MIT Launches Free AI Platform to Teach Entrepreneurship to Middle and High Schoolers

The Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship has launched Dear Dreamer, a free, AI-powered platform designed to teach entrepreneurship to middle and high school students. The platform adapts the Disciplined Entrepreneurship framework, a 24-step approach to starting a venture created by Bill Aulet, managing director of the Trust Center and a professor of the practice at MIT Sloan School of Management. The project was made possible through a gift from the Frank and Eileen Foundation.

Aulet's framework is already taught at hundreds of colleges worldwide and detailed in his book Disciplined Entrepreneurship, which has sold more than half a million copies. At MIT, students who apply the framework through the delta v startup accelerator program have a 61 percent survival or acquisition rate and have collectively raised more than 3 billion dollars. Until now, however, the approach had not been adapted for younger learners outside higher education.

According to Aulet, the Trust Center's mission has expanded beyond training MIT students to creating entrepreneurs more broadly. He points to the response from an earlier edX course built on the same framework, which drew hundreds of thousands of learners and generated feedback from people who said the course was the first time they saw themselves as entrepreneurs or felt a path toward economic security. Dear Dreamer extends that reach to a younger age group that typically receives little formal guidance on entrepreneurship in school.

Aulet frames entrepreneurship as more than company formation. He describes it as a mindset and skillset for operating amid change and uncertainty, arguing that the habits of iterating on an idea and building something from scratch are valuable even for students who never start a business or who eventually work at larger organizations.

The idea for Dear Dreamer grew out of a conversation between Aulet and Audrey McLoghlin, founder and CEO of apparel brand Frank and Eileen and president of the Frank and Eileen Foundation. Aulet showed her Jetpack, an MIT generative AI tool trained on the Disciplined Entrepreneurship framework that guides MIT students through the entrepreneurial process. McLoghlin, who said she wished she had access to such a tool when she started out and who has a daughter interested in entrepreneurship, proposed making the Trust Center's work accessible to young people.

The resulting platform keeps the same step-by-step curriculum used at MIT but repackages it for a younger audience. The Trust Center worked directly with younger students, including those as young as 10, to figure out how to make the material digestible. The platform includes short educational videos, interactive exercises, personalized feedback on a user's own business idea, and case studies and examples tailored to each step of the framework. Its interface is modeled on familiar social platforms like Instagram or YouTube, with videos featuring people students can relate to, rather than the format used for MIT MBA or PhD audiences.

The announcement does not specify metrics for measuring the platform's impact beyond the 2030 target of reaching 50,000 young entrepreneurs, nor does it detail how usage or outcomes will be tracked over time. It also does not describe technical specifics of the AI components beyond their role in adapting the curriculum and providing personalized feedback. As the platform rolls out, it will be worth watching whether it reaches the kind of completion rates and venture outcomes seen in MIT's own accelerator program, and whether schools incorporate it into formal curricula rather than leaving it as a self-directed tool.