Laurie Stach had what she calls a “crazy ambition to take on the world and solve problems” as a teenager. At MIT, she discovered plenty of other students felt the same way — but nobody was actually teaching them how. “Adults always see these youth who are good at math and science and say, ‘You’re going to do great things—someday,’” Stach says. “Meanwhile, traditional education isn’t preparing them.”
So in 2012, the MIT mechanical engineering grad and Harvard Business School MBA founded LaunchX, a for-profit entrepreneurship program built around a simple premise: stop telling teenagers they’ll do great things later, and let them do it now. Students form teams, identify a real problem, and build an actual product or service they take to market. Many generate preorders or even revenue before the four-week program wraps.
LaunchX started in 2013 with 30 students on MIT’s campus and, as Stach puts it, “kind of snowballed.” The program now serves roughly 500 students annually across in-person and online formats. That’s not just growth for growth’s sake — it reflects a broader shift in how ambitious young people approach careers. The traditional pipeline of good grades to good college to good job no longer feels like the only path, and programs like LaunchX are betting that building something real beats waiting for permission.
The timing matters. High school entrepreneurship programs have proliferated over the past decade, but few push students to actually sell something to strangers before the program ends. That’s the hard part most curricula skip, and it’s the part that separates a summer project from a company that might keep going once the program ends.
