What Founders Can Learn About Excellence From MIT President Sally Kornbluth

Sally Kornbluth is president of MIT and one of the best crisis leaders I've come across. Within a year of starting the job, she got summoned – not invited – to testify before Congress alongside the presidents of Harvard and UPenn. You know how that went. The others didn’t make it. Sally did, and she came out stronger.

We spend a lot of time on sustaining meritocracy, which I think is one of the hardest things for any scaling CEO to pull off. Sally has a line I can't shake: if you take a lick of the lollipop of mediocrity, you suck forever. That's how MIT has operated for 150+ years. We get into how you actually hold the bar as you scale, why most founders drop it without realizing it, and what to do once you've dropped it.

We also get into the crisis playbook – staying calm on the outside when you're screaming inside, why explaining is losing, and why having a board that's truly behind you is the most underrated variable in whether you survive. The board backing her was the pivotal moment, full stop.

Other things we cover: what managing PhD students taught her about leading without being overbearing, the 5:1 praise ratio and why it doesn't cost you anything, how she told the federal government "no thanks" on their higher ed compact, and what AI actually means for education, including why writing is still thinking.