ETHAN MOLLICK

Before Mollick was Wharton's AI professor, he was a startup founder in New York. He co-founded eMeta Corporation as VP of Business Development, where he also met his wife Lilach. That experience - being inside an early internet company when the internet still felt like it might change everything - gave him something that pure academics often lack: a felt sense of what it's like when technology outruns your mental models.

When the startup phase ended, he went back to school - not for the credential, but because he had questions that his experience couldn't answer. He got an MBA at MIT Sloan, then stayed for a PhD. His dissertation was called "Essays on Individuals and Organizations." He spent six years at MIT asking why some organizations produce consistent innovation and why most don't.

He arrived at Wharton in 2010 to teach entrepreneurship. For over a decade, he built simulations through Wharton Interactive - educational games that put 20,000+ students inside the decisions of startup founders. The simulations were his theory of learning: you understand entrepreneurship by doing it, not by reading case studies about it. That same philosophy would later define how he thinks about AI. You understand it by using it, not by reading about it.

When ChatGPT appeared in late 2022, Mollick was one of the first academics to take it seriously as a genuine object of study rather than a parlor trick. He started writing. The newsletter was free. The experiments were documented in public. The audience grew by word of mouth among people who were confused by AI hype and wanted someone who was actually measuring things.

His newsletter process is worth noting: he writes every post himself, completely, before asking AI for any feedback. He shows you the original and the AI-edited version side by side, or he describes where AI spotted a flaw in his argument. He's not outsourcing his thinking. He's demonstrating what collaboration actually looks like when done honestly.