MIT Course Connects Students with Alumni Startup Founders

A new MIT class is giving future engineers something textbooks can't: real stories from people who turned dorm room dreams into thriving companies.

The Founder's Journey course launched in spring 2025, inviting mechanical engineering students to learn directly from alumni who built successful hardware startups. Guest speakers included founders of companies like iRobot, Formlabs, and Onshape, sharing honest lessons about everything from raising money to managing supply chains.

"So much of this has been done before," says Marina Hatsopoulos, founding CEO of Z Corp. and course co-leader. "I want them to understand that this is a well-trod path."

Colin Angle, who co-founded iRobot in his living room after graduating in 1989, told students about starting with just a vision. His company became famous for the Roomba vacuum cleaner, but also built robots that saved thousands of lives in Afghanistan and explored Egypt's Great Pyramid live on National Geographic.

"This idea that you can create something from nothing, that you can have an idea and not just draw it, but build it and make it real, is something I've always loved," Angle shared. Living in his MIT fraternity house, he watched five multimillion-dollar companies get started by his brothers, which helped him realize entrepreneurship was possible.

Elise Strobach took a different path. She developed super-insulating transparent window technology during her PhD research in 2020, never initially seeing herself as an entrepreneur. Today she's CEO of AeroShield Materials, turning her lab work into products that could help buildings save energy.

The Ripple Effect

MIT alumni have founded more than 30,000 active companies worldwide, employing 4.6 million people. The new course helps today's students see themselves in those success stories, building networks that could spark the next generation of world-changing companies.

Each week focuses on a specific challenge that founders face, from securing first customers to scaling production. Students prepare questions and discuss real solutions that worked (and didn't work) for companies across robotics, energy, 3D printing, and consumer products.

Department head John Hart, himself a co-founder of VulcanForms, says the goal goes beyond teaching business basics. "We want to cultivate interest in entrepreneurship among our students and expand opportunities to bring MechE-born technologies to the world."

The class demystifies the startup journey by showing students that failure, pivots, and uncertainty are normal parts of building something new. Seeing successful founders describe their messy beginnings helps students realize they don't need perfect plans to start.

These stories prove that world-changing companies often begin with students who simply believed they could build something bigger than themselves.