Local Unicorns Encourage Dropping Out of School
Graphic by James Foss
Harvard is filled with unicorns—not the traditional kind (bearing sparkly horns and colorful manes); instead, these individuals have founded privately held start-up companies with valuations of over $1 billion.
Harvard ranks third among top U.S. universities for such peculiarities, boasting 76 start-up founders between 2017 and 2025. This number trails only Massachusetts Institute of Technology (89) and Stanford (113). Even coming in third (in more than one respect as of late…), the University’s founder culture is still strong, as past precedent shows. Let’s take a walk down Harvard memory lane: Mark Zuckerberg dropped out after founding Facebook from his Harvard dorm room in 2004. Jennifer Hyman ’02, a Harvard Business School alumna, co-founded Rent the Runway, a clothing rental service that makes high fashion more accessible, in 2009. Harvard Professor Derrick Rossi helped start Moderna in 2010, the company that ultimately pioneered the COVID-19 vaccine and is currently worth $78.76 billion.
On Harvard’s campus today, startups are still rapidly developing. It is becoming common for students to take a leave of absence to join emerging companies or to start their own. Organizations like Harvard Innovation Labs and Harvard’s Institute of Politics’ Governance Lab help accelerate these businesses. In addition, Harvard’s vast alum network—full of mentors and potential funding sources—helps aspiring entrepreneurs scale their ideas.
Ely Hahami – SpaceXAI
Prior Harvard Class of 2027 student, Ely Hahami, began a leave of absence this fall after three years pursuing a double concentration in Mathematics and Computer Science. Hahami entered the entrepreneurial world while interviewing for a position at xAI (Elon Musk’s startup) before xAI was acquired by SpaceX, making it a subsidiary of the larger company working on X’s Grok model.
Hahami explained he wasn’t initially planning on taking leave when xAI reached out to him in January 2026. “I actually thought the job would be for post-grad,” he said. However, after he secured the position, they told Hahami they needed him to start immediately—highlighting the fast-paced AI landscape and fierce competition with Anthropic. Then he had to choose: stay at Harvard, try to keep up with school while working, or drop out entirely.
After reflecting on his experience and dreams, Hahami came to a decision. He started conducting machine learning research with Professor Haim Sompolinsky in the fall of his first year. “I would, you know, keep on bringing up sort of insights that I learned from him or sort of describe some of the papers we wrote and published,” Hahami recalled from his interview. “That was actually crucial (to getting the position) more than any other coursework.”
After watching the Grok 3 livestream in his dorm in Pforzheimer House, he realized the leaps artificial intelligence was making. “They have become extremely strong coders, can do basically all of my homework, even like my graduate-level coursework, and to sort of help build that and shape that would be very cool,” Hahami added about the growth of AI.
“And then xAI specifically, I appreciate because they have a sort of culture of, like, 1st thinking from 1st principles. This is sort of like a very, like, Elon Musk kind of philosophy, but, you know, thinking from 1st principles and sort of having the AI be truth-seeking,” he said.
Speaking on his previous summer internship at Google, he said, “… I think it’s just like a difference in culture between, sort of, we (xAI) want AI that will sort of pursue the truth and be aligned to the user,” something he finds more prevalent at xAI than other frontier labs.
Hahami’s excited about his new role, though he does miss his friends, the social aspects of college, and the learning he enjoyed in class. His friends and family were very supportive of him taking time off, and he feels that Harvard recognizes and embraces the importance of supporting students in doing that.
“I could see a future where I go back; I could see one where I don’t.”
Elson Bankoff – PowerTown
Unlike Hahami, prior Class of 2027 student Elson Bankoff does not intend to return to Harvard after building PowerTown. This company makes small energy storage systems, with co-founder Elio Torres ’26. “Even if this failed, I’m not gonna go back because I would just do the next thing,” she said. Bankoff fits the “quintessential founder” stereotype, dropping out her sophomore year to pursue PowerTown.
Bankoff decided to drop out after needing to hire a PhD student to expand the organization. The company had to raise money to pay his salary, and Bankoff felt that going back to school was no longer much of an option once investors were involved.
Leaving school was naturally a period of great uncertainty. “I had to switch my living situation 4 times—leave all my shit in the basement of the Lampoon in duffel bags, and half say bye to people, not really know what the vibe was. [I’d] live alone in an apartment in the dead of winter, work out of it and bike to campus sometimes,” she recalled. “It was just weird.”
“But I’m happy now; everything’s great now.”
Bankoff enjoys the startup environment at Harvard, comparing her experience to the alleged culture at Stanford where these ventures are seen as less of a risk—a perception she disagrees with. “Starting a company is a creative force, and it’s a disciplined activity, and you owe things to people,” she explained. “You owe things to investors, you owe things to yourself, you owe things to whatever kind of mission you say you’re pursuing, you owe things to your team, [because] you’re getting people to completely shake up their lives and move across the country for your vision.”
Bankoff is confident in the direction PowerTown is moving in and excited to continue building power infrastructure in the United States.
Hadi Abdul – Boov Card & Ouranos
Hadi Abdul ’30 is currently developing two startups: Boov Card and Ouranos, founded in July and August 2026, respectively. Boov Card is a restricted credit card for unhoused individuals—an alternative to stipend checks that can be used toward certain expenses, such as disaster relief and basic needs. Abdul recently got a pilot test contract for $50,000 of disaster relief funding through the Boov Card in North Carolina.
Ouranos is a space tech startup looking to predict and prevent spaceship crashes. Abdul has always been fascinated by physics and mathematics and took six months off high school to work at Capture Technologies in Scotland, where he worked on passive cooling systems used to cool data centers across Glasgow. Through conversations with his co-founder, Fayadh Kader, a freshman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Abdul identified a gap in the space tech industry.
“A lot of the vehicles, or just spacecraft, that are in orbit… don’t have any system to predict before they go down,” Abdul explained. “All the technology is currently reactive and not predictive.” With Ouranos, Abdul aims to close this gap.
“We’d be like an insurance company that helps assure whatever spacecraft is in the air that we can keep them up for longer,” he added.
Abdul would need to be all in on pursuing one of the two startups to justify a leave of absence. He hopes to have complete conviction on one idea; dropping out means he knows what he will be spending the rest of his life doing, in an ideal world.
“The best argument that people were making was that the college experience is going to be something that you miss out on, right?” he continued. “But also I think that, just like the American dream, the college experience is subjective. If my goal coming into college was to do what I’m doing right now, I think I’m following through with my college dream.”
When Abdul was deciding where to attend college, he was in between Harvard and Stanford. He ultimately chose Harvard because Stanford’s startup scene felt oversaturated. “Harvard has a much higher value in my eyes, or a much higher follow-through rate, than Stanford currently has.” He’s gained a lot of insight from interacting with upper-level students in the startup community and becoming involved with GovLabs.
While these three companies might not be unicorns yet, they offer us a peek into the incredible concepts coming to life every day on Harvard’s campus—from social impact to deep tech.
Venus Dastidar ’30 (vdastidar@college.harvard.edu) tells everyone she’s going into start-ups but spends more time napping with her unicorn (plushie) than she does trying to be one.
Zoë Macklowe ’30 (zmacklowe@college.harvard.edu) is so busy chasing rainbows and writing Indy articles that she might drop out of school to go nap too.