Opening Breakfast
Coffee available outside.
- To be announced
From Ideas
to Institutions
The annual student-run entrepreneurship conference at HBS
Organized by the Entrepreneurship Club — A Student Club at Harvard Business School
Be in the room with ideas that become tomorrow's breakthroughs. 40+ speakers. 3 keynotes. 15+ panels. Leaders ranging from seed-stage AI founders to scaled organization CEOs.
EverQuote
Kiva Systems
9 COMMONS
On the program
Jim McKelvey
Co-Founder & Board Director
Noubar Afeyan
Founder & CEO
David Fialkow
Co-Founder & Managing Director
Aaron Cain
President & CEO
Katie Rae
CEO & Managing Partner
Amir Khan
Co-Founder & CEO
Julie Bornstein
Founder & CEO
Vicky Tsai
Founder
Nir Liberboim
Co-CEO & Co-Founder
Tudor Achim
Co-Founder & CEO
Andy Zhong
Founder & CEO
Max Lobovsky
Co-Founder & CEO
Carmen Li
Founder & CEO
Elan Halpern
Co-Founder
Kirsten Couchman
Co-Founder
Leah Marcus
Co-Founder
Yasaman Bakhtiar
Co-Founder
Ben Liu
CEO & Co-Founder
Reza Satchu
Senior Lecturer
Fatima Hussain
Co-Founder
Rafael Quintanilla
Co-Founder & CEO
Pari Natarajan
CEO & Co-Founder
Rob Blaine
Founder
Punn Kam
Co-Founder & CTO
Siva Namasivayam
Chief Executive Officer
Adam Mueller
Founder & CEO
Jangwoo Kim
Founder & CEO
Amy Villeneuve
Former President & COO; Rock EIR, HBS
Kim Blair
Vice President, Business Development
Laura Stoffel
Partner; Head of Boston Corporate Practice
Alexander (Alex) Civetta
Partner
Daniel Freshman
Partner
Faye Pan
VP of Growth
Cameron Stajer
Founder & CEO
Angelo Policicchio
Co-Founder & CEO
Kyle Clark
President & CEO
Anita Modi
Co-Founder & CEO
Maria McClay
Founder & CEO
Vicken Arslanian
Re-Founder & Creative Director
Vidhan Bhaiya
CEO & Co-Founder
- More speakers
coming soon
40+
15+
3
1000+
The day’s program
Sunday, November 22, 2026 · Harvard Business School
Opening breakfast
Opening
Opening Remarks
Welcome attendees, introduce From Ideas to Institutions, and frame the day around the founder journey: Find, Build, Fund, Scale, Endure, and Exit.
Maha Arshad
Entrepreneurship Conference Co-Chair
Shirley Lei
Entrepreneurship Conference Co-Chair
Jon Cabarrus
Entrepreneurship Conference Co-Chair
Cara Li
Entrepreneurship Conference Co-Chair
- Maha Arshad
Opening keynote
Opening Keynote
Use the Square story to explore how founders recognize overlooked problems, persist when incumbents dismiss the opportunity, and turn an unconventional insight into a category-defining company.
- Maha Arshad
FIND: Choosing What Is Worth Building
Building Tough Tech: Hard Problems, Long Horizons
How founders and investors identify difficult technical problems worth years of commitment; evaluate scientific and commercial risk; finance long development cycles; and move from prototype to market.
- HBS Professor, Andy Wu
- Dahlia Bjorklund
Permission to Scale: Building in Regulated Healthcare
How healthcare founders choose problems with meaningful clinical value, then navigate evidence, regulation, reimbursement, trust, and institutional adoption to scale responsibly.
- HBS Professor, Satish K. Tadikonda
- Ishitaa Gupta
Going Viral: The Consumer Marketing Playbook
How consumer founders identify a resonant cultural insight, create products people want to share, convert virality into repeat purchase, and build durable brands beyond the initial moment.
- HBS Professor, Niren Chaudhary
- Henrik Cox
BUILD AND FUND: Building the Company and Choosing the Capital
Fashion Rewired: Technology, Brand Reinvention, and the Future of Shopping
How established and emerging brands combine product, storytelling, technology, and new shopping experiences while reinventing without eroding brand equity.
- HBS Professor, Chip Bergh
- Tan Kameswaran
Bootstrapping and Beyond: Building Consumer Brands from Zero to Scale
How founders choose a capital strategy: bootstrap to preserve control, use revenue to finance growth, or raise outside capital when it can accelerate distribution and scale without distorting the business.
- To be announced
- Jon Cabarrus
Founding During Business School: From Class Project to Company
How student founders find co-founders, test an idea while in school, use the campus ecosystem, balance coursework with company-building, and decide when to pursue the venture full time.
- HBS Professor, DJ DiDonna
- Jinit Sanghvi
Lunch break
Lunch & Networking
Networking: 1:00–2:00 PM.
- Maha Arshad & Jon Cabarrus
BUILD TO ENDURE: From Breakthrough Science to Global Institution
From Breakthrough Science to Global Institution
How Flagship originates companies around scientific platforms; how leaders distinguish promising science from an enduring business; and what Moderna’s journey reveals about financing long horizons, scaling through inflection points, and building for global impact.
- HBS Professor, Reza Satchu
- Maha Arshad
SCALE: Building Reach, Trust, and Infrastructure
Beyond the Brand: Building Consumer Trust and Loyalty
How consumer founders earn trust, build community, translate attention into loyalty, and scale without losing product quality or brand authenticity.
- To be announced
- Shirley Lei
Reimagining Entertainment: AI, Creativity, and New Worlds
How AI is changing games, 3D assets, characters, and entertainment experiences; where creative advantage will come from; and how companies can scale while preserving human taste and authorship.
- Andy Zhong (FunPlus)
- Angela Li
Powering AI: Chips, Compute, and Infrastructure
The infrastructure bottlenecks shaping AI progress—chips, memory, compute efficiency, data systems, and deployment economics—and where founders can build durable value.
- Thomas Baker (Executive Fellow)
- Izzy Jihyun Lee
ENDURE AND EXIT: Building the Institution and Realizing Value
Small Teams, Supercharged: Using Agentic AI to 10x Productivity
How agentic AI changes team design, workflows, operating leverage, and the economics of company-building; where smaller teams can outperform; and which management systems they need.
- Rob Blaine (TNT)
- Angela Li
Don’t Sign That (Yet): Legal Lessons Founders Learn the Hard Way
A practical roadmap covering formation, founder equity and vesting, governance, intellectual property, hiring, financing documents, cross-border issues, and costly mistakes to avoid.
- HBS Professor, Guhan Subramanian (HBS/HLS)
- Robert Li
Landing Big Exits: The Road to Acquisition
How founders build strategically valuable companies, recognize acquisition readiness, manage buyer interest and negotiations, navigate diligence and integration, and protect long-term value through an exit.
- HBS Professor, Paul Gompers
CLOSING KEYNOTE: Building to Endure
Closing Keynote
Lessons on backing exceptional founders, building durable organizations, and maintaining conviction through major transitions.
- To be announced
- Robert Li