, there's no magic to this. The difference between your skills and the skills of the best person in your industry is probably smaller than you think it is. Your competitors are only humans, after all. Don't start assuming they're all supercompetent whiz kids you could never beat. Get out there and compete!

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One of the most important parts of management, perhaps the most important, is setting proper expectations. This sounds like something you've heard before, I know. It's funny how little most people pay attention to this, though. A deadline slips and they just kind of accept it.

When you delegate something to an employee, make an agreement, and make it written by sending email about it. Later on, if there's a screw up, you can point to the email. Instead of you being the "badguy" and "making them feel bad" by pointing out the problem, instead the agreement becomes the badguy. You're pointing out to them their own promises.

Here's a tip on milestones. Most people break a project up into reasonbly-sized chunks and call those milestones. I would urge you not to do this. Instead, make one milestone every 1 or 2 weeks. That way, you have a regular way to check up and see how your employee is doing and whether the project is slipping.

That's why banks ask you to pay back a loan monthly. In reality, they'd love it if you waited and waited to pay back the loan, so that more interest would accrue. But by making you pay monthly, they are getting monthly reassurance that you have not fled the country.

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I spoke about this subject earlier when I mentioned that making people feel good can come into conflict with the company's success at times. This is especially painful when the people you are managing are your friends.

My recommendation is to set expectations properly and then be tough on accountability. This means being tough on hiring. Don't let five people who half-heartedly interview someone and pass the buck to each other cause you to hire someone inappropriate for the job.

Also, when you're giving someone feedback, of course you want to spare hurt feelings. But be careful that you do communicate. Some people who've recently been failing build towering rationalizations that need knocking down. I've had meetings when I fire someone, and they don't understand they've been fired.

Or I chew someone out and they don't understand that I'm unhappy, and that the reason I'm unhappy is them, and that they should in the future change their behavior.

Without agreement that a problem exists, there can be no change. Therefore, I encourage you to use the "F" word, which here is "Failure" or "Fire".

Finally, it's tough but you need to fire people who are not exactly performing badly, but their performance is at best mediocre. Such people cause a morale drain on the employees who are getting paid the same but are working harder.

It's funny, I don't think I've ever had to fire an employee and had morale go down. Usually by the time I get to it, the employees (who work with this person more closely than you do as a manager) already know that he or she is not pulling a fair share of weight.

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When there's a crisis, the worst thing you can do is to shout fire. That's getting out of the Trojan horse before it enters the castle.

When you get upset, bang your fist on the table, and write 10-page emails, people start to tune you out. You may be right, and you may be wrong, but right now they just don't want to deal with you.

You may see the crisis, and it may be obvious, but for the moment, they do not see it. So first, before suggesting any solutions &#151 it's way to early for that -- get agreement that a problem exists. This is usually the important part of resolving the problem and solutions will pop up spontaneously after agreement is reached.

If there are a number of problems at once, you'll have to prioritize them and take 'em one at a time. People may not have the attention or free time to tackle all your problems at once. By slinging a dozen problems at them, you muddy the water, and make everything more confusing. Stick to one thing, even if it's painful to let those fires burn.

This is necessary because without patience and without building support, you will not overcome the natural barrier of resistance and people will start to lampoon you for championing every cause on Earth.

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I've got more to say, but I made this one #10 because whenever I give a lecture and mention books, people don't take me seriously.

Let me imagine Tommy in the audience, thinking, "Hmm... this is a good lecture, but everything he's saying is basically common sense and I think I can more or less handle this."

OK, Tommy, you got me. A lot of this stuff comes straight from "Duh, So". Everybody has some basic skills in interpersonal relations and organization. But when your company is at stake, do you really want to wing it?

If your company is important to you, you owe it to yourself to buy at least one of these books &#151 I would recommend the 7 Habits book if I could only choose one &#151 and you can always return it if you end up knowing everything.

I knew a guy in college who wouldn't let me loan him a book on business plans and he wrote a truly awful one. His company tanked, along with the money his parents had given him for it. Don't let this happen to you by thinking you know everything already.

Anyway, sorry to rant. This is a list of some really great books. Hopefully I've convinced you to give one a shot.

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The fellow who is chairman of my company, Turbine, is a sensational professor at Brown University named Andy van Dam. I won't go into Andy's long list of accomplishments except to say that you will do well to heed one of his secrets: "Do your homework."

Let's say Andy is going to a meeting at SIGGRAPH. A bunch of professors get together to talk about how things are going and what to do in the next year. Andy will come prepared with an agenda and say "OK, what about you? Where are your agendas?" Everyone else will say, "Um, I dunno, I just thought we were going to talk."

