Startups: a hidden lifestyle at MIT

From the time I arrived at MIT in '08 to the time I left in '11, I witnessed a pretty huge shift in the interests of MIT students towards startups. Many people who probably would have gone into finance or defense diverted themselves to the startup world. The 100K competition at MIT and things like StartLabs have gotten big. Dropbox being homegrown was a big thing.

For me, it's been awesome to see the best engineers doing their own companies instead of joining defense contractors or GS.

I often think back to why I came to MIT, especially when the semester gets tough. I remember I came to the admitted students weekend and toured one of the dorms. The walls were covered with murals and the floors with junk --- motors, robot parts, circuit boards. People had built their own lofts; someone had rigged their door to open automatically when it recognized them. Someone had hooked up a camera and a projector so that you could "draw" on one of the nearby buildings with a laser pointer.

So of course, I came to MIT. I remember discovering pg's essays around sophomore year and starting to consider starting my own company, but my transformation really began when I set foot here at MIT, where creative and curious people build mind-blowing things every day.

At first it's intimidating. These people all seem so smart! Who am I to build a roller coaster, paint a 20 foot mural, build a loft, hack a PS3, build a crazy device and start a company out of it? You hear about these things in the abstract and you're intimidated. But then you get home and see people building a roller coaster in your courtyard and you realize: Who am I not to do awesome things? Life is too short, damn it. It seems obvious to the entrepreneurially minded, but it's hard to describe the impact it had on me. I could've learned the same course material in many other places. But I cannot overstate how powerfully this cultural immersion changed my life.

Burnout does happen, but you don't necessarily hear about it.

Sounds like there is an incredibly strong hacker culture there.

Is working on personal projects outside class considered the norm?

It certainly wasn't when I was at uni, not with CS students anyway. After studying most CS students spent their time playing video games, watching movies, smoking pot or doing other activities.

Making a door with face detection or similar would be very unusual.

Burnout and subsequent energy management are only the superficial components, I think. I've found that the curriculum really cuts to the core of how people think as they work. To me, the major lesson I've learned throughout my 3.5 years at MIT so far is how to deal with futility.

I feel like people (I'm probably thinking mostly of my parents and friends outside) often refer to "trying until you succeed". But sometimes you just won't. Often you won't. You're not smart enough, don't have the resources, those things that keep you up at night. If you tie everything to big success and ground-breaking progress, you'll burnout because there's nothing for you to chew on. You feel like you're spinning your wheels.

So the lesson I've only just started to really take in is that to avoid burnout you do things for the sake of doing them and celebrate the smallest, stupidest things you can. That's of course from someone who has yet to even graduate, let alone really start accomplishing anything of significant worth. So take that shit with a grain of salt.