New Group Will Advise Budding Entrepreneurs

Thanks to the Harvard Entrepreneurial Action Team (HEAT), students hoping to start a company, work at a start-up or develop a new technology may soon have a leg up.

HEAT, a new group, has solicited applications from sophomores and juniors interested in advising others on their business plans.

The group of advisors will offer advice to "help realize and actualize [students' business] ideas," said Alexander F. Rubalcava '02, who co-founded HEAT with Konstantinos Papakonstantinou '01.

The application process--which ended on Sunday--drew more applications than the group's founders expected, though they would not cite a specific figure.

"We were taken aback at how much interest there was," Rubalcava said.

Rubalcava and Papakonstantinou will now select up to seven students who will advise others on their business plans, along with recruited advisers and professional entrepreneurs. The team will be announced before winter break.

HEAT is a part of the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard (TECH). TECH was created in 1999 as a place for students, faculty and alumni to learn from each other, collaborate and innovate, according to TECH's mission statement.

Rubalcava said he hopes the group will allow students with entrepreneurial ideas at any stage, even "the faintest inkling of an idea," to obtain help writing business plans, researching their competition and building their business team. The group will also keep a database of Harvard students who are interested in joining a business and have skills like programming and finance.

Papakonstantinou and Rubalcava founded HEAT because they thought that Harvard needed to encourage entrepreneurship more.

"We will be confidential. We're not going to try to make money off of this. Our ultimate goal is for start-ups to outgrow our services," Rubalcava said. Rubalcava noted that great businesses have been conceived at colleges, including Microsoft, Dell and Yahoo.

"We won't reject ideas. We will tell them the challenges. We're here to help people, not discourage them," said Rubalcava.

Rubalcava expects that students will approach HEAT with many ideas in hot technological fields such as optics and network communication, and in Internet communications.

HEAT will use space in Pierce Hall north of the Science Center.