Faculty
Paul Cheek is a global expert in innovation-driven entrepreneurship. Paul is a serial tech entrepreneur, educator, software engineer, and bestselling author of Disciplined Entrepreneurship: Startup Tactics. He is a Senior Lecturer in the MIT Sloan School of Management. Prior to his role at MIT, he co-founded three ventures which earned him recognition by Forbes 30 Under 30, the definitive list of young people changing the world. Paul has been featured in publications including Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Inc Magazine.
Paul was MIT’s first Hacker in Residence and has since taught, mentored, and advised thousands of entrepreneurs around the world. Paul designed and now leads a new advanced course he developed to help student entrepreneurs build their businesses called “Venture Creation Tactics”. Additionally, Paul teaches hundreds of MIT and Harvard undergraduate, graduate, and PhD students each year in the historic "New Enterprises" course. His teaching materials have been used by educators around the world.
Prior to his work at MIT, Paul was the co-founder of Oceanworks and Work Today. Oceanworks is a for-profit company with a mission to end plastic pollution. Work Today is a venture backed digital staffing and recruiting company. Paul has also built technologies for and consulted with LogMeIn, BlackRock, Prudential, Mazda, and more. He serves on the CNBC Disruptor 50 Advisory Board, the MIT Sandbox Funding Board, and judges the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s CO—100 Awards.
You can learn more about Paul on his website, PaulCheek.com, or follow him on LinkedIn.
Cheek, Paul. John Wiley & Sons, 2024. Startup Tactics.
In his new book, MIT Sloan School of Management’s Paul Cheek argues that companies lose competitive ground when they keep humans in the loop on decisions that AI can make more efficiently.
AIDEs have lower overhead, are extremely efficient at product development, require a smaller footprint, and provide increased ownership for founders, according to MIT Sloan’s Paul Cheek.
Senior lecturer Paul Cheek said the first step for Chief Human Resources Officers (CHROs) is investing in AI training and upskilling for executives and employees. The next is rethinking the org chart. "The CHRO title itself needs to change from managing headcount to auditing whether a given role needs a human's judgment or an AI agent's uptime," Cheek said.
The closure of an industrial site, the bankruptcy of a large group, or a massive restructuring plan can simultaneously affect several thousand households, suppliers, subcontractors, and sometimes an entire region. It is precisely this risk that senior lecturer Paul Cheek puts back at the center of the debate. According to him, large, innovative companies are generally perceived as beneficial to the economy because they concentrate a high volume of jobs. However, this concentration can also produce a systemic risk when the economic health of a region depends on a limited number of actors.
In his new book, "No One Works Here," senior lecturer Paul Cheek urges managers and business leaders to think twice before throwing a roadblock into the flow of what could be very efficient automation. "The companies that are most likely to fall behind their peers are the ones that insist on keeping a human in the loop for decisions that a machine could have made yesterday," he wrote.
What happens to a company at the moment when the AI revolution takes off? Senior lecturer Paul Cheek's new book, "No One Works Here: How AI-Driven Enterprises Are Raising the Bar for Business, Leadership, and Competition," addresses this question. The book's foreword was written by Henry Ford III (MBA 2010).
Drawing from the vast culture of innovation and entrepreneurship at MIT, this unique course introduces participants to MIT’s entrepreneurial education programs, technology transfer system, and global entrepreneurial network. It covers the entire venture creation process, from generating ideas to building viable global businesses, with a special emphasis on the nurturing roles of corporations, universities, governments, and foundations.
A month-long senior executive program designed for a diverse group of experienced leaders seeking transformative learning among global peers. AMP participants will engage in custom learning components led by MIT’s world-renowned faculty, including interactive classroom sessions, management simulations, case studies, 1:1 leadership coaching, and individualized feedback assessments. Participants will also explore the many companies, labs and centers that make MIT and surrounding Kendall Square the epicenter of innovation worldwide.