Being prepared in this way lets you set the agenda. It also impresses the hell out of people. The funny thing is that the stuff that you'd think up before the meeting probably isn't awe-inspiring stuff. It's stuff that anyone would have thought up if they'd put an hour into it. But that person was you, and that's leadership.

You're probably tired of me yakking about principles, so here are some concrete examples of people not doing the stuff that's important to their company:

• Managers who are "too busy" to read resumes in a timely manner and help with hiring. Meanwhile, unfilled positions in the company drain morale and efficiency.
• Top management who can't be bothered to communicate to the employees what's going on.
• Top management who's "too busy" to read the half-dozen most important industry magazines. If you're not keeping up on your own industry, how the hell are you running your company? What do you do when your in a negotiation and somebody asks you if you've heard of the AOL-Netscape merger and you say "Wha?"

Sorry, I got a little excited there. You can see that these things I'm talking about can have a real effect on your company.

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When you're writing a document, it really helps to put in structure everywhere. Think about it this way. On top of all your text there is another document, about 20% of the length, at a higher level of abstraction. That document itself must make sense at the higher level. Use bullet points, diagrams, and sections to make your document more clear.

This goes beyond communications efficiency. Sometimes I write a document for myself, even when no one else is going to see it, because getting it on paper, and putting it into multi-tiered abstraction form helps me to think through and really understand the issues. It helps me focus.

This is important, for example, when setting market drivers. The highest level abstraction of your business plan should be "we hit market drivers and succeed if you give us money". The next lower level should talk about the market drivers, one for each section, for example. And so forth down to the lowest level which is raw text of the document.

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This is a complex idea so here's an example. This is a vertical chain diagram. People hand me business plans to peruse all the time and typically there is no clear diagram of the vertical chain.

Here, for example, at the bottom in yellow, Turbine makes the technology and the content for a computer game. Microsoft boxes and distributes the game, as well as running a web site &#151 the portal for the game experience. Microsoft and Turbine share running the game on an ongoing basis. You can see the flows of money as well. Microsoft gets money from the customer and shares a portion with Turbine.

Since businesses are about making money, and a vertical chain shows how the money is passed from one partner to another (and who's doing what work) you can see how vital it is. Don't make your investors figure it out from various hints. Give them the high-level message clearly and without ambiguity.

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This slide is about body language. Hold on a moment. I'm not going to start asking you to fake illness during a meeting so you can slip out. This slide is about two things.

First, learn how to stop yourself when your body language is lying. For example, I'm a big guy and I have long arms. Crossing my arms feels comfortable and very natural to me. But people may misinterpret that body language (crossed arms or legs) as my being closed-minded to their ideas. So I don't do that.

My advice is to stay aware of the effect you're having on people, and stop your body from lying about your inner state.

Second, as part of being a little paranoid, and also to increase your social perception, learn to use body language cues to read other people. I'm not telling you to start placing bets here &#151 body language can never let you read minds. But it's an important instrument. If you can tell when someone's anxious, you can help them feel more at ease.

Making eye contact is just one way to do this. Back on the books slide I recommended "You Can Get Anything You Want", by Roger Dawson, which has a great section on body language.

While we're on this topic, whenever someone shakes my hand and squeezes really hard, I am most definitely not thinking, "Oh, what a cool macho man, I must do business with him." Usually I am thinking, "Ow! What are you doing to my hand, you moron?".

This is basic, but bear with me here. To shake hands, step forward, make eye contact, grip but do not squeeze, and shake once. While you're at it, repeat the person's name out loud both to confirm you got it right and to signal that you are paying attention. Saying it out loud will also run take the name on a little jog around the block in your brain that will help you remember it later.

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I had too many items for my top 10 list, didn't I? OK, here are some other ones to watch out for, quickly.

Match the scope of the solution to the scope of the problem. Let's say you have flex time at your company. Staff work when they want to. But you have this one woman who insists on working from 12am to 8am every day. She's never around for meetings, of course, and you have no way to "watch" her in the benevolent way that managers are supposed to.

The wrong way to handle this is to cancel flex time. No, no, no. You need to match the solution (fix that one employee's attitude) with the problem (one employee). Don't slap a tax on your well-behaved employees. This is how beauracracy starts.

I don't run Turbine any more, and when I stop by there is a big note on the front door "NO SOLICITORS". I get it. Probably one day they'd just had too many solicitors come by, and somebody decided to post a big ugly note to scare them away. But think for a moment. Is it attractive? No. Guests and business relations who see this imposing sign get a feeling of being unwelcome, as though they'd better be on their best behavior OR ELSE. Take down the sign, guys.

