#hackharvard

Students of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham in Coimbatore have won the All-Track Grand Prize at HackHarvard 2024, an internationally renowned collegiate hackathon organised by students of Harvard University in the United States. Competing with teams from prestigious institutions, including Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and the University of Toronto, the Amrita team clinched the ‘Overall Best Hack’ award,…

Check out the Harvard Crimson's coverage of the Public Safety Innovation Hackathon!

“The work that you do in this area can save lives. If you can put something together that moves us from Microsoft Word to the cloud…then we can reduce some of the inefficiencies that are driving the crime rate up and help us save lives.”

Two weeks ago Yipit co-founder Vin Vacanti came back to his alma mater here at Harvard College to share his experiences as an undergraduate studying Computer Science (he took CS50 way before it was cool), lessons in founding a startup, and above all: calling on students to be entrepreneurs and "build stuff for Harvard".  Seeing just a few days later an article in the New York Times highlighting Vin's success in NYC as an entrepreneur, the opportunity seemed ripe to review tech entrepreneurship at Harvard, then and now.

It might be easy to forget, but students pursuing startups here at Harvard didn't have the same support and enthusiasm for studying computer science and building tech businesses that we have today. With the debut of "The Social Network" last year and the continued growth of CS50: Introduction to Computer Science (now one of Harvard's largest classes) offering students enough coding skills to set them on the road to being the much-coveted technical co-founder, being a CS major and founding your own startup has never been sexier.

In contrast, the hacker community at Harvard when Yipit's Vacanti, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and other Harvard entrepreneurs were working privately in their dorms was vastly different. Sure, there was HCS,  a great group of system administrators that have long been the technical hub of the school, but many of the new and diverse groups and resources from Harvard that have sprung up to foster student collaboration and applications of computer science in founding startups simply didn't exist as a recently as last year. They are recent innovations, created to meet shifting demand and interest in the new Wild Wild West of technology ventures.

Back in Zuck's day:

-There was no HackHarvard incubator program to help students turn their CS50 final projects and websites into full-fledged startups, many of which are creating solutions and new tools for the Harvard community (such as Zach Hamed's AidAide and Seth Riddley’s HarvardLunch). 

-There was no Harvard College Venture Partners, a student group dedicated to supporting college students who are pursuing ventures in technology. With the hope of realizing President Drew Faust's "One Harvard" of cross-campus collaboration, HCVP has pioneered bridging the gap between Harvard College and Harvard Business School in partnership with StartupTribe, as well as a key role in co-founding HackHarvard.

-There was no StartupTribe, an amazing community of HBS students passionate about startups, led by the visionary Andrew Rosenthal. They have already created institutions such as the MVP Fund to back entrepreneurs launching their own startups (like Cynthia Samanian's Tenth & Taylor) among a host of other events and programs centered around pursuing opportunities in technology. In many ways, StartupTribe has been the juggernaut in rallying students, Harvard administration, and the greater Boston community in support of university entrepreneurship.

-There was no Harvard Innovation Lab to act as a hub for students across all the schools of Harvard, providing space, mentorship from VCs and serial entrepreneurs, and all the fixin's to launch the next game-changing technologies and continue Harvard's rich history of innovation. If you're looking for a coach to help get you inspired to launch something cool, look no further than iLab Director Gordon Jones.

-There was no i3 Innovation Challenge awarding funding to top business plan ideas and pitches, many of which go on to compete in state-wide competitions like MassChallenge. Great startups like HerCampus have had their start with this competition.

-There were no HackNights bringing students out from their dorm rooms of isolation to code and create collaboratively in the same space, sharing pizza and watching their friends demo cool hacks and projects.

-There was no class on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, a new Gen-Ed course taught at the Harvard Business school where students use the case-study method to learn about tech businesses (including Twitter & MLB.com) and venture capital firms (Khosla Ventures & Highland Capital Partners among them).

The students who were launching startups when they were supposed to be studying for finals laid the foundation for this spirit of innovation we have seen sweep across campus. We owe them a debt of gratitude, the innovators who forged ahead into unchartered and unglamorous territory to create tech startups when studying Computer Science was synonymous with being a geek.

So with all these amazing new resources and communities fostering college entrepreneurship (the likes of which even last year's Harvard graduates have never seen), what's next? In a year of many firsts (the first year HBS students like Cynthia are taking CS50, the first time that Zuck has visited campus since leaving to grow Facebook in Silicon Valley, and the first university-wide Harvard Tech Meetup) what do we do as students to continue creating new technologies and social innovations that impact the world?

We keep building.