In the News

The path to launching and growing a startup can be full of twists and turns. For a budding entrepreneur, gaining perspective from those who have already experienced the journey can be incredibly valuable, and highly inspirational. 

At MIT, opportunities to explore and learn about entrepreneurship abound. “Looking at the landscape of entrepreneurship offerings, [MIT has] turned up the volume significantly,” says Ken Zolot, senior lecturer at MIT, citing programs like delta v (an educational accelerator for MIT student entrepreneurs) and The Engine (a nonprofit incubator and accelerator). 

2.S977/2.S979 (Founder's Journey: Launching and Scaling Hardware Startups) explored real-life challenges of startups focused on building and scaling hardware technologies. The class, which was particularly popular among graduate students, invited students to “find and activate their entrepreneurial energy” through the lens of challenges faced by founders and their teams at various stages in development of new hardware-focused companies--ranging from fundraising to supply chain development and much more. 

“There are so many amazing entrepreneurial stories among our alumni. We want to bring those stories to our students and our community and build networks with our incredible alumni founders.” says John Hart SM ’02 PhD ’06, Class of 1922 Professor and MechE Department Head. “Through the Founders Journey class and other new programs, we want to cultivate interest in entrepreneurship among our students and expand opportunities to bring MechE-born technologies to the world.” 

According to a 2015 report on MIT’s global entrepreneurial impact, there are more than 30,000 active companies worldwide founded by MIT alumni which employ some 4.6 million people. Marina Hatsopoulos SM ’93, founding CEO of Z Corporation, an early market leader in 3D printing, said one of the aims of the course was to show students they don’t need to reinvent everything. “So much of this has been done before. I want them to understand that this is a well-trod path.” 

Each week of the class was structured around a key challenge faced during the development and growth of a hardware startup, presented by the instructors and guest speaker.  The speakers were founders of companies in robotics, energy, 3D printing, consumer products, and other frontier technologies, and the students engaged through preparing questions for the speakers and participating in follow-on discussions and reflective exercises throughout the semester. 

Zolot and Hatsopoulous co-led the class and developed it along with Hart. Hart was among the alumni speakers and spoke to the class about his experience as a co-founder of VulcanForms which began through collaboration between Hart and fellow co-founder Martin Feldmann MEng ‘14. 

The other alumni speakers included Mick Mountz (Kiva/Amazon); Jon Hirschtick (Solidworks/Onshape); Max Lobovsky (Formlabs); Elise Strobach (Aeroshield); Greg Mark (Markforged); Seemantini Nadkarni (Coalesenz); Eran Egozy (Harmonix); Renuka Babu (DOTS Technology); Davide Marini (Inkbit); Loewen Cavill (Amira); and Colin Angle (iRobot).

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Colin Angle ’89, SM ’91, Co-Founder of iRobot

Colin Angle ’89, SM ’91, Co-Founder and former CEO of iRobot, now CEO and Co-Founder of Familiar Machines & Magic, identified a passion for building things early on. 

“This idea that you can create something from nothing, that you can have an idea and not just draw it, but build it and make it real is something I've always loved,” he says. “MIT had such a strong, hands-on ethos and, that really, powerfully resonated.”

While living in the Alpha Delta Phi Fraternity house at MIT, Angle watched several companies get their start (by his count, five multimillion-dollar companies were started by his fraternity brothers during his time in the house). Seeing others do it helped to demystify the process. 

He started iRobot in his living room, beginning at first not with a product concept but a grand vision. “We're supposed to have robots. So, if not us, who? And if not now, when? It was a magical day.” 

iRobot may be best known for the Roomba, an autonomous robotic vacuum cleaner, but through the years the company also sent robots to Afghanistan (saving thousands of lives with the Pack Bot tactical mobile robot) and explored the Great Pyramid in Giza live on National Geographic. 

“The joy I have taken from my entrepreneurial journey has been the ability to build bigger things, from building teams, to building a company capable of building something far beyond what I could have ever imagined doing myself… we created inventions that no one thought possible simply because we believed we could.”

