“Why are we studying the Grateful Dead in the context of the Ocean MBA?” Asked Brian Halligan, cofounder of HubSpot and GP at Propeller to a room full of early stage climate-tech founders.
Silence at first. Then a few brave founders trickled in some creative answers.
“Original viral marketers?”
“Complementary skillsets of the founding band members?”
No one was hitting the mark. Finally, Brian spared them...
And thus began day three of our 7th cohort, a deep dive into all the ways in which the Grateful Dead zigged when others zagged on their path to creating a wildly unique and successful business, and yet another way in which our Ocean MBA brings creative depth and breadth to company building.
At our kickoff, I challenged the room full of founders to approach the program with some of the ocean’s greatest qualities – depth and breadth.
Breadth – Like the ocean, spanning horizons as far as one can see, touching coastlines of all kinds, our Ocean MBA program encompasses breadth in a few ways. Breadth of concepts covered, breadth of the problems being tackled by the startups, and breadth of stages. We do this for a few reasons. Firstly, we want to cover the startup concepts and examples that we think are most helpful to early stage companies – regardless of their direct relevance to the ocean, or even to climate-tech. We believe there are business lessons to be learned and inspiration to be taken from across all sorts of prior examples.
For example, our partner and HubSpot cofounder, Brian Halligan, leads the cohort through the HubSpot case study and the journey he and his team took arguing over which market to go after. We then watch as the teams in the room think through their journeys. "Do we go after the Navy/defense market? Or the commercial shipping market?" "Industrial customers or municipalities?" The context is different. The concepts are the same. Knowing your customer, understanding your market, and getting to scale.
Additionally, we love seeing the breadth of sectors and stages in one room. The mixing of founders -- sharing challenges and successes -- creates an ideal learning environment, and hopefully relationships that founders carry with them forever.
On to depth – Like the ocean, which is on average really deep(!), we challenge the founders to engage deeply in the curriculum, from the lectures, to the breakout sessions, to those interstitial moments and hallway chats. With intention, presence, and focus, the full depth of the Ocean MBA presents itself – the opportunity for founders to simultaneously step away from their day to day work IN their business, to really immerse themselves in strategic thinking and work ON their business.
As an example of how valuable this can be, this year, we had a former mentor come back as a startup CEO to be in the Ocean MBA. Why? Because they've seen how the intense, and intentional depth and breadth of the program helps founders get further faster.
Of course, we may be high on our own supply. So don’t take our word for it. Check out what some of the founders from this year’s cohort have to say about the Ocean MBA...
The Ocean MBA would not be possible without the support of our partners – Kristin Gerber + Joe Theis at Goodwin Procter, Britt Gardner at JP Morgan, and Ben Downing, Serena Dao, and Emily Knight at The Engine. These are all tremendous champions for founders, building capacity and support for the climate-tech ecosystem to continue to grow and thrive. Thank you for being such stellar partners year after year! Additionally, our speakers, lecturers and mentors are the best! It's an honor to host and learn from folks like Rylan Hamilton (CEO of Bluewater Autonomy), Susan Hunt Stevens (CEO of Tessi), Henry Sztul (former CTO at Bowery Farms) and more. These folks are paying-it-forward with hard-learned lessons from their experiences building great companies and we are eternally grateful for the shared knowledge and inspiration.
*Note: We don’t publish the list of participating companies publicly. It’s a choice we made for the first cohort and have stuck to it. When we first crafted the Ocean MBA, we asked ourselves two questions: “What could we uniquely contribute to the ecosystem?” And “What’s best for founders?” Frankly, there are a million programs with demo days and lists of startups passed around... This is not that. This is built for founders. Intimate. No journalists. No stages. No audiences. Real work and real connections with founders and mentors. We don't hide who's in the program every year, but we let the founders decide if they want to share their participation or not.