Bill Aulet

Career

Aulet teaches New Enterprises, Energy Ventures, and Applications of Advanced Entrepreneurial Techniques, in addition to running the Martin Trust Center, which supports student entrepreneurship education inside and outside the classroom across all five schools at MIT. Since Aulet became Managing Director in 2009, he has conceived, designed and overseen the implementation of numerous innovative programs, from new courses (Linked Data Ventures, Entrepreneurial Product Marketing and Development, Energy Ventures, Applications of Advanced Entrepreneurial Techniques) and student initiatives (MIT Clean Energy Prize, MIT Entrepreneurship Review) to accelerators (Global Founders’ Skills Accelerator, Beehive Cooperative) and thought leadership initiatives (Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program or REAP). His work has won numerous awards; most recently, in April 2013, Aulet was awarded the Adolf F. Monosson Prize for Entrepreneurial Mentoring at MIT. In December 2013, Bill was recognized by BostInno as one of the 50 on Fire in Boston

Prior to joining MIT, Aulet had a 25-year track record of success in business, having directly raised more than $100 million in funding for his companies and led the creation of hundreds of millions of dollars in market value in those companies. After working for 11 years at IBM, he was named an MIT Sloan Fellow, taking part in a one-year accelerated master’s program in management. Upon graduating, he became a serial entrepreneur, running two MIT spinouts as the president/chief executive officer (Cambridge Decision Dynamics and SensAble Technologies). The latter became a two-time Inc. Magazine 500 Fastest-Growing Private Company t. With a presence in over 20 countries, SensAble also won more than 24 awards and was featured in Fortune Magazine, BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications for its innovative products and strong business foundation.

In 2003, he was recruited as chief financial officer to co-lead a turnaround of security technology company Viisage Technology. During his tenure of two and a half years, and in a resource-constrained environment, Viisage developed a new strategy, overhauled its operations, made three major acquisitions, and executed two major fundraising rounds; as a result, its market value increased from $50 million to over $500 million.

His writings on entrepreneurship have been published by The Wall Street Journal, Tech Crunch The Boston Globe, The Huffington Post, Xconomy, the Kauffman Foundation, MIT Sloan Experts, and the MIT Entrepreneurship Review.

Personal life

A former professional basketball player, Aulet lives in Belmont, Massachusetts with his wife; they have four grown sons. Aulet holds a bachelor’s in engineering from Harvard University and an SM from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Book

Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup (2013). Disciplined Entrepreneurship has been translated to Vietnamese, Chinese (Orthodox and Simplified versions), Japanese, Korean (where it was a best seller and named one of the top Economics & Business books of 2014 by the prestigious Kyobo Book Store) and Russian with plans for Arabic (Spring 2015), Spanish (March 2015), Croatian, Polish, Swedish and Thai as of January 2015. It has also been the basis of a series of highly successful MIT edX online classes Entrepreneurship 101 and Entrepreneurship 102 with more planned in the future.