MIT launches new venture for world-changing entrepreneurs
news.mit.edu
news.mit.edu
B) It appears that the resources are spread out across Cambridge, Boston, and South Boston. Which of these locations if any is planned to be the central location for the accepted startups?
C) What existing companies and organizations are planning to be part of The Engine and what will their roles be?
Serious question:
Is there any type of "traveling workshop" program that brings high-tier guidance and supplies to various locations for a weekend? I was thinking that an up-front Submission Process, then some evaluations / meetings / feedback, and then a Weekend Workshop using 3D printer(s) and other basic tools that could fit in a box truck and about 5,000 sq ft of space (?) - would be a great way to bring brain capital to under served communities. Then follow up through the same channels used for evaluations / meetings / feedback, and continue mentorship.
I mean, I'm not knocking location anchored programs, they make sense and they can help a community.
>In that time, they will receive financial investments as well as guidance in business planning and access to shared services such as legal, technology licensing, and administrative assistance. Entrepreneurs will be able to take advantage of specialized equipment, services, expertise, and space through an online marketplace developed for The Engine.
Doesn't most of that read like something that doesn't need to be totally anchored in the "Greater Boston" community? Especially for a tech-savvy institution with plenty of bandwidth?
What I am trying to say is that based on the distribution of population in the US, if you really want to find undiscovered talent, you're going to have to meet them half-way.
From what little I can read, The Engine is a separate entity from MIT, which gives them freedom to work with entrepreneurs without the restrictions in faculty contracts.
Some technologies invented at MIT(1) will be licensed by companies(2) that will leverage The Engine(3) to accelerate their development, with the expectation that the development will take place over a longer-than-usual time scale (10-20 years).
Maybe I'm optimistic, but I'm guessing that this is less about the return on the money for MIT, and more about bringing impactful technologies to market that previously have not fit well in the existing funding ecosystem (and inspiring others to do the same).
Yes, MIT does this quite explicitly, which while making some professors unhappy, has helped it avoid some notorious messes seen at other universities when they got greedy, e.g. the University of Pennsylvania going from #1 in computers (ENIAC) to nothing, or CalTech losing Steve Wolfram over his first symbolic math program.
Flip sides include giving professors 1 day a week to work on whatever they want that's not part of their MIT stuff.
Trivia: after decades of being one of the worst in the nation, averaging about one license per year (seriously, and we know of three of them, Symbolics, LMI, and Macsyma to the former), and infamously flubbing both 3D core memory and synthetic/semi-synthetic penicillin licencing, MIT realized they had a problem and supposedly fixed it, the official statement was wonderfully understated, said something about actually licencing the technology instead of focusing on the process of licensing....
"The Engine will demand less equity in startups than is typical, allowing founders to maintain more control over their companies."
MIT ignored YC, and now is competing with YC.
Next will be bargaining with YC :)
Then just partnering with YC...
Really? Some endowment sizes for world-class universities:
MIT: $13 billion
Caltech: $2 billion
Harvard: $36 billion
Stanford: $22 billion
Princeton: $21 billion
Yale: $25 billion
Cambridge: GBP ~6 billion
Oxford: GBP ~4 billion
Caltech is the outlier here for US universities, but it's also an outlier in size; its endowment per student is still about $1 million, which is in the same ballpark as the other US universities on the list. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit... for probably more data than you ever wanted. ;)
I'm having a hard time finding how much money YC has lying around, but I would be rather surprised if it's in the billions USD.
> pure & applied research departments; staff scientists
On a _tiny_ scale compared to a world-class university.
I believe Stanford also has funds for even earlier stage / younger teams, as well as domain specific programs like the one at the tomkat center for sustainable energy.
They don't care if its hard-tech or not. Your company has to be good enough to qualify for their program.
They're working on the absolute lack of space, but I think the "reasonably priced" part is unlikely to get fixed short of backing like this from someone who can provide facilities and funding for at least the first few years without expecting returns.
And yes, I mean a place that you can use chemicals without dealing with permitting for 6+ months. I did actually try to do this, and the Fire Marshall was fantastic to work with, and I looked at both Somerville near Sullivan Square and down near BU. It wasn't hard to find industrial space for cheap enough to manage. I ended up finding a space in Beverly as the closest that was remotely okay, and that only worked because I owned a car (which isn't terribly common in the city, at least among the people I know).
But even if you get as far as pursuing permitting it's enormously expensive to outfit your own lab, and impossible without VC backing. Just having access to the equipment at MIT for free/cheap would be a lifesaver. A lot of it is things like "I need a <foo> for a test." but <foo> is a $600k piece of equipment and you need to use it exactly once.
You can often get user access (for instance at UMass, MIT or Harvard's user facilities) but those are also not all that quick.
Really, Boston just needs something akin to Cyclotron Road.
So not just "hard" in the sense of being physical -- building a LED light bulb isn't "hard tech" to me because the outcomes are comparatively very predictable and you can essentially completely design an end product with no physical prototype if you had to (though QC is another story).
On the other hand, making a new LED die technology with a new semiconductor material is "hard tech", because it may just not work for reasons that are impossible to anticipate. But that would certainly require a wet lab.
Even for sophisticated electronics projects, between datasheets, spice, circuithub, etc I've never felt that a project could just fail because it's literally impossible, but that is absolutely a potential outcome for a project I'd call hard tech.
Same for mechanical design, the projects might be astronomically challenging, but usually whether it's possible can be predicted with extremely high accuracy if you've built a SolidWorks model and understand adequately how to evaluate things like material strength, creep, machining limitations, thermal expansion and so on. But these are all extremely well understood things.
I'd also consider electronics or mechanical projects to be in the same category as software in that it is fairly easy to operate out of your house (or using more commonly available coworking spaces with machine shops, like the Artisan Asylum or Greentown) until you've figured out whether your prototypes will work.
So, yes, I mean wet lab facilities when I think of "hard tech". Stuff that doesn't scale and which no amount of clever thinking can guarantee will ever be possible to accomplish. For my project, for instance, it took a solid year just to prove that what I wanted to do wasn't possible and there was just no way I (or any of the folks who reviewed the idea before I did it) could know for sure without putting in the effort.
This heuristic might be a little limited in edge cases, but this is what I was meaning.
I'll also add that I am thinking of pre-employee companies. If you have employees, you have some kind of funding already. I'm talking about that stage where if it were a startup you'd be creating your MVP to show investors to get seed funding.
That is absolutely impossible for I suspect most "hard tech" companies, where getting to a MVP will require years of effort to prove conclusively the value proposition (i.e. will it work, and what does the real value proposition look like?). That effort could easily be done solo at low cost -- if the equipment and facilities were free or nearly free.
Hopefully that clarifies! I wasn't aware that people considered things like Bolt to be hard tech, honestly. Is this common usage to just call anything that's not literally computer code "hard tech"? Because I think that definitely groups companies together that really don't make any sense to think about as being similar.
Iterating on electronics hardware may take months and cost perhaps tens of thousands of dollars. Iterating on new polymer coatings to encapsulate electronics in the bloodstream takes years. It seems misleading and less useful to pretend that the two are particularly similar.