Paul Cheek is a serial tech entrepreneur and software engineer. He is a Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the MIT Sloan School of Management, an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, and the Co-Founder and CTO of Oceanworks.
Paul was MIT’s first Hacker in Residence and has since taught, mentored, and advised thousands of entrepreneurs around the world. Each year Paul teaches hundreds of undergraduate, graduate, and PhD students in the "New Enterprises" course and has also taught the Advanced Entrepreneurship course, "Building an Entrepreneurial Venture: AdvancedTools and Techniques.” From working closely with so many students, Paul identified a gap in the entrepreneurship curriculum, designed experimental entrepreneurship education content, and now leads a new advanced course he developed to help student entrepreneurs build their businesses called “Venture Creation Tactics”. Paul also reinvented the Supply Chain Management Public Speaking class to help supply chain engineering graduate students communicate confidently and concisely about their research and innovations.
Outside of classes, Paul spends time coaching and mentoring entrepreneurs in a variety ofprograms including the MIT delta startup accelerator, MIT fuse accelerator, Sandbox Innovation Fund, as well as other workshops and hackathons. One of which was the MITCOVID-19 Challenge, a series of global hackathons that Paul co-founded, which served over 8,500 participants around the world. To scale the impact that he and the Trust Center have within the five schools across the Institute, Paul built the digital entrepreneurship platform, Orbit, which serves over 15,000 users annually.
Paul is also the Co-Founder and CTO of Oceanworks, a for-profit company with a mission to end plastic pollution. At Oceanworks, he has developed a platform and trace ability system to provide corporations with a trusted source for a variety of quality recycled ocean plastic materials at competitive prices. In the past two years, Oceanworks has diverted thousands of tonnes of plastic from the ocean, served hundreds of corporate customers in over 30 countries, and enabled the launch of a variety of high-profile sustainable products such as Clorox ocean plastic trash bags, Sperry ocean plastic boat shoes, and YKK ocean plastic zippers.
Prior to Oceanworks, Paul co-founded Work Today, a venture-backed digital staffing and recruiting company. Work Today helped day laborers find jobs every morning to achieve financial predictability and stability. As CTO, Paul designed and built the company's technology and payments platform. He scaled the business from 0 to 50,000 workers across 16 major markets throughout the United States.
At 21, Paul envisioned a new way for global payment card networks to interact. He then designed and engineered a technology that aggregates payment transactions across financial systems and was issued a patent for the invention. Paul has also built technologies for and consulted with LogMeIn, BlackRock, Prudential, Mazda, and more.
You can learn more about Paul on his website, or follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.
— Back