Elise Strobach SM ’17, PhD ’20, CEO and Co-Founder of AeroShield

Elise Strobach SM ’17, PhD ’20, is CEO and Co-Founder of AeroShield Materials. The company, cofounded with Kyle Wilke PhD ’19 and Aaron Baskerville-Bridges SM, MBA ’20, develops super-insulating transparent window inserts with technology based on transparent silica aerogels developed by Strobach while she was completing her PhD in Professor Evelyn Wang’s lab.

“I wasn't thinking of myself as an entrepreneur at that time, but looking back, that's definitely where that seed was planted,” says Strobach. As entrepreneurs, she says, “We have the… freedom to find the best problem to solve and to continue to seek the best way to solve that problem.”

Aerogels, which were first invented almost 100 years ago and were first commercialized by NASA to insulate equipment in space, had a hazy blue tint which limited their use in certain applications. The aerogel material created by Strobach and her team is completely see-through, creating a variety of new everyday applications. The company recently achieved another milestone, with their work on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. 

“You don’t have to know everything to start. You just have to know that this is what you want to do, and just get started.”

Maxim Lobovsky SM ’11, CEO and Co-Founder of FormLabs

Maxim Lobovsky SM ’11 was already working on 3D printers when he came to MIT to study at the MIT Media Lab. As he was finishing his master’s degree, he saw an opportunity to build something new.  

Lobovsky, with fellow Media Lab graduates David Cranor SM ‘11 and Natan Linder SM ‘11, founded Formlabs, a developer and manufacturer of 3D printing technology. The trio set out to build a professional level 3D printer, but a significant cost reduction and one that would be easier to use than what was then available on the market. At the time, 3D printers could cost $100,000 or more, Formlabs’ product started around $3,000.

“We definitely built Formlabs in a classic, disruptive innovation path,” Lobovsky says. They achieved the cost reduction through several different ways, including replacing technology developed in the 1980s with modern consumer electronics components like the laser diodes that were developed for Blu ray disc players, and with “just a lot of clever engineering.” 

It was a long grind to raise the first round of funding, he says. The team participated in MIT’s 100K competition and pitched their idea to many potential investors (with limited success, initially). Their big break came in the form of an overheard conversation. 

“As someone who is naturally, introverted, shy engineer…a really important lesson [was] that, sometimes, you can get lucky,” he says. “Sometimes talking loudly at a restaurant is actually a good way to get things going.” 

Lobovsky and one of his cofounders were having dinner with a potential investor at Legal Seafoods in Harvard Square. The pitch to the initial investor didn’t go well but Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Software and an early pioneer in the PC industry overheard the conversation and he ended up leading Formlabs first round of funding. 

Today, Formlabs is the largest supplier of professional stereolithography (SLA) and selective laser sintering (SLS) 3D printers in the world. 

Jon Hirschtick ’83, SM ’83, Co-Founder of SolidWorks and Onshape

Jon Hirschtick ’83, SM ’83, Co-Founder of SolidWorks and Onshape, says the first time he can remember thinking about starting a company was when he was an undergraduate. 

“I had heard about startups, and it sounded like a lot of things that I was drawn to… a sense of being able to realize your vision, express yourself, a sense of excitement, of making money, and even the idea of a chaotic environment,” he says. 

Hirschtick has spent over four decades building computer-aided design (CAD) software, starting as an intern at MIT in 1981 and continuing that work today. “I thought, ‘hey, the world could use this software.’ It'll be a better place with the software that I envisioned.”

He refers to CAD as a meta product design. “We're designing a product that other people use to design products and that’s just really cool to me.” 

“I think startups just fit me,” he says. “The excitement, the idea of trying to solve a lot of problems at the same time. MIT is a place of problem solving... and a startup is a place where there's lots of problems to solve.” He adds that a lot of big companies are doing new things, but “startups are always doing things.”

He says most anything today that is a manufactured product is modeled in CAD first. “If you're interested and excited by product development, then building a CAD system lets you get involved in the world's product development.”

“Nobody knows for sure when they start a company whether it's going to be successful or not. If it were, if there was a way of knowing for sure, then there wouldn't be all these classes in entrepreneurship. They'd just tell you the secret. There's always risk. Visions and hallucinations, they look and feel the same. You only find out which is which once you really try to realize them.”