Startups: A Hidden Lifestyle at MIT

“Sleep, friends, p-sets—choose two,” is a common mantra at the Institute. But what happens when you add your own startup into the mix?

The spirit of entrepreneurship at MIT is alive and well; a report published in 2009 by Professor Edward Roberts ['57, SM '58, SM '60, PhD '62], founder and chair of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, estimated that if the almost 26,000 companies founded by MIT alumni that still existed in 2006 were a country, it would have the 11th highest GDP in the world. MIT founded companies like Dropbox, a Web-based file hosting service founded in 2007 by Andrew Houston ’05 and Arash Ferdowsi ’08, and Quizlet, an online education tool that helps students study using flashcards and other learning tools, created by Andrew N. Sutherland ’12 in 2005, have almost become household names. With Facebook’s multibillion-dollar initial public offering announcement in February, no one can deny that the allure of startups for MIT students is higher than ever.

But what is it like to found your own startup and work on it as a student? Why are startups so appealing? What resources are there for people interested in entrepreneurship? The startup environment at MIT can often be fragmented, sometimes hidden from view, but at their core, all startups seek to solve problems. It all begins with a single idea.

Chris Varenhorst ’09, MEng ’11, a Course 6-3 alum who now works at Dropbox, founded Lingt, a language-learning software startup his senior year. Lingt was backed by Y Combinator (YC), a seed-stage startup funding firm, in 2009 and sold to Dictionary.com a year later. A light version of the product, Lingt Classroom, which allows students to easily record themselves speaking and send the files to their teachers, still exists and is used in the Chinese department at MIT.

“First semester senior year, we were like, ‘Let’s do a startup!’ We decided to focus on foreign language education, since it was relevant to us at the time, and we thought we could use technology to make it better. My co-founder Justin Cannon ’08 and I were taking Chinese at the time, and we thought there was very little speaking practice. In class, people just kind of droned over each other, and we wanted to address that. We spent IAP working on it and ended up making Lingt.”

Varenhorst says he found the experience simultaneously exhilarating and challenging. “I remember our servers crashing when TechCrunch ran an article about us. I was driving through the Hoover Dam with my brother and watching the mail server crash, trying to fix it—it was kinda crazy.”

 Read the full article. This Slice of MIT blog post is an excerpt from a longer article first published March 23, 2012; Vol. 132, No. 14. Copyright The Tech 1881-2012.