A Business Plan in Search of a Product

When Remington Hotchkis left a startup founders workshop at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the end of January, he had a company name, a team and a rock-solid, AI-mediated business plan. What he didn’t have was a product.

Photo illustration: Oscar Bolton Green; photo: Getty Images

Hotchkis was one of 76 aspiring founders attending MIT’s Entrepreneurship Development program, where he’d been voted most likely to succeed by his peers. The main attractions of the program are a pair of “JetPacks,” software programs that help entrepreneurs produce business plans by combing the internet for reams of market data. The JetPacks complement a 24-step approach to starting a high-growth ...