Great notes. I wish I could have been there in person, but these are a reasonable substitute for now. I especially liked the comments from MIT's Ken Zolot:

"...frame a product’s value in terms of 'who might want it' as opposed to 'the box of parts' that make it up."

In my experience, this is one of those common pitfalls that even very smart people (or maybe, *especially* very smart people) fall into. We create a great product that does everything you could ever want it to do, and then we can't understand why you aren't begging us to sell it to you. Meanhwhile, we failed to solve the one problem you actually had and that you were willing to spend money to solve. On one of my recent projects, we called this "demo love" - a fatal infatuation with our own prototype that refused to acknowledge room for improvement.

"In regards to entrepreneurial ecosystems, Zolot cited the importance of environments that allow for fast failure and support people to quickly get back on their feet."

"Fast failure" - that's perfect. A corrolary to that is the rapid prototyping credo: "fail early, fail often." We can do it with our code, but can we do it with our company? I have repeatedly read that one of Silicon Valley's critical success factors has been removing the stigma from failure. As long as failure is just another step on the road to success, then you can get brilliant minds to take crazy risks and push the envelope. When failure is punished ("you've started *how many* companies?") then people hold on to bad ideas for far too long.

Good stuff: looking forward to the next one.