“There’s this real emerging tech community here at Harvard—it’s pretty heartening to see. The institutional support for startups has rapidly expanded,” Novendstern says.

Competitions like I3: Harvard College Innovation Challenge and classes such as Engineering Sciences 20: “How to Create Things and Have Them Matter” drive innovation and collaboration at the College, according to Melissa C. Oppenheim ’12, one of last year’s I3 winners.

Novendstern says he thinks Harvard takes that startup culture one step further by encouraging students who are not traditional “techies.”

“[In] Palo Alto you’re around a bunch of people who are writing code. Here you’re around people who are studying the problems,” he says.

— Staff writer Radhika Jain can be reached at radhikajain@college.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Amy Guan can be reached at guan@fas.harvard.edu.

This article has been revised to reflect the following corrections.

CORRECTION: APRIL 8, 2011

The April 8 "Young Entrepreneurs Put College on Hold" stated that Bill Gates had been writing code in Maxwell Dworkin during his time at the College. That building, however, was opened after he left the school. The article also misstated the year in which Melissa Oppenheim won the I3 competition. It was not this but last year. Additionally, Bill Gates did not fall asleep in Computer Science 121 but in a combinatorial applied math class.