Last Friday a couple of Fridays ago I was invited to attend Scott Kirsner’s Entrepreneurs’ Breakfast at ZINK’s Bedford headquarters. To put it in Scott’s own words, “the sole focus was connecting entrepreneurs who have something of a consumer bent” and provide a “schmoozing opportunity for student entrepreneurs”, which personally was what got me into the privileged group. 

It was great to meet and hear the stories of proven entrepreneurs that today guide companies like Pixily, GamersDNA, Tourfilter, Chestnut Hill Sound, to name a few. It was also amazing to meet there other Babsonian friends like Matt Lauzon and Rush Hambleton (whose company, I must say, I really admire and look up to). I think that the sole activity of connecting these entrepreneurs with students (entrepreneurs-to-be) is not only necessary, but extremely beneficial to the startup ecosystem in New England. A week later, Scott would revisit this issue in his Sunday column in the Globe by answering the question: How can we hold on to student talent?. He also wrote a long and thorough post about the role every trade association in New England is playing in engaging student entrepreneurs in local business activities with the purpose of retaining their talent in the region. Some of them scored low and others are doing well and contributing to this important endeavor. From my experience, I know that MITX is aware of the “brain export problem” and is taking concrete actions to further investigate and contribute to solving it.

From this humble blog I just want to thank Scott for being not only a Maven but a true Connector (sorry for all the Gladwell references but I’m just in the middle of reading The Tipping Point). If you ask me today, my first choice would be to graduate and stay in Boston to either start my company or work for a startup.

Now back to the job hunt.

For more than a year I’ve been following the digital footprint of Argentinean entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky (his blog and on Twitter), a spirited and successful businessman/salesman/thinker that (at least for me) represents all the right decisions and philosophies that somebody can implement in order to live life at its fullest.

Here’s the video of the conversation he had with Tim O’Reilly at the Web 2.0 Expo Europe, held in Berlin last week. I hear him mention, yet again, what I’ve been hearing for quite some time about the single most important success factor in any entrepreneurial venture: a good team of people.