The fraternity house at MIT once housed at least five future multimillion-dollar companies. Colin Angle, who would go on to co-found iRobot, watched it happen around him — and it changed everything.

"If not us, who? And if not now, when?" Angle recalled thinking when he started iRobot in his living room. That question became the seed for a company that would send robots to Afghanistan, explore the Great Pyramid on live television, and eventually put a Roomba in millions of homes.

Now, MIT is bringing that same spirit directly to students through a new class called "Founder's Journey." First held in spring 2025, the course invites students to discover their own entrepreneurial energy by learning from the real stories of alumni who built hardware companies from scratch.

"So much of this has been done before," said Marina Hatsopoulos SM '93, founding CEO of Z Corp., an early leader in 3D printing, who co-led the class. "I want them to understand that this is a well-trod path."

Each week, students hear from a different founder facing a real challenge — fundraising, building supply chains, scaling production. Guest speakers have included names like Colin Angle, Greg Mark (founder of Markforged), Max Lobovsky (founder of Formlabs), and Seemantini Nadkarni (founder of Coalesenz), representing robotics, 3D printing, energy, and other frontier fields.

Professor John Hart, who teaches the class and himself co-founded the company VulcanForms, said the goal is to connect students with living proof that building a company is possible. "There are so many amazing entrepreneurial stories among our alumni," he said. "We want to bring those stories to our students and build networks."

The numbers behind that ambition are staggering. According to a 2015 report, more than 30,000 active companies worldwide were founded by MIT alumni, employing roughly 4.6 million people — equivalent to the population of a small country.

For Elise Strobach SM '17, PhD '20, CEO of AeroShield Materials, which makes super-insulating window inserts, the entrepreneurial spark wasn't obvious at first. "I wasn't thinking of myself as an entrepreneur," she said. "But looking back, that's definitely where that seed was planted."

The class aims to help students spot that seed in themselves — and give them the confidence to plant it.

"Through the Founder's Journey class and other new programs, we want to cultivate interest in entrepreneurship among our students and expand opportunities to bring MechE-born technologies to the world," Hart said.

In other words: the path has been walked before. Now MIT wants to make sure its next generation knows how to take the first step.