Karen Mills - Obama Administration, Harvard Business School - a podcast by HBS Entrepreneurship Club
from 2019-12-23T02:29
Today's guest is Karen Mills, a professor at the TEM (The Entrepreneurial Manager) unit at Harvard Business School. Karen was the administrator of the US Small Business Administration from 2009 to 2013, serving as a member of President Obama’s Cabinet. She is also a venture capitalist and private equity partner, and the author of Fintech, Small Business, & The American Dream.
Topics:
- How Karen drew inspiration from her entrepreneurial family
- The impact of regional innovation clusters, and how she got her job at the SBA
- The importance of small business lending to society
- Karen's advice for people who want to work in the public sector
- How automation will affect the future of work, and which industries it will show up in
- Does fintech have an innovator's dilemma? Who might the eventual winners in that space be?
- A lesson Karen had to learn the hard way
Quotes:
"A meeting is not an outcome. Once you say okay, this is an outcome we want to get to, then we can say: how do we reverse-engineer success?"
"Small businesses play a critical role in the economy and in the social fabric of our lives."
"When your friend gets a great job, I say to everyone, think: good for them, irrelevant to me."
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