The Best B-Schools For Great Jobs

10 Harvard Start-Ups You Should Know

Harvard MBAs Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer Fleiss founded fashion mail-order service Rent the Runway

When you think of entrepreneurship, Harvard is probably not the first school that comes to mind. As evidenced by Chamath Palihapitiya’s passive aggressive pot shot at a recent Harvard dinner, Harvard still has a big branding job ahead.

And it’s a head scratcher as to why. Harvard MBAs founded over a third of the companies listed in Poets&Quants’ Top 100 MBA Startups, with Harvard founding more of these companies than Stanford and three times more than MIT. Harvard’s entrepreneurship department boasts the second largest faculty in the business school.  Heck, Harvard has been teaching entrepreneurship since the 1930s. And Harvard MBAs comprise over a quarter of the professionals in the 200 largest American venture capital firms.

Still, Harvard start-ups are getting more attention these days. In the Top 100 MBA Startups, firms founded or co-founded by Harvard MBAs raised over $830 million dollars in funding. Here is a sample of the type of startups coming out of Harvard:

• Rent the Runway: “Jennifer Hyman and Jenny Fleiss met on their first day at Harvard Business School in 2008, and went on to found Rent the Runway together in 2009. The site allows users to borrow designer wear for several days and provides the item in two sizes to ensure fit.”

• Ovuline: “Ovuline is a women’s reproductive health startup in
  

  A closet full of old clothes inspired James Reinhart to shake up the $30 billion market in second-hand apparel

  Boston that has helped more than 50,000 women get pregnant to date, thanks to big data and machine learning. The app connects with fitness trackers such as Fitbit and Withings and helps women to track fertility while they’re trying to conceive and track health after they conceive for a healthy pregnancy.”

• Blue Apron: “Blue Apron wants to cater towards busy professionals who want home-cooked, healthy meals and want to cook it themselves–but not spend too long in the grocery store. The startup sends out meal kits each week which include already-measured ingredients for specific recipes, which require the user to only have standard cookware on hand, and meals take around 40 minutes to prepare.”

• ThredUp: “Launched in 2009, ThredUp makes consignment easy by allowing users to simply ship a bag of used clothing to the company, which in turn takes responsibility for resale. The seller will get reimbursed based on the quality of goods, and ThredUp is clear about what brands it accepts (kids and women’s) and thus curates its storefront.”

For additional information on other burgeoning Harvard startups, click on the link below. For information on funding for particular ventures, click here.

Source: Mashable