“I had to take a midterm for my psych course, and then I literally had to leave that, get in a taxi, and leave for the airport to fly out for the interview.” said Lutsky, referring to an interview with Y Combinator, a selective for-profit start-up incubator that provides start-up founders with seed money and mentorship.

Lutsky and Schluntz were accepted into the 2013 YC “winter class” for their start-up, Posmetrics. Originally inspired by their Computer Science 50 final project, Posmetrics provides a mobile application for giving real time feedback of hotels and restaurants. According to its website, the app could increase feedback rates over 100-fold compared to current survey methods.

A DAY IN THE LIFE

“Working on a start up company sort of consumes your entire life. I find myself constantly thinking about how we could be growing faster than we are,” Lutsky said. “If you can’t really sustain that high pace of innovation and progress and growth within your company all the way from day one to [initial public offer], you’re likely to be outrun by competition.”

Lutsky said founders of a start-up need to be adaptable and capable of covering all the bases while their start-up is in its initial stage before developing their team.

Coming from technical backgrounds, Lutsky and Schluntz had to reinvent themselves as “sales guys.”

“Having to train ourselves to fulfill that role was one of the more interesting personal challenges of starting a company,” Lutsky said.

“You think your college life is kind of a roller coaster. Like, ‘Oh, this week I’ve got psets, like I’ve got three psets due tomorrow and two midterms to turn in the morning after,” Gupta said, moving his finger up and down in front of his face. “For [a start-up], the roller coaster highs and lows are much bigger.”

Besides running a business, leaving Harvard means having to start a life on your own, which comes with all the difficulties that some would gloss over.

“Housing is a pain in the ass and ridiculously hard to find,” said Ben M. Yu, a former member of the Class of 2014. “I lived in a garage for a good while. A bunch of the [Thiel] fellows had this awesome ‘mansion.’... They needed someone to take a temporary lease on it until the end of April.... They had two rooms available, one of them was a garage and the other was the pool house.”

Because the pool house was 8 feet long, Yu opted for the garage, where he found new value in heated blankets.

Yu became a Thiel Fellow in 2011, leaving Harvard after his freshman fall semester. He initially planned to work on Pricemash, a tool designed to compare prices for online items fitted with the ability to consider online deals from outside providers, such as Groupon.

But when Pricemash failed, Yu started work on Sprayable Energy, a topical caffeine spray, which delivers a more even energized feeling when compared to the energy spike from caffeinated drinks. Launch has been delayed for some time because of the health requirements that Sprayable Energy has to meet.

THE “TROUGH OF SORROW”

“It’s extremely difficult to work on something by yourself,” Yu said. “Inevitably, every start-up goes through a ‘trough of sorrow’ and everything is going to shit and everything looks like it’ll never succeed.”