How Alumni Entrepreneurs Are Trying to Redefine Harvard’s Reputation in the Startup World

Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs thinks Harvard has a marketing problem, and they are trying to fix it.

At the inaugural Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs Startup World Cup regionals on Sep. 12, Harvard graduates from 12 finalist startups made pitches for the chance to be sent to the championship round in San Francisco.

Startup World Cup holds regional competitions everywhere from Seattle to Kathmandu to Johannesburg, but this was the first year a round of the contest was held exclusively for companies with Harvard founders. This year’s 12 companies, which aim to tackle problems ranging from women’s health to food insecurity, were selected from a pool of around 125 applicants from 20 countries.

HAE president Regina H. Ryan said that the purpose of the Harvard-only round was to put more of a spotlight on alumni-founded companies.

“The reason we did this is that not everybody needs to go through an accelerator to get to the next level,” Ryan said. “There are thousands and thousands of alumni-led companies that need the spotlight.”

Harvard College ranks third globally in the number of startup founders it produces, according to PitchBook, while Harvard’s graduate schools are ranked second, and Harvard Business School is ranked first among MBA programs. Harvard graduates have gone on to start highly influential companies including Facebook, AirBnB, OpenAI, and Stripe.

But some alumni believe that compared to peer institutions like MIT and Stanford, Harvard doesn’t yet have the entrepreneurial reputation it deserves.

“If you were to ask, what is the school with the most entrepreneurs coming out of it? You’d think Stanford, you’d think MIT, you’d think Harvard dropouts,” Jeffrey Fidelman, CEO of Fidelman & Company and a judge for the Startup World Cup competition, said.

“Stanford usually gets all the praise for having the most amount of tech startups, or the most amount of startups that come out of it,” he said. “Harvard is, if not above and beyond Stanford, it’s at least equal to in terms of the amount of entrepreneurship that comes out.”

‘Just a Marketing Issue’

In 2021, after observing retail worker shortages in European countries like Germany, Harvard Business School graduate James Sutherland founded Autonomo, a company that builds staff-free stores using AI to track inventory.

“We started our own store in Hamburg in Germany. First year, built the technology. Second year, opened the store, and then third year, we had customers coming to us trying to buy the technology,” Sutherland said.

At HAE’s Demo Day in 2022, where founders pitched their startups to a panel of judges, Autonomo emerged victorious and was launched directly to the final round in San Francisco. While they did not win in San Francisco that year, Sutherland is shooting for the prize this year after winning Harvard’s regional competition.

“In a month’s time, I’m going to win,” he said.

Harvard Medical School graduate Pablo Lapuerta, founder of 4M Therapeutics, a biotech startup developing an alternative, lithium-free treatment for bipolar disorder, said he worked with the technology transfer offices at MIT and Mass General Hospital to found his company. The offices deal with patenting and other administrative tasks when faculty want to turn a product into a business, in exchange for partial ownership.

“If you look at an example like MIT, it does have university offices that support MIT startups,” Lapuerta said, citing the MIT Startup Exchange and the Industrial Liaison Program, which connect faculty, staff, and alumni with industry executives. “I think that’s a model that other universities could benefit from.”

Lapuerta said that strong relationships with the university’s technology transfer offices are essential in translating research into impactful products, especially for biotechnology startups like his.

Harvard’s Office of Technology Development sponsored 155 U.S. patents and 14 startups from the commercialization of Harvard research in 2024, while MIT’s technology licensing office saw 323 US patents and 24 startups in the same year.

Ryan said that MIT also does better giving a platform to their affiliated entrepreneurs.

“I talk to the folks at MIT all the time, and they do a great job in putting the spotlight on their alumni, their entrepreneurs and innovators,” Ryan said. “The truth of the matter is, for us, it’s just a marketing issue.”

Alexandra C. Stephens, the director for communications at the Harvard Innovation Labs, said that more can always be done.

“We’re always looking for new ways to tell venture stories and spotlight founders, and I think there can never be enough stories about them,” she said.

‘Meet You Where You’re At’

Not everyone is convinced that marketing is all that important to Harvard’s place as a bastion of entrepreneurship among peer universities.

“When we’re talking about Harvard versus Stanford, or Harvard versus MIT, we’re talking about Alcaraz versus Sinner,” said Jeffrey J. Bussgang ’91, a Harvard Business School lecturer and a former entrepreneur turned venture capitalist.

Comparing the academic giants is akin to comparing “two competitors or three competitors who are just head and shoulders above everybody else,” Bussgang said.

Harvard offers a wide range of institutional support for entrepreneurs, with its primary resource being the school’s Innovation Labs, which houses everything from accelerator programs to classes and below-market rate access to lab benches and scientific equipment.

“We support all students from all 13 Harvard schools anywhere in their innovation journey,” said Stephens.

Skye Lam ’27, founder of MabLab, a startup reinventing drug testing strips, said that the i-lab’s resources were extremely helpful during the early stages of his venture, adding that their many programs “really meet you where you’re at.”

“I think they’re at the correct stage where they help entrepreneurs when they’re first starting out, but there comes a point where you should be able to do it by yourself,” Lam said.

MabLab won the President’s Innovation Challenge in 2024 and was named a Top 5 Startup for the prestigious Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024.

Lam said that although there are many ways for alumni to engage with institutional resources, the i-labs’ main focus is to support current students.

“When you’re a student, you get the most out of those opportunities,” Lam said.

‘A Melting Pot of Ideas’

To strengthen support for entrepreneurs after graduation, Harvard alumni have come together to create their own initiatives supporting innovative ventures among their ranks — the HAE’s Startup World Cup being just one example.

In the early days of Autonomo’s journey, Sutherland joined the HAE’s 12 week Accelerator program. He said the recognition and lessons he learned were invaluable.

“It raised our profile significantly — globally — with the Harvard brand that allowed us to raise the many millions that we have done,” Sutherland said. “It was a game changer.”

The accelerator was led by William M. “Bill” Reichert ’76, a partner at Pegasus Tech Ventures — a venture capital firm that has invested in companies including SpaceX, OpenAI, and AirBnB — and the Chief Evangelist for the Startup World Cup.

Several other alumni vehicles exist to provide mentorship or funding to start-ups. The Graduate Syndicate, co-founded by Bussgang, is a community fund that invests in pre-seed and seed stage ventures started by Harvard graduates. The latest fund raised a total of $8 million.

Bussgang said he started TGS with a group of colleagues after the retirement of HBS professor Bill Solomon, to pay forward the support he himself received from the Harvard ecosystem.

“He was a mentor of mine and invested in my two startups when I was a young graduate from HBS and Harvard. And so a group of us decided that we wanted to fill, humbly and imperfectly, Bill’s shoes,” Bussgang said.

Bussgang added that the “magic” of entrepreneurship for Harvard graduates is the network of its students, graduates and faculty.

Fidelman agreed.

“You have such an incredible intellectual capital at Harvard,” he said. “You have a melting pot of ideas that not only go through ideation, but you have the people and the tools at your disposal to actually build and test whatever, whatever hypothesis that you have,” Fidelman said.

Ryan added that Harvard’s strength in entrepreneurship is amplified by its unique focus on theory and liberal arts.

“We’re more than the ivy on the building,” Ryan said. “We’re more than academics. We are people solving problems in all different ways. And that’s the richness. It’s kind of a liberal arts education in entrepreneurship. We have it all.”

—Staff writer Stephanie Dragoi can be reached at stephanie.dragoi@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Thamini Vijeyasingam can be reached at thamini.vijeyasingam@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @vijeyasingam.