Get a reality check from the outside. Sometimes you employees are so busy agreeing with one another they don't even realize they're out of sync with the industry's quality standards or customer appeal.

Don't let your mother choose your next Techie. Well, unless she's a Techie too. The idea here is that if your background is in business, frankly you are not qualified to interview techies and you will probably choose a charismatic person who may be unskilled.

The same logic of course works backwards for techies who try to interview businesspeople. Do yourself a favor and find a few advisors you trust who are specialists, and let them do the interviewing.

You always have time for what you really want to do. Ever see those bumper stickers, "I'd rather be skiing?" Well, why aren't they out skiing? Probably because they have bills to pay and they don't want to move out to the slums just to get free time for skiing. So, in reality, they don't really want to be skiing. They want to be working so they don't have to live in the slums.

Next time you are working so hard you miss someone's birthday party, and you think to yourself "I'd rather be there", maybe it is time to re-evaluate your career or your delegations skills. Get out there and go to that party!

Negotiate from needs, not solutions. It's a very American thing to start a negotiation by listing your favorite solution. Hold it a moment. If you were over in Europe, you would start by trying to understand the other person and his or her needs. Then try to craft a solution that solves these needs. Both the "Seven Habits of Highly Successful People" I begged you to read, and the "You Can Get What You Want" book by Roger Dawson have great sections on win-win negotiation.

Following your dream: when not to. Let's say you have a management gimmick you love, maybe telecommuting. You let all your employees telecommute. There's a problem here. First off, you may or may not be a visionary. Maybe telecommuting is a dream strategy. I'll admit that from the outset.

But put yourself in the shoes of an investor. Telecommuting is an unproven technique and it adds risk to your company. This makes it harder to raise money, and harder to get a good valuation.

How do you respond? Think about why you are starting the company. If your primary goal if you have a life-long dream to show everyone that telecommuting will work, then by all means, keep telecommuting.

However, if your real goal is to make the best widgets you can, and never have to wear a necktie, then give up telecommuting. It may be a good idea, but you know what, non-telecommuting also works so hey.

Here's the same advice phrased in a slightly different way. You only have so much creative energy. Focus it on the important stuff where you have to compete. If you think out of the box too much you may add risk where there is really no reward to be gained by taking the risk. My advice to you is:

Back! Get back in that box! Start thinking "in the box"! The whole reason there is a box there in the first place is because it is filled with solutions that work. In other words, try normal before going to strange.

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Among the good things, you get a chance to prove yourself. Nobody is holding you back from that promotion. Back yourself CEO, do your best, and see what happens. It's great to try to really make a difference. And who knows, you might get rich!

On the bad side, it can be stressful because if you don't solve the problems, nobody is going to do it for you. It is possible as a rank-and-file employee to live in a wonderful La-La land where you don't know that people can sometimes be evil bastards. As a CEO it is impossible to miss this and you will become a little more cynical. Also, any friends you hire may become a little distant since you're now the boss. Finally, employees who need a little emotional support may rely on you to be a 2nd mother to them.

Overall, though, I think as long as you are paying attention to your own happiness and delegating properly, starting a company is a great experience and your best shot at changing the world for the better. Or... taking over the world if that's your approach instead.

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There's a myth that MBA students believe about entrepreneurship. They think it's too hard. No, this is not the case. You can delegate and live a more or less normal lifestyle. Besides, do you think going into consulting or investment banking is going to be a piece of cake?

Here's another way to think about this. See the chart for this. You start off in school working your butt off. That's why the blue bar is fairly chunky. Then in a consulting role, you graduate (the green line), work a little less hard, make some decent money and retire by age 60.

Well, in a startup (orange) you may work a little harder for 5 years, but as your company grows and becomes more like a "real company", things get a little more stable and you are able to delegate more effectively and handle crises. So you're working about as hard as you would at a consultancy.

Plus, if you make it big, you may get to retire at age 40 with a ton of money, so overall you may end up working less in your life this way!

(Listeners who point out the risk involved here will be shushed violently, but there's still something to this point I'm making.)

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Thanks for coming. This is the end of the lecture. This is a new diagram here. Don't forget that from MIT's perspective, the real triathalon is that you get your MBA, you earn a lot of money, and then give a generous donation to the school!

If you enjoyed this lecture, I hope that you'll refer others to my web site at www.monsarrat.com. I'd love to hear from you that you enjoyed the lecture, or if you have suggested changes, let me know.

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Also, if you are starting a company and would like someone to look over your business plan and give you some feedback, I may just have time to do that. Say hello through email to jon@alum.mit.edu.

Thanks, and I hope you give entrepreneurship a shot.