Ashwin & Entrepreneurship

Career Builders: Ambitious professionals reflecting on timing, growth, and carving meaningful paths.
Founders and Engineers: Builders navigating the messy process of turning technical ideas for the physical world into businesses.
Investors: Those drawn to the complexities of evaluating hardware, robotics, and technology readiness.
Thinkers and Explorers: People connecting seemingly unrelated dots—like how aerospace systems inform entrepreneurship or how risk perception shapes decisions.

Subscribe to receive email updates about my writing

I write about how we design, build, and make decisions in the physical world — a field where success depends on navigating risk, timing, and tradeoffs.

Faculty Envy as Motivation for the Ecosystem

Written in

July 11, 2007

ashwinl

Startup Ecosystem Challenges

Here’s one suggestion: What we need is 1 or 2 faculty members (and successful entrepreneurs) to be crass enough to drive a Lamborghini to work each day. Other faculty will look at that and be green with envy. ‘My research is better’, they’ll say. Academia is a competitive environment. We need entrepreneurship to be part of the competition.

[Picture it] On how the mindset of faculty members at the University of Michigan can be changed for them to embrace entrepreneurship. A discussion today with an entrepreneur and employee of the University who works with start-up companies based on University technology.