Ellie Park, Multimedia Managing Editor
Across the country, student-founded startups are going from dorm room ideas to billion-dollar ventures. While Yale hasn’t always been seen as a startup powerhouse, entrepreneurs and enthusiasts on campus say that Yale’s entrepreneurial engine is quietly picking up speed.
Over the past few years, student entrepreneurship at Yale has undergone a quiet transformation. What was once a niche interest has rapidly scaled into a vibrant network of campus initiatives, including the Yale Entrepreneurial Society, or YES; Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale, or Tsai CITY; Yale Venture; Launch pre-orientation and the Hillhouse Fellows program.
Students are now working on ventures that span artificial intelligence, biotech, consumer products and fintech. With programming that offers mentorship, seed grants, speaker series and job placement, Yale is carving out a name for itself in a space traditionally dominated by West Coast schools.
In interviews with more than a dozen students, alumni, faculty and administrators, the News found a growing cultural shift: students are no longer waiting until graduation to start building. And while challenges remain — particularly around visibility and technical support — many say the Yale startup ecosystem is on the brink of a breakthrough.
“I absolutely love the program,” said Anjal Jain ’26, a junior majoring in biomedical engineering and music, said of Hillhouse Fellows. “As a student entrepreneur, you face a lot of ups and downs, but being surrounded by other students who are equally as passionate as you are about entrepreneurship. I feel like the inspiration is constantly alive when I go to these Hillhouse events.”
For Jain, discovering entrepreneurship wasn’t a straight path. She initially followed the premed track, but soon realized she wanted a faster-paced environment — something that offered more immediate results. After switching to engineering and completing an internship at a medical device company, Jain began developing her own venture — using AI to improve patient education and healthcare inefficiencies.
Programs like Hillhouse Fellows, co-founded by Zaid Fattah ’25 and Seth Goldin ’26, aim to address what the founders describe as a gap in technical and industry-focused opportunities on campus. While pre-professional and general interest entrepreneurship programs have long existed, Goldin said Hillhouse was designed for students who were already technically skilled and seriously considering working in or founding startups.
“Hillhouse is explicitly a program for people who are very, very interested in this,” Goldin said. Unlike broader programs such as Launch, also co-founded by Goldin, Hillhouse provides a focused cohort of students with direct access to startup executives, venture capitalists and Yale leadership. This semester, Goldin said, fellows have met with figures from firms like Lux Capital and Anthropic, as well as Yale Ventures leadership.
Jain’s story echoes a broader trend on campus. Clare Leinweber, the outgoing executive director of Tsai CITY, wrote that student interest has “grown in number, in the range of different ideas and innovation pathways that students wish to pursue, and in the quality and progress of the ventures.”
She wrote that students are now coming into Yale already aware of the center. “We increasingly hear from incoming students that Tsai CITY factored into their decision to choose to come to Yale,” she added.
Leinweber said Tsai CITY’s programming — from Launch Pad to the Summer Fellowship — is deliberately interdisciplinary. “Students in each batch learn together with those from other disciplines and programs. We have had consistent feedback from students that this opportunity to interact with students from across the university has been important to them.”
Goldin and Fattah began building the program after meeting up for dinners in San Francisco last summer, where they discussed how to bring a version of Stanford’s Mayfield Fellows Program to Yale. Their vision wasn’t to replicate it exactly, Goldin said, but to create a similarly high-touch initiative for STEM students who often lack extracurricular exposure to the startup world.
“We felt as though Hillhouse Fellows had the opportunity to provide a much, much smaller, more concentrated group of students a platform to meet in person with venture capitalists, former founders, alumni and Yale leaders,” he said.
That tight-knit model is meant to build long-term mentorship pipelines. “In five years, if one of them wants to start something, hopefully they can call or email one of the people they met at dinner,” Goldin added.
Before Hillhouse, Goldin and co-founder Teo Dimov ’26 founded Launch, Yale’s first entrepreneurship-themed pre-orientation program, in collaboration with the YES. He said the idea came out of a desire to make entrepreneurship more accessible for incoming students —especially those without prior experience or technical backgrounds.
“Launch is meant to be top of the funnel,” he said. “You don’t need demonstrated interest. You don’t need experience. You just need to be excited about learning and open to it.”
That kind of early exposure, Goldin said, lays the groundwork for deeper involvement. He sees the layered infrastructure — Launch, YES and Hillhouse — as a pipeline that helps turn initial curiosity into real commitment.
Fattah added that the campus climate has evolved dramatically. “When I came to Yale, it didn’t really feel like there was a startup ecosystem,” he said. “Now it’s really flourished … Yale has one of the better up-and-coming startup ecosystems on the East Coast.”
This growth is reflected in student-run organizations like YES. Amelie Liu ’27, its current president, said YES has seen exponential growth.
According to Liu, the club has grown significantly over the past two years — expanding from 25 members to 300 last year and now to around 600.
“We’re the biggest entrepreneurial and kind of business-oriented club on campus.” Her goals this year include expanding fellow engagement, stabilizing funding and improving board structure to match the organization’s rapid growth.
YES aims to support students across the experience spectrum. Liu said the group focuses on making resources accessible to those without technical backgrounds, offering low-barrier entry points to programming, mentorship and community events.
Director of the YES INSPIRE Series, David Fleming ’26, said the growth is evident beyond numbers.“Even outside of YES, I’ve noticed a rapid rise in entrepreneurship activity on campus, with over a dozen friends launching companies in the past few years,” Fleming wrote in an email to the News.
Still, challenges persist. “The most significant challenge by far is time,” Leinweber noted. “Students have limited time … they have to forego other aspects of university life and activities to be able to focus on developing their ideas.”
Funding and technical support are additional concerns. Dimov noted that students who are serious about building startups often struggle to secure the resources and funding needed to go full-time, which he said offers a fundamentally different experience.
Josh Geballe ’97 SOM ’02, senior associate provost for entrepreneurship and innovation and managing director of Yale Ventures, Yale’s hub for supporting research commercialization and startup creation, said expanding capacity is a current goal. “We tend to have more people apply for our programs than we have resources to support them today,” Geballe said. “We are hoping to expand most of the programs that we operate.”
Geballe added that the administration’s long-term vision is clear. “We want Yale to be widely recognized as one of the top universities for innovation.”
Looking ahead, Goldin said he’s optimistic. He pointed to growing institutional investment in engineering, faculty hiring and physical infrastructure as signs Yale is building a durable entrepreneurial base. “The fact that we have such a vibrant and thriving ecosystem here — I think it’s really incredible,” he said. “And I can’t wait to see it just keep growing.”
For many, including Goldin, what’s next hinges on a singular milestone: one breakout success. Until then, the groundwork is being laid — one dinner, one demo day, one prototype at a time.
“Yale’s entrepreneurial scene will explode if one student starts a company which, in the next five years, becomes worth a billion dollars or more,” Fattah said. “That’s all it takes for the floodgates to open.”
JANICE HUR Janice Hur covers the Yale New Haven Hospital for the SciTech desk. From Seoul, Korea, she is a sophomore in Morse majoring in Biomedical Engineering.
