699 DOLLARS AND THE ONE WHO REJECTS YOU AT HARVARD IS AN AVATAR
Seven Harvard Business School professors got themselves cloned and now the clone is the one grading founders. Seven professors and senior lecturers sat down and got recorded. The company rebuilt their face, their voice, and now the feedback goes through the copies.
They did it for a course called HBS Foundry. Eight weeks, $699 and 760 founders have been through it. And the sessions with real professors are there. One a week. The practice is not. Pitching an investor, a sales call, a board meeting, those happen in front of the clones because the clone listens to the same pitch 50 times, never sleeps, and doesn’t have a calendar to squeeze you into the way that a professor made of flesh does.
Sarah Kessler from the New York Times went and tried it. She pitched a fake company, an Uber for bananas, to the clone of Jeff Bussgang and the clone rejected it. Then she pitched the real Bussgang and he rejected it too. Identical, obviously. But according to her account, the copy held a frozen smile the whole time. And Bussgang says his double is a little creepy and that his students love it.
So you start asking, what’s missing? And that’s a good question. I think that what’s missing is the part you pay Harvard for. At the end of the course, there is a real pitch in front of real investors with $100,000 on the table. And what moves a pitch is not the comment on your business model. It’s the professor picking up the phone afterwards and calling somebody, putting his own name on it.
The clone answers at any hour and never takes offense. It doesn’t know anybody. It has no reputation at stake. And it introduces nobody to nobody. So that’s the first problem. But a second and real problem is when it rejects a good idea and no human being ever saw it.
If the topic interests you, I wrote a book about it, Artificial Decisions, published on Amazon in English.
What do you think?
#ArtificialDecisions #MCC #BusinessSchool #Startups #DigitalClones