MIT retools to aid students with startups
Is it possible MIT is feeling inadequate — insecure even?
That seems hard to imagine for the school that helped invent the transistor radio, radar, Technicolor, modern robotics, and essentially the field of biotechnology, and whose famous graduates include a Treasury secretary, Israeli prime minister, an astronaut who walked on the moon, and dozens of Nobel Prize winners.
But the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is facing increasing competition from around the corner and across the country.
Its neighbor, Harvard University, is building an innovation campus and business park in Allston to rival MIT’s backyard in Kendall Square. And in Silicon Valley, Stanford University has emerged as the center of gravity for this exciting new era, in which seemingly every other bright young student is starting a new company, and more than a few of them are becoming overnight millionaires.
Start6 inspires student engineers to become entrepreneurs
In Start6, a new entrepreneurship program for MIT engineering students offered during IAP, participants have received advice from such guest speakers as Paul English, cofounder of Kayak; Mike Evans ’99, MEng ’00, and COO and cofounder of GrubHub; Marina Hatsopoulos ’92, serial entrepreneur, former CEO and director of Z Corporation, and angel investor; and Max Krohn ’08, cofounder of OkCupid. And that was just on the first day.
The three-week workshop, which began Jan. 13, also features visits from Drew Houston ’05, CEO and cofounder of Dropbox; Google vice president Jeremy Wertheimer ’89, former CEO of ITA Software; Nanxi Liu, a 23-year-old who has already founded two successful startups; Rodney Brooks, founder, chairman, and CTO of Rethink Robotics and Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus) at MIT; Ray Stata ’57, cofounder of Analog Devices; and Robert Langer, prolific inventor and entrepreneur and the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT. In addition, venture capitalists Peter Levine of Andreessen Horowitz and Jamie Goldstein ’89 of North Bridge Venture Partners walked the Start6 students through the various phases of a startup.