Episode 9: Bonus: MIT Event with Hurst Lin & Rebecca Fanning

**Mike Grandinetti** (0:00)
Hello everyone, and welcome to this episode of the Disruptive Innovation Podcast series. I'm your host for this episode, Mike Grandinetti. We're recording live on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The event that we are recording is a masterclass program preparing for and competing with the Tech Titans of China. As a result, this episode will be different in format than all prior episodes.
I also want to point our regular listeners to episode 3 Episode 3 was a deep dive on China's innovation ascendancy and it will complement the content that you hear in this episode.

**Katja Wald** (1:01)
All right, everyone, sorry for the delay.
Good evening. My name is Katja Wald. I'm the Executive Director here at the MIT Enterprise Forum. Welcome to our very first Innovation Series event of our 2019-2020 program year. For those of you who are not familiar with the MIT Enterprise Forum, we produce nearly 40 programs from September to June with the help of a small but mighty staff and a great community of volunteers and sponsors. Our Innovation Series programs, like the one tonight, are intended to cover all aspects of the innovation ecosystem and take on both industry-specific and interdisciplinary topics as part of our efforts to support technology entrepreneurs. Programs like our Start Smart Class for Entrepreneurs and our Mentor Program are designed specifically to accelerate the success of very early stage companies as early as concept and pre-seed but prior to significant institutional funding.
As you can see, we have a very full and diverse calendar of events coming up and we keep adding more. So please make sure to add yourself to our mailing list to get the latest and greatest updates, including notifications of our application deadlines like for our Mentor Program.
As I mentioned before, we can't do what we do without help. Our annual gold sponsors, Witham, Caldwell IP, Chen PR, Hamilton Brooks Smith Reynolds, Morse and Wolf Greenfield provide key financial support to help us do what we do best. Also for this event, we worked with many wonderful marketing partners to get the word out. Thanks to all the organizations listed here on this slide for this support. A lot of these folks we never worked with before, so I'm really thankful to have gotten to know this group of people as well.
Now just a couple of quick housekeeping items for tonight. Rebecca will be upstairs signing books in the R&D pub after the event. The R&D pub is on the fourth floor. It's a little bit hard to find in this beautifully designed maze of the building, but we will try to get you up there. There is an elevator. If you follow this back wall, there's an elevator you take up to the fourth floor.
Also, just so you know, our friends at WGBH's Forum Network is recording tonight. So please note, if you ask questions during the Q&A, we'll have a mic going around that you will be recorded. And finally, I'm particularly excited about this program tonight because I've heard from many startup leaders in our community on the topic of U.S.-China relations. They're caught in the middle and struggle with everything from manufacturing issues to having investors' support. So I want to thank Mike Grandinetti, a longtime supporter of ours, for bringing this idea for this program to us. It was super interesting. And with that, I'm going to have Mike kick it off.

**Mike Grandinetti** (4:19)
Thank you.
Good evening, everybody. And welcome to MIT. And welcome to the Stata Center and the iconic Frank Gehry Design Building. It's great to see friends and business associates to join us tonight. And just building on what Katja just said, right? And this is a phrase attributed to Confucius, although it's not quite clear that it actually was something that he actually said. And it's actually not a blessing but a curse, one of three curses. May you live in interesting times. And I don't think there is any question that when it comes to China-U.S. relations, given what we're hearing on the news day in and day out, we are indeed living in probably unprecedented times in our lifetimes, certainly for the last 40 years.
So the Chinese Communist Party was born in 1949 They were about to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the creation of the Party.
And from the time of Mao, there has been a focus on the concept of Ganshao.
And in characters, Ganshao looks like this, to surpass or to overtake.
Now, on Friday night at Fenway Park, some of you may have been fortunate enough to see one of the legendary rock and roll bands of all time, The Who, Rock the House. One of the most famous songs by The Who is Won't Get Fooled Again, and one of the great lines is Meet the old boss, he's the same as the new boss. Now, why would I be referencing The Who in a talk on MIT-China relations, or US-China relations? What is remarkable about the leadership of the party since the time of Mao in 1949 is that each and every one of the premiers of the party has been consistently disciplined and relentless in their pursuit of Ganshou. It is unimaginable in American politics, which is a pendulum that goes through a cycle from hard left to hard right with no center. As we switch parties, China has taken an extremely different and far more disciplined approach over the last 70 years.