MIT VMS - Venture Mentoring Service

"VMS's mission is uniquely inclusive, with its corps of experienced volunteer mentors offering services without charge to the entire MIT community, from students and staff to faculty and alumni. By freely sharing their knowledge and insights, MIT Venture Mentoring Service mentors make a very important teaching contribution while helping start-up business ventures learn the roadmap to success."

L. Rafael Reif,
Provost
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

About VMS

The MIT Venture Mentoring Service (VMS) traces its beginnings to a meeting suggested by MIT Provost Robert Brown in 1997 between Alec Dingee, an MIT Sloan School of Management (52) alumnus, and MIT Professor David H. Staelin, at which they found they shared a common vision-to further MIT's educational mission by providing entrepreneurs within the MIT community with mentoring, advice, and help in developing their enterprises. Each had deep MIT roots (Dave received his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from the Institute and has been on the faculty since 1965, while Alec has retained closely connected with MIT for several decades following graduation). Each also had extensive experience in starting companies and managing them to success.

From these backgrounds, their vision was developed-built around a shared belief that a fledgling business is far more likely to succeed when an idea, a good business plan, and an entrepreneur are matched with proven experience. With the blessing of the Provost's Office, they set about developing a structure that could translate their vision into reality. The result is VMS, which was officially launched under the auspices of the MIT Office of the Provost in January 2000.

VMS activities revolve also around the belief that active support of entrepreneurial activities improves the education of MIT students and alumni, strengthens MIT's role as a world leader in innovation, and broadens MIT's base of potential financial support. VMS delivers its services through volunteer mentors who are selected for their experience and their enthusiasm for the program. Relationships between mentors and potential entrepreneurs are established on the basis of each entrepreneur's needs and preferences, and the interests of the available mentors. Mentors use face-to-face coaching techniques to deal with actual situations as they arise in the development of a young business. As one of several MIT programs for entrepreneurs, VMS strives to maintain its focus on offering practical help and advice.

VMS's mentors are skilled volunteers— drawn from the corporate, entrepreneurial, and academic communities. They include MIT alumni and faculty, and their careers represent a wide range of skills and experience as founders, chairmen, CEOs, chief technical officers, chief financial officers, or directors of sucessful corporations and partnerships. They are recruited for their expertise in business formation and funding, strategic planning, management, and technical fields, for their skills as advisors and their commitment to the support of entrepreneurship at MIT.