Culture Shift at HLS

Ashwin Kaja’s big idea has reached communities like Oaxaca, Mexico, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Providing tours for individuals to meet and invest in entrepreneurs in poor communities, his non-profit—Investours—is a first-world start-up with the aim of helping third-world start-ups.

Kaja is not only a founder and director of Investours, he is also a third year student at Harvard Law School, a tutor in Kirkland House,

and a part of a growing trend at the Law School—budding entrepreneurs.

Law School Dean Martha Minow has made a point of encouraging students to make their own jobs, and Kaja is part of a burgeoning group of students at the Law School to leave behind traditional corporate careers in favor of self-made start-ups. Minow’s initiative includes introducing a range of courses pertaining to entrepreneurship with titles like “Law and Finance of Start-Up Companies,” but she also faces the challenge of convincing students to forsake lucrative careers in big law firms.

To try and meet that challenge, Minow introduced plans last year for what is called the Public Service Venture Fund. Debuting in 2013, the fund will give “seed money”—as little as a few thousands dollars to as much as $80,000—to students to establish non-profit start-ups.

While the Law School has made progress toward encouraging enterprising projects, students say that the initiative remains hampered by a lack of coordination across the University and a paucity of incubator courses. By breaking down barriers between schools, they say, students would be able to easily tap the resources they require.

Professor David M. Hornik has watched the Law School take this important first step to incorporate more entrepreneurial material in the curriculum—both since he was a student two decades ago and since he began teaching at the Law School.

“In the early 90s, I don’t think there was any focus on entrepreneurship,” Hornick says. “It was certainly not clear that lawyers would participate in entrepreneurship.”

After law school, Hornick worked for a law firm in California that represented Internet start-ups like Yahoo and Google. He says that on the West Coast, entrepreneurship has always been a more accepted career path, and law students consider entrepreneurship a suitable future along with public service or private practice. But now, he says, things are changing.

A venture capitalist himself, he says his class “Entrepreneurship and Company Building” has more than tripled in size since he began teaching it four years ago. Of the hundreds of students who have taken the class, Hornick says some of his students have since started their own businesses, including a former student that started a child’s clothing and toy swap business.

“In regards to the law school, there’s a lot more focus on the opportunities available to graduates in the realm of entrepreneurship,” Hornick says.

But some student entrepreneurs say that accepting and fostering young entrepreneurs involves more than just changing the curriculum. While the classes on venture law, starting companies, and finance law are helpful, Kaja says that that’s only one layer of a multi-dimensional program the law school needs to develop.

“The thing is, starting a company is not just one thing—we’re a non-profit with very specific needs and so learning and taking a venture law class isn’t really helpful.”

Kaja says that once students become interested in launching their own project, they need a place to plan and network for their businesses—a step the Law School has not yet taken that Kaja calls “practically enabling entrepreneurship.” The MIT Sloan School of Management has a good model for these classes, Kaja says.

“A lot of business schools have incubators, where you actually go put together team, put together a business plan, and churn out real businesses,” Kaja says. “There’s something in that model for the Law School to consider.”

To receive this training, students often look outside the walls of the Law School.

Alain Goubau, a third year at the Law School, cross registered at MIT as a second year and took an incubator-style class called “Energy Ventures”. As a result of contacts he made and ideas he helped form during the course, Goubau co-founded Altaeros Energies—a company that is developing a novel kind of wind turbine.

“Taking that class [and] working yourself through a business plan for three months really forces you to think a lot,” Goubau says. He adds after the class was over he said to himself, “Now that we’ve thought about it, let’s try it.”

He said that meeting students with similar interests was a bonus of the class, noting that the first three weeks of class seemed like “speed dating” as students met and discussed their ideas. The interaction did not stop there. Students—a mix of policy, business, and engineering students—openly critiqued their peers’ ideas, using the course as a forum to discover the most practical and efficient ideas regarding renewable energy sources.

Kaja says the Law School should support this kind of programming, in addition to the foundational classes already offered.

“They’re still at the initial stages of setting [the program] up,” Kaja says. “It’s really important as they lay the groundwork for supporting entrepreneurship [to realize] that entrepreneurship is fundamentally a practical thing. It’s incredibly important steps that they’re taking to practically enabling entrepreneurship. That’s what made the incubator classes at Sloan so successful.”

Robb London, a spokesperson for the Law School, says that some courses introduced to teach entrepreneurship do touch on business planning but that students can and are encouraged to cross-register at Harvard Business School. David N. Back, a second year at the Law School, however, says that cross registering puts an unnecessarily large burden on the student to negotiate with teachers and administrators across schools and that schedules are not always lined up.

While Sloan-style incubator classes may not be offered at the Law School, Harvard has announced plans for a forum for students across the University to meet and discuss ideas earlier this year. The Innovation Lab, a new program that will open later this year at the Business School, aims to facilitate interaction between students with similar entrepreneurial dreams.

But one program like the Innovation Lab is not enough, according to Back. Back, who is working on a project involving transportation in India, says that though the Law School has begun to offer more courses and bring in more faculty specializing in entrepreneurship, it is still a relatively “small niche” at the Law School. He says the University—not the Law School—is holding back the entrepreneurial potential of students.

“The wealth of knowledge at Harvard is so extremely and unfortunately segmented,” Back says. “It needs to increase student collaboration.”

Back says he believes that the University should facilitate a larger program for entrepreneurship across all schools, hence enabling cross-school projects. For one start-up, he suggested, an architect at the Design School could work with a real estate specialist at the Business School, a budding real estate attorney at the Law School, and a city planning and urban development specialist at the Kennedy school.

Though he agrees that the Innovation Lab will start that kind of collaboration, Back says he hopes collaboration can be facilitated by reforming the steep requirements for cross-registering and truly recalibrating all school calendars. He says that it makes sense to have law-related programs to prepare young entrepreneurs at the Law School, and other resources should be distributed throughout the University for students to take advantage of.

“It should be easier to take advantage of opportunities elsewhere,” Back says. “The University has actively discouraged, and has been a huge impediment, of entrepreneurial activity not just at the law school, but across the University.”

—Staff writer Caroline M. McKay can be reached at carolinemckay@college.harvard.edu.