📄

One-pager

The Summer Founders Program

Tenets:

  1. Vision: Build the YC of Harvard in the age of AGI. Bring together 30+ top student founders to launch transformative startups in a hacker house over the summer of AI.
  2. Values: Cool people working on cool ideas. Humane, humanity-helping, or humanitarian projects
  3. Mission: Provide inclusive housing, funding, mentorship and community to help ambitious students, researchers, dropouts, and founders ship impactful projects over the summer.

Overview:

  • Host founders across 5 core residencies in the Cambridge area focusing on neuroscience, human augmentation, evolving institutions, projects for peace, and student startups
  • Create holding companies for equity sharing fundraising and a non-profit arm for hosting
  • Leverage Harvard's $4B investment and local student ecosystem as tailwinds

Operational Plan:

May

  1. Select: initial cohort of 30+ founders from 500+ apps
  2. Fundraise: from grants and funds. Create holding companies for equity sharing and a non-profit
  3. Finalize: housing, insurance, legal, and key partnerships for residencies

June

  1. Initiation: move-in, goal-setting, and team formation support
  2. Weekly programming: speakers, workshops, socials
  3. Recruit: mentors, advisors, partners, investors, contractors, employees for each program

July

  1. Organize joint AMAs, retreats across programs to cross-pollinate
  2. Ship: Support key milestone achievements (MVPs, user growth, funding)

August

  1. Demo Day: a cross-program launch party with investors and press. Help them fundraise
  2. Reflect: collect off-boarding, collect testimonials and case studies. Synthesize learnings.

Target Outcomes:

  • 4+ themed residencies housing 30+ student founders over summer
  • 15+ viable ventures developed and advanced across key milestones
  • $3M+ raised total in pre-seed funding for participating startups
  • 100K+ customer lives positively impacted through startup and non-profit projects

In the past house, we had 4 student researchers dropout and raise over $1m at $20m+ valuations. In this house, we will create man-made wonders beyond comprehension. C House and Cambridge will be the epicenter of a new wave of startup innovation. It’s time to forward the future. Learn more at harvard.co

📺Video