Today we are thrilled to announce that, in a special collaboration with Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), NEA is launching The Experiment Fund (www.xfund.com), a unique seed-stage investment vehicle based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the Harvard campus.
NEA and Harvard share in many respects the same mission: to attract, develop, and cultivate profoundly talented people who want to make a difference in the world. Harvard’s record speaks for itself: eight U.S. presidents, 68 Nobel prizes, and even the creation of the venture capital industry itself (when Harvard professor Georges Doriot founded American Research and Development in 1946). Arguably the most transformative technology company of the last generation arose from Harvard’s campus when Bill Gates left campus in 1974 to found Microsoft. And a generation later, the most transformative technology company of this generation arose from Harvard’s campus when Mark Zuckerberg dropped out to found Facebook in 2004.
Back in 1974, you can understand why Bill Gates would have had to leave campus—there was no support whatsoever for, and no concept of what it would mean to support, a sophomore who wanted to start a company that would create a Gargantuan new industry. So Gates sought his help, his capital, and his destiny off-campus. Flash forward 30 years, and it’s difficult to see why any entrepreneurial-minded student would feel compelled to leave a university that brims with talent, network, and capital. And yet many do: Mark Zuckerberg is perhaps the most prominent recent example, and although he recently said that if he were starting over he’d have remained in Boston, the fact is that Silicon Valley, New York, Asia, and Europe now all exert powerful pulls on Harvard’s best entrepreneurs.
We think that this is an opportunity to support and nurture some of the world’s most talented people, right in the place where their ideas and their teams are born. NEA has a long history of backing amazing Harvard-founded teams: Bob Metcalfe (M.S. ‘70, Ph.D. ’73, and inventor of Ethernet) at 3Com in 1980; Dan Yates (A.B. ’99) and Alex Laskey (A.B. ’99) at Opower in 2008; and Alexis Maybank (A.B. ’97, MBA ’04) and Alexandra Wilkis (A.B. ’99, MBA ’04) at Gilt Groupe in 2011. In the last nine months alone, we have funded the Harvard teams who created Rock Health, Punch, and Tivli.
So more than two years ago, in partnership with an extraordinary group of people at Harvard’s new Engineering School, we began to discuss the formation of a Fund that would be centered at SEAS and provide a unique resource for students with a burning desire to start companies. Led by Dean Cherry Murray, Professor David Edwards, Executive Dean Fawwaz Habbal, and entrepreneur Hugo Van Vuuren, we have worked tirelessly to put in place what we believe is the first such Fund in Harvard’s 375-year history.
The Experiment Fund will be centered at Harvard and extend to Silicon Valley, New York, Washington, D.C., China, and India with NEA. We will provide seed capital and company-building expertise to serious teams of entrepreneurs who want to take ideas that matter, translate them into tangible outcomes, and build the companies that will sustain their impact across time. We pledge to work harder than anyone else to ensure that no other resource matches what the Experiment Fund can do for our teams. In order to build the best full-service organization for them, in the coming months we will be inviting other investors to join the Fund whom we believe can make a material difference to our entrepreneurs.
Importantly, to avoid any hint of conflict and to ensure that investment decisions and company-building advice are fully in the interests of companies, the Fund is a separate legal entity from the University and will support teams with no Harvard affiliation. The University has no say in the Fund’s investment decisions and has no economic interest in the Fund. In short, Harvard sticks to what it’s good at—educating and providing unparalleled resources to its students—and we stick to what we’re good at: making bets on promising projects and people.
Our vision for the Experiment Fund is conveyed in the name we have chosen for it: the range of projects we will consider is much broader than a typical incubator, encompassing consumer Internet, enterprise software, alternative energy, and healthcare companies. Our outlook is longer-term, our aspirations are higher, and we will actively shy away from projects whose impact is incremental. We want to back this campus’s world-changers.
If you want to be one of those world-changers, please come visit us at www.xfund.com, or in person at Harvard: we are in Maxwell Dworkin (the building given to Harvard by Bill Gates!), at 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
