Applications will be open on Thursday 9/12, 7:00 PM. Please check out the requirements tab for more information.

2025 Startup Bootcamp will be limited to 36 teams. We will notify teams that are accepted by Tuesday, October 8th. We expect interest in Bootcamp to exceed space, and in the event that your team is not admitted, you will be able to be considered for other SIPs via the SIP Poll, which closes on Thursday, October 10th.

No.

Your transcript will show participation in the program with a pass-fail grade, but Bootcamp does not grant course credit.

During the Fall semester, students will need to find and form a team prior to the October 3rd application deadline. There is a mandatory all-day (9am-4pm) Customer Discovery Workshop on Saturday, November 2nd for admitted teams. In November and December teams will complete customer discovery work and must submit a pre-Bootcamp deliverable at a to be determined time and date in order to participate in the program.

In January, required sessions will generally be held between 9am - 4pm. Furthermore, participants are expected to meaningfully contribute to their team’s progress and to devote time to complete interim deliverables that are due prior to the final presentation on January 24th. We will hold optional sessions on some days outside the “required” 9am-2pm time window.

Students may be excused from required sessions for religious observance. Please email bootcamp@hbs.edu to discuss your situation.

No. Teams will be asked to build a series of prototypes and to test those prototypes with prospective customers, but your earliest prototypes are likely to be paper sketches. Some teams may choose to develop higher-fidelity prototypes that simulate your solution's functionality.

No, sorry — they cannot apply. We are happy to have team members who are not RC students work with you during afternoon studio time, but they cannot attend class sessions. They also cannot count toward the minimum of 3 team members.

We’ve designed Bootcamp for teams of 3-4 team members: no more or less. We're trying to make the Bootcamp available to as many students as possible, which rules out teams of 1 or 2 — as does the amount of work your team will need to complete in a compressed time frame. At the other end of the spectrum, teams of 5 tend to be difficult to manage; the coordination that big teams require offsets the work that additional team members can deliver.

Yes. We will hold a team matching session in September -- details forthcoming. We will also utilize the Bootcamp Slack channel to help students find each other.

Students who attend the 9/12 Info Session and provide their email address will automatically be added to the Slack. If you are unable to attend, please click here to request to join the Slack workspace. (Please allow up to 24 hours for approval.)

Yes, but you'll need to quickly move a concept to the point where you can conduct customer interviews, prototype reviews, and other discovery work required for the pre-Bootcamp deliverable in early January.

Ventures in most sectors should be viable for the Bootcamp. However, a concept that requires a great deal of long-cycle scientific research—e.g., a medical diagnostic test—would likely not be a fit. If you have questions about whether your idea is right for the Bootcamp, contact Profs. DiDonna or Koning.

Can you do your customer interviews and prototype reviews using Zoom or some other platform? Do you have contacts in that country who can help you line up respondents? Are you willing to adjust your schedule to do work in that country’s time zone? If so, you will be fine! If this is not possible, then your concept may not be a good fit for Bootcamp.

It's a good thing if you have done some market research and thought about the problem space: that will reduce the odds that you discover your idea is not viable during Bootcamp. Conversely, if you already have a working product or significant customer revenue, you may be too far along. Feel free to reach out to Profs. DiDonna or Koning to discuss.

We expect that most teams will work intensively through the weekend to push their concept forward. Over the holiday weekend, we will have a mix of required and optional workshops and mentoring sessions on Saturday and Sunday. We have no planned programming or activities on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, January 20th.

Since Bootcamp concepts will be at an early stage, we do not expect that many teams will bring proprietary intellectual property to the Bootcamp. Students who wish guidance on such issues should consult legal experts at the Harvard i-Lab. All participants will be asked to sign a standard Harvard disclaimer prior to Bootcamp acceptance.

No, unless all parties agree on such arrangements.

No, but please remember us in your charitable giving plans after your IPO!

All students will be required to sign a Harvard-Standard Student Participation Agreement. In the unlikely event that you bring an idea to the Bootcamp that builds upon pre-existing proprietary intellectual capital (as with a biotech concept, for example), you are welcome to ask those who join your team to sign an NDA agreement. Likewise, we do not encourage concept owners to ask other team members to sign non-compete agreements. We trust that joiners will not clone the concept owner's idea after the Bootcamp. If anyone does this, the faculty will certainly remember this violation of community trust in dealing with the student in the future. Ultimately, you must be comfortable disclosing details of your venture with peers and the Bootcamp's guest instructors and mentors. The value of feedback you'll receive almost always exceeds by a great margin the insurance value of keeping an idea in stealth mode.