I run Prod, a startup accelerator for college students. This year, my goal is to be critical in 30 student founders creating amazing companies—companies so amazing that quitting school/their job is a no-brainer.
In the summer of 2022, I spent 1,000 hours building (it's a long story). After the summer, I got back to Harvard in the fall itching to build a company. I had 1,000 hours of engineering under my belt, unwavering belief in my idea, and great co-founders.
I worked on my company for a bit and did all the "right things": I raised some money; hired some people; I went through the feedback-iteration cycle a few times; and I even got a few hundred users. Despite this, though, I failed. My company failed to get off the ground and we ended up shutting down the company. I came away with one key learning: the university ecosystem fails at helping great builders create exceptional companies.
My mission was to solve that problem. How do you systematically convert great builders into great founders? This is certainly a hard problem, one which I have dedicated myself to solving.
When I say I want to "create founders", I'm not implying that I want to be the driving force in a founder creating their company. Quite the opposite. The founder is the only factor in the success of their company. When I say I want to "create" a founder, I mean that I want to leverage my position to combine framing, mentorship, and community to help a founder overcome the several challenges they will face while building their company. I consider it a success case if a founder is able to quite their job/school and go full-time on their company.
I have made steady progress in converting great builders into great founders; however, I am a long way away from achieving this goal. As such, I am going to cheat. I'm going to give myself a much easier problem. Rather than creating a scalable system that can create hundreds, thousands, or even millions of great founders, I want to create just 30. Less would be sufficient if each of the founders created companies that lasted for years. As of June 1st, 2023, I want to have been critical in helping 30 founders go full time on their company by May 2024.
Running a startup accelerator happens to be an effective way of going about my goal. As such, I run Prod this year. I could call myself the "Director" of Prod, but I don't care for titles. My title is not an important part of this story.
Prod is a non-profit startup accelerator founded in 2021 by friends of mine Ben, Arul, Rob, and Richard. Prod was started with one goal: to make startups a viable career option. After one year, Prod had helped 40 Harvard and MIT students (working on dozen or so companies) raise $25M at around a $240M cohort valuation.1
I was tasked by the founders of Prod to "run Prod". Since then, as of June 2023, we've helped several founders in everything from getting out their first waitlist to raising their pre-seed. We've played a critical role in guiding companies as they get their first thousands of users and raise their pre-seed rounds. This is good. However, as of June 16th, I have a long way to go to creating 30 founders.
1Measuring the success of a company by fundraising numbers is like measuring the performance of a car by how much gas it uses. Better than saying that Prod helped x teams raise $y, I can say that Prod has created a community of like-minded builders and instilled world-class framing and mentorship into college students. Through this, we've been not just helpful, but critical for dozens of college students in creating their companies.