We teach and inspire thoughtful action through entrepreneurial innovation.

Bill Aulet is the Managing Director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and Professor of the Practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

He is changing the way entrepreneurship is understood, taught, and practiced around the world. Bill is an award-winning educator and author whose current work is built off the foundation of his 25-year successful business career first at IBM and then as a three-time serial entrepreneur. During this time, he directly raised over a hundred million dollars and, more importantly, created hundreds of millions of dollars of shareholder value through his companies. Since 2009, he has been responsible for leading the development of entrepreneurship education across MIT at the Martin Trust Center. Bill's first book, Disciplined Entrepreneurship, released in August 2013, has been translated into over 18 languages and has been the content for three online edX courses which have been taken by hundreds of thousands of people in 199 different countries. The accompanying follow-on book, Disciplined Entrepreneurship Workbook, was released in April 2017. Bill has widely published in in places such as the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, the Boston Globe, the Sloan Management Review, the Kauffman Foundation, Entrepreneur Magazine, MIT Sloan Experts and more. He has been a featured speaker on shows such as CNBC’s Squawk Box, BBC News, Bloomberg News as well as at events and conferences around the world.

He has degrees from Harvard and MIT, and is a board member of MITEK Systems (NASDAQ: MITK) and XL Fleet. (Private). He is also a Visiting Professor at University of Strathclyde (Scotland). On July 1, 2017, Bill was named a Professor of the Practice at MIT Sloan, the first at the school in the area of entrepreneurship since Alex d’Arbeloff held that title in 2003. For his efforts, Bill has earned external recognition as well including Boston 50 on Fire, 2017 Favorite MBA Professors from Poets and Quants, and 2018 Nannerl Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professorship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University.

Luis Perez-Breva, PhD, is an expert in the process of technology innovation, an entrepreneur, and the the author of Innovating: A Doer’s Manifesto for Starting from a Hunch, Prototyping Problems, Scaling Up, and Learning to Be Productively Wrong. (MIT Press 2017).

Currently Perez-Breva directs the MIT Innovation Teams Program, MIT’s flagship hands-on innovation program jointly operated between the Schools of Engineering and Management. During his tenure, i-Teams has shepherded over 170 MIT technologies to discover a path to impact. He co-led the Innovation Pillar of the MIT Skoltech Initiative, and collaborates with MIT’s innovation initiatives in Portugal, Singapore, and Abu Dhabi. He has taught innovating as a skill worldwide to professionals and students from all disciplines; and gotten them started innovating from pretty much anything: hunches, real-world problems, engineering problem sets, and research breakthroughs.

He is a serial innovator with successes in emergency cell phone location technologies currently deployed worldwide, and a fully automated portfolio allocation and trading system; and numerous other stories to share from his trial and error adventures to conceive artificial intelligence technologies that tackle real-world problems and drive them to market.

Dr. Perez-Breva holds degrees in Chemical Engineering, Physics, Business, and Artificial Intelligence from Spain (Institut Quimic de Sarrià), France (Ecole Normale Supérieure), and the US (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). As an innovator and entrepreneur he has worked on cell phone location for emergency response and national security, genetics, healthcare intelligence, automated portfolio allocation, and developed several non-profit organizations, including building a new university centered around innovation. In 2011, the government of Spain recognized his career achievements with the Order of Civil Merit of the Kingdom of Spain.

Paul Cheek is a serial tech entrepreneur, entrepreneurship educator, and software engineer. He is the Executive Director and an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, a Senior Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the MIT Sloan School of Management, and the Co-Founder and CTO of Oceanworks.

Paul was MIT’s first Hacker in Residence and has since taught, mentored, and advised thousands of entrepreneurs around the world. Each year Paul teaches hundreds of undergraduate, graduate, and PhD students in the “New Enterprises” course, which is believed to be the oldest entrepreneurship course in the country, and has also taught the advanced entrepreneurship course, “Building an Entrepreneurial Venture: Advanced Tools and Techniques.” From working closely with so many students, Paul identified a gap in the entrepreneurship curriculum, designed experimental entrepreneurship education content, and now leads a new advanced course he developed to help student entrepreneurs build their businesses called “Venture Creation Tactics”.

Outside of classes, Paul spends time coaching and mentoring entrepreneurs in a variety of programs including the MIT delta v startup accelerator, MIT fuse accelerator, Sandbox Innovation Fund, as well as other workshops and hackathons. One of which was the MIT COVID-19 Challenge, a series of global hackathons that Paul co-founded, which served over 8,500 participants around the world. To scale the impact that he and the Trust Center have within the five schools across the Institute, Paul built the digital entrepreneurship platform, Orbit, which serves over 15,000 users annually.

Paul is also the Co-Founder and CTO of Oceanworks, a for-profit company with a mission to end plastic pollution. At Oceanworks, he has developed a platform and traceability system to provide corporations with a trusted source for a variety of quality recycled ocean plastic materials at competitive prices. In the past two years, Oceanworks has diverted thousands of tonnes of plastic from the ocean, served hundreds of corporate customers in over 30 countries, and enabled the launch of a variety of high-profile sustainable products such as Clorox ocean plastic trash bags, Sperry ocean plastic boat shoes, and YKK ocean plastic zippers.

In 2021, Paul was recognized by Forbes 30 Under 30, the definitive list of young people changing the world, and for his leadership at Oceanworks, Forbes named Paul one of ten standouts who hold the future of cleantech in their hands.

Prior to Oceanworks, Paul co-founded Work Today, a venture-backed digital staffing and recruiting company. Work Today helped day laborers find jobs every morning to achieve financial predictability and stability. As CTO, Paul designed and built the company’s technology and payments platform. He scaled the business from 0 to 50,000 workers across 16 major markets throughout the United States.

At 21, Paul envisioned a new way for global payment card networks to interact and his company, Tab Technologies, was subsequently named to the Forbes list of “The World’s Next 10 Big Fintech Stars”. He designed and engineered a technology that aggregates payment transactions across financial systems and was issued a patent for the invention. Paul has also built technologies for and consulted with LogMeIn, BlackRock, Prudential, Mazda, and more.

Ingrid Toppelberg parlays her formidable professional education content and curriculum expertise as Chief Digital Transformation Officer for ThriveDX. In her role, she develops relevant, best-in-class oriented programs for individuals entering the growing cybersecurity field or seeking to advance their cybersecurity careers.

In addition to her role at ThriveDX, she currently serves as a Head Coach for the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Bootcamps. As such, she develops coaching processes to ensure a consistent experience across programs and manages and trains MIT’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Bootcamp coaches. 

An economist by training, Toppelberg also worked at Mckinsey & Company, where she specialized in leadership development and  change management processes like post-merger integration, cultural change and operations transformation. Ingrid holds an MBA from MIT Sloan School Of Management and a bachelor’s in economics from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires.

Iman Urooj is Chief Operating Officer at Safepay, a Y Combinator and Stripe backed Fintech startup empowering Pakistani businesses by making digital payments simpler.  She is Pakistani Venezuelan and has previously directed sales and strategy initiatives in the food industry, acting as a bridge between Latin American and Middle Eastern markets.

She studied History and Economics at New York University and has coached learners from around the world for MIT Bootcamps online and in person.

Iman is passionate about entrepreneurship, particularly how access to digital payments can help accelerate economic opportunities in Pakistan. She enjoys talking to customers and learning from their stories, traveling and following multiple dog accounts on instagram.