The student‑run nonprofit — whispered about by Harvard and MIT undergrads, and likened to a “secret society” by some investors — has quietly become one of the most influential forces in university entrepreneurship.
“Nataly said she’d rather not talk to reporters,” read the text message I received last month, from someone who helped pass an interview request to Nataly Delcid, one of the Harvard undergraduates who helps run the nonprofit. She and others ignored my emails.
“It is a very underground community,” said Bill Aulet, who runs the MIT entrepreneurship center.
“It’s almost like a secret society,” said Youssef Rezkalla, a Boston venture capitalist. “You don’t find Prod; Prod finds you.”
Prod formed in 2021 to help support undergrads at MIT, Harvard and Stanford who want to create startups.
“We help outlier students build outlier companies,” according to its exceptionally sparse website.
Its track record is pretty impressive: just three of the companies that have been through the program, Mercor, Etched and Cursor, are estimated to be worth $45 billion, based on recent investment rounds.
And Prod is just one of the student-created entrepreneurship initiatives in Boston that have popped up in the last five years. It’s an interesting change for the local ecosystem, where the expectation has long been that university-sponsored programs, venture capital firms or accelerators — all run by adults with good intentions — would help cultivate promising new companies.
Now, students are at the helm, and they’re often being flown around the world, wined and dined, and written no-questions-asked checks by established venture capital firms hoping to get the opportunity to invest more if a student’s idea takes off.
Bottom-up, student-created initiatives may be better at attracting real entrepreneurs, rather than “want-repreneurs,” said Mateo Martez, a Cambridge entrepreneur and author of the recent book, “Beyond Networking.” The student-spawned programs may be less bureaucratic, Martez said, “and they tend to attract more of these really capable students.”
Here are a few of the most significant things students have built in the last five years:
HARVARD ST. COMMONS
Lucas Chu started what he calls a “founder house” in 2023 to give student entrepreneurs a place to live together. While its full name is Harvard St. Commons, it’s better known as C House. There’s no affiliation to Harvard University; the house sits on Harvard Street near campus and many of its residents are students taking time off from their studies to create startups.
Many of the residents follow the 996 schedule, working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, said Shefali Sastry, who helps coordinate things at C House.
“If you’re a founder, you’re working crazy hours,” she said. “You’re getting dinner (with other residents), but talking about work.”
The average age, she estimated, is 24 or 25. Monthly rent ranges from $1,000 for a shared room to $1,900 for a single, but bargains can be had.
“We have some closets that people live in,” Sastry said.
She’s a student at Harvard Business School, but she’s currently on leave.
Some of the costs of running the house are defrayed by venture capital firms that sponsor dinners there or other events, so they can get a look at the companies being built by C House residents. But many of those are West Coast venture capital firms, and Sastry said that many of the people who’ve moved out of C House end up taking their startups to New York or San Francisco.
That’s true of Chu, the founder, who moved out to San Francisco last June after graduating from Harvard.
GENESIS FUND
With an office on Newbury Street, the Genesis Fund recently raised $8 million to identify and invest in companies created by “high-potential students,” Rezkalla, who graduated from Boston University last year, said. One of the firm’s founders is still at Babson College.
There is “a huge gap in the Boston ecosystem,” Rezkalla said. “All the best companies are never funded by any Boston-based venture funds. We’ve had Kalshi, Etched, Delve, Cursor, Mercor, Cognition” — startups that were all either founded here or have founders who were educated in Massachusetts.
Building relationships with the next generation of great company founders involves getting pizza in Harvard Square with them, dropping by campus hackathon events or taking them for group outings to places like Puttshack to play indoor minigolf, Rezkalla said.
Rezkalla added that some of the $8 million Genesis has to invest was provided by more established venture capital firms in Boston and Silicon Valley, to serve as their “eyes and ears” on Boston campuses.
But of the seven startups Genesis has invested in so far, Rezkalla said five have already left town, and he expects the other two to follow suit.
“I would love for them to stay here, but at the end of the day, I want what’s best for the company, and most of the time it’s to move to the Valley or New York,” where early customers and follow-on funding can be easier to come by than in Boston, he said.
SUND.AI CLUB
Last Sunday, Sund.ai Club (yes, pronounced like the day of the week) celebrated its second anniversary. The student-organized club hosts events every Sunday that challenge participants to assemble a working AI app in a single day.
Among the things participants have built: a real-time translation system that can create captions of what you’re saying in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and eight other languages, and an app that can scan your power bill and recommend ways to save money.
TNT ACCELERATOR
TNT just kicked off the third cycle of its accelerator program earlier this month; it’s run by Rob Blaine, a student at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Student entrepreneurs, predominantly from MIT and Harvard, receive credits to use services such as Anthropic, Google and Amazon Web Services as they build, including legal advice.
Among TNT’s alumni companies are Subconscious, focused on AI agents, and Solid, which uses AI to create new web-based apps for internal company use. The former is still based in Massachusetts; the latter has decamped for San Francisco.
“Hopefully, we’re going to show them that you can stay and build here in Boston,” said Blaine, who also brings in local entrepreneurs to speak to the group.
He is working to raise a $15 million investment fund so he can keep TNT going after he graduates this spring and supply capital to the participating companies.
PROD
And Prod? Everything I could find out was from people who know about it, not the people who run it. Many of the original founders and former Prod presidents are now living in San Francisco, running companies like Etched, a new chip design especially for running AI “transformer models” like those behind ChatGPT, or Conway, automation for tasks such as detecting fraud or moderating spammy comments posted to websites.
“One undergrad told me the programming is really intense,” said Blaine. “They push you hard. Somebody was trying to build parking lot software, so they made him find the biggest parking lot company, track down the CEO and get dinner with him.”
Rezkalla said, “People think of Prod as this holy grail that produces multi-billion-dollar companies. But it’s just a group of really ambitious founders” that have good ties to investors — mainly from the West Coast.
According to Prod’s website, “Our year-long program works with the smartest, most committed student builders to create exceptional companies.” The group’s current application form says they will consider students from any university — and as young as high schoolers.
THE LURE OF SF
One of the unfortunate dynamics with most of these initiatives is that the students involved tend to gravitate elsewhere — whether they graduate or drop out. Chu described San Francisco as “where AGI is happening,” referring to artificial general intelligence. AI startups Mercor and Cursor, two of the hottest products of Prod, are both based there.
Martez, the entrepreneur, said that increased “inter-generational linking” could help to change the current dynamic — meaning, more exchanges between successful entrepreneurs and investors in Boston and students. A recent graduate of the University of Alabama, he is one of the longest-tenured residents of C House.
Maybe instead of state agencies or trade associations creating new initiatives, or trying to lure back programs that left town, what Boston really needs to do is simply better support the things students are already doing on campuses here.
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