Dive Summary:
- Venture capitalist Hugo Van Vuuren helps run a $10 million investment fund backed by Harvard graduates and is looking for the next generation of startup talent from his new office on Harvard's campus.
- Van Vuuren's office on campus is part of the "Facebook effect" and stems from a larger effort by the university to help students explore starting businesses even before they graduate.
- Harvard's on-campus relationship with the venture capitalist may be unique, but other schools have similar encouragement for entrepreneurs: Carnegie Mellon and Stanford provide start-up funds to student-run businesses, and MIT awards hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to students with the best business plan.
From the article:
... This co-mixing is further blurring the distinctions between the business world and campus life, prompting some in academia to question whether in their rush to encourage entrepreneurship, schools are losing sight of their educational mission and risk having even more students abandon their studies. “We can’t put a wall around campus and dig a moat, but we could start to educate our students more about this,” said Martin Schmidt, the associate provost at MIT. ...
