Ken Zolot

Senior Lecturer, MIT and Senior Fellow, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation

Ken Zolot is a Senior Lecturer at MIT and is the founder of the Innovation Teams program at MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation. Ken currently teaches “The Founders Journey” for engineering undergraduates who aspire to be first-time company founders. Ken also co-teaches the X-PrizeLab class at MIT. Ken’s teaching and mentoring have guided numerous MIT-spawned companies, including A123 Systems, Arch Therapeutics, Brontes3D, HubSpot, Myomo, QD Vision, Robopsy, Saaf Water, Semprus Biosciences (fka SteriCoat), Vertica Systems, and Visible Measures.

In addition to his work at MIT, Ken has held full-time founding roles in several startups, most recently Heartland Robotics, which Ken co-founded in 2008 with Rod Brooks, former CTO of iRobot. In 2000, Ken joined Goldman Sachs’ CTO Vern Brownell in creating Egenera, Inc. Ken’s previous startup, Geer Zolot Associates, was a spinoff from MIT Project Athena. Geer Zolot developed network security software for electronic trading and commerce, and designed the Internet security architecture for much of the financial services industry. After the sale of Geer Zolot Associates, Ken was retained by Goldman Sachs to guide its technology strategy.

Ken serves on the global Board of the MIT Enterprise Forum, and serves as a Faculty Fellow at the Levin Institute of New York city. In 2009, Ken was named a Senior Fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman foundation to advise the Foundation on its new initiative “Kauffman Labs for Enterprise Creation”. Ken has also held positions at MIT Project Athena, and at Digital Equipment Corporation’s Innovative Technology Research Center in Cambridge. Ken serves as an advisor to the MIT Portugal Program, and launched Portugal’s BioEngineering Innovation program. Ken served as a Research Scientist at the MIT Media Lab, and was instrumental in the creation of the Center for the Future of Banking. He also served as a director of Yoga301, which focused on advancing the art, science, and practice of the timeless discipline of yoga.

Ken holds a Master of Science degree from MIT in Management of Technology. His undergraduate work was at Syracuse University, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy.