Michael Autery

MIT, Sloan School of Management

“Father, husband, mission-driven defense entrepreneur blending leadership, storytelling, and engineering to build life-saving autonomous systems.”

Hometown: White House, TN

Fun fact about yourself: I’ve been to Antarctica twice.

Undergraduate School and Degree:

United States Naval Academy – Bachelor of Science, Electrical Engineering

Texas A&M University – Master of Science, Ocean Engineering

Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? United States Navy – Civil Engineer Corps officer, 2010 – 2025

Where did you intern during the summer of 2025? No internship. I was enrolled in classes all summer.

Where will you be working after graduation? Gander Robotics – I am the CEO & Founder

Community Work and Leadership Roles in Business School:

Dean’s Fellowship Award

Volunteer – Technology & National Security Conference 2026

Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? Winning the MIT $100k Pitch Competition for my Autonomous Rescue Swimmer idea – 1st Prize AND the Audience Choice Award (we were the first team to ever win both.) I conceived of the business idea just three months earlier. Winning proved to me that entrepreneurship can be humanitarian. I don’t have to be a business monster and chase the easy money. I can make the world a better place AND make a decent living doing it.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? I can’t decide between them, so it’s a tie:

1) As a naval officer I led a joint US–New Zealand–Australian team of 76 troops for six weeks of round-the-clock logistics operations in Antarctica, coordinating workflows in subzero temperatures and achieving the highest cargo throughput in Operation Deep Freeze history.

2) As a naval officer, I taught electrical engineering at the US Naval Academy. Teaching EE honed my skills as an engineer, but more importantly, developing and mentoring the next generation of naval officers right before I left active duty was incredibly meaningful to me. I know that I will have a lasting impact on the lives and careers of many fine young men and women. That makes me incredibly proud.

Why did you choose this business school? MIT Sloan also has a reputation for unity and camaraderie. “Sloanies helping Sloanies” was a term I heard a lot when exploring different MBA programs, and I have absolutely found that to be the case. It’s not cut-throat here. It’s not our culture. Classmates genuinely want to see each other succeed. It truly emphasizes impact. The MIT Sloan mission is to develop principled, innovative leaders who improve the world. That’s the differentiator for me. You come here to improve the world.

What was your favorite course as an MBA? Entrepreneurship 101. This was where I met Bill Aulet, my favorite professor. For our first homework assignment, I came up with Autonomous Rescue Swimmer. Through the semester, I took the idea through the 24 steps of entrepreneurship that Bill teaches, and at the end of the term, I won the 100K Pitch competition. A month later, I closed a $1.1 million pre-seed round: four months from ideation to venture capital-backed company all because of this class.

Looking back over your MBA experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently and why? I know this isn’t the answer you’re looking for, but I would change absolutely nothing. This could not have gone any better. I came here to make a better life for myself and my family. I didn’t know what that meant, but things turned out better than I could have ever dreamed.

What was the most impactful case study you had in business school and what was the biggest lesson you learned from it?

The most impactful case study I had was not a traditional classroom case. but an MIT Sloan Action Learning lab. I worked with HavocAI through the Enterprise Management Lab. We didn’t read about their problems. Instead, we jumped right in and got our hands dirty at a real defense startup. It showed me that in defense tech, speed, and adaptability matter more than perfection. Successful teams iterate quickly with real users and evolve the product alongside the mission.

What did you love most about your business school’s town? I am a huge history buff, and I love being surrounded by the founding era monuments and buildings in Cambridge and Boston.

What business leader do you admire most? The business leader I admire most is Palmer Luckey, the founder of Anduril. What stands out to me is how he’s redefined how defense companies operate, bringing a startup mindset into a space traditionally dominated by slow-moving incumbents. He’s shown that speed, product focus, and tight feedback loops with operators can outperform scale. That’s a model I really believe in, especially as I build in the defense and autonomy space.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? The MIT Entrepreneurship JetPack is a generative AI tool trained on Bill Aulet’s 24-step Disciplined Entrepreneurship framework that inputs prompts into large language models. I used JetPack in two different entrepreneurship courses: Venture Creation Tactics and Entrepreneurship 101. The insight I gained is that I can iterate through ideas so much faster with AI. I can find out if the market is too small or too competitive very quickly and move on before wasting lots of time discovering it the hard way.

Which MBA classmate do you most admire? The MBA classmate I most admire is Cam Herd. Cam is an active-duty Marine who will return to operational duty when he graduates. I admire how he goes out of his way to help people. It’s as though he made it his mission while he’s here at Sloan to make himself as useful as possible to as many Sloanies as possible. He is building an incredible network here of people who will never forget his kindness and selflessness. It’s even more impressive when you realize he can’t even utilize that network immediately after graduating because he is still serving on active duty. Most of us will be leveraging our Sloan network to find jobs or build ventures, but he has to be patient and maintain those relationships for the long term, so that he can leverage them years later when he leaves active-duty.

What are the top two items on your professional bucket list?

1) I want to see the day that my product, Autonomous Rescue Swimmer, saves a human life.

2) I want to rise to the rank of Admiral in the Navy Reserves.

What made Michael such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2026?

“It is my great, great honor to nominate Michael Autery for this year’s best and brightest MBAs. Michael is an exceptional operational leader who is developing the Autonomous Rescue Swimmer (ARS) — an unmanned submersible that uses sonar and AI-enabled object detection to locate people in the water and keep them alive until help arrives.

The idea for Gander Robotics started in an MIT Sloan classroom when Michael identified an urgent and underserved problem – the maritime industry’s 72% fatality rate in man-overboard emergencies – and applied his deep expertise as an ocean engineer and U.S. Navy veteran to solve it. In under a year, he went from idea to a seven-figure venture-backed company, with whole-hearted support from the MIT entrepreneurship ecosystem. Not only were Michael and his cofounder Lael Ayala the unanimous winners of the MIT 100k entrepreneurship competition, they also received the Audience Choice award. Michael is on a mission to save lives, and is a collaborative, principled, and mission-driven leader. He used his MBA experience to build the skills, team and network needed so that he could bet on himself to create a great job for himself and dozens of others that will literally save lives in a vibrant entrepreneurial environment. Michael represents the best of MIT and MIT Sloan School of Management.”

Bill Aulet
Ethernet Inventors Professor of the Practice at MIT Sloan School Management
Managing Director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship

Leslie Owens
Associate Director, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship

DON’T MISS: THE 100 BEST & BRIGHTEST MBAS: CLASS OF 2026

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