Getting back to our roots
When I tell people that I’m part of MIT StartLabs, people ask me what that is. “Star Labs? Like Tony Stark?*” I hear. When I tell them it’s the main entrepreneurship club at MIT, I always hear, “do you guys start your own companies? Do you sponsor biology labs, or chemistry labs?” I’ve always laughed it off — StartLabs’ main role on campus previously has been to host large events while connecting students to startups, resources on campus, and hubs in the Boston ecosystem, and inspire students.
I won’t lie and say those conversations didn’t bother me. Since arriving on campus, I’ve looked for a welcoming, friendly group of people to bounce ideas off of, to learn about entrepreneurship from, and to potentially found companies with. That’s why I joined StartLabs — in the past, StartLabs has hosted events known as “E-Lounges” or “Slack Nights”, allowing students to come together and hack on personal projects, toss ideas around, and form relationships with other entrepreneurs on campus. However, these events went by the wayside as StartLabs evolved.
Surveying the MIT entrepreneurship landscape, we at StartLabs have realized that students lack a space where they can work on side projects with no strings attached. MIT’s numerous hackathons (and those in Boston in general) are great opportunities to experiment, but too many projects with great potential fall by the wayside after the fact. On the flip side, MIT offers hundreds of project-based classes and certain funding resources like Sandbox and ProjX, which are great for structured projects in a specific context, but students need more chances to more easily explore and pivot from one idea to the next. MIT has over twenty other sources of funding, but they don’t actively provide a literal space for students to work or are further down the entrepreneurship pipeline than the early-stage projects we want to support. We hope to continue the grand tradition of entrepreneurship and ideation at MIT by sponsoring a “perpetual hackathon.”
That’s why we’re super excited to announce that we’ll be powering Incube! Incube was formed around the idea that great collaboration only comes when passionate people work together. While Incube will no longer run as an independent student group, we hope that, by bringing it under the StartLabs umbrella, we’ll finally become the go-to Lab for MIT undergrads to come and Start their entrepreneurial journeys.
We’re super excited to announce that our first meeting is happening Saturday, March 3rd, and will continue every Saturday from 6PM to 9PM, in the Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship (E40–160). So, if you’re an MIT student, undergraduate or graduate, fill out our interest form here and join our awesome community!
The StartLabs Team
*Author’s note: I’ve since been informed that Star Labs is not at all related to Tony Stark (being in the DC universe, not Marvel) but I swear I’ve had this exact conversation at least three times. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
