Do More Faster India, 2nd Edition

Chapter 77Practice Your Passion

Eran Egozy

Eran Egozy, Professor of the Practice in Music Technology at MIT, is an entrepreneur, musician, and technologist. He is the cofounder and chief scientist of Harmonix Music Systems and developed Guitar Hero. He has been a Techstars mentor since 2009 and was a founding investor in Techstars Boston.

I have two passions: music and building things. When I look back at what has happened in my life, it all comes back to those two things. At age six, my parents got me Legos. At 11, I started playing the clarinet. At 15, I wrote a machine language program for my Apple IIe to play back digital music with six-note polyphony. I painstakingly entered each note from a score of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in machine code. While this was the first time I combined my two passions, I didn’t realize I was doing it, although in retrospect it all makes sense.

After undergraduate and graduate school at MIT I started Harmonix with my friend Alex Rigopulos. Unlike some entrepreneurs, we didn’t start the company to be entrepreneurs. We started the company because we had a mission: to let anyone in the world experience the joy of making music. Starting a company happened to be the only way we knew to fulfill that mission. Alex was the business guy. I was the tech guy. I got to build software that makes music, just like when I was 15.

Passion is often an overused word that loses its meaning, especially when attached to marketing statements such as “Your potential. ...