Oct 17, 2026 · Computer History Museum, Mountain View · open to all
Four moving parts. Circles are curated and by application; the rest is yours the day you log in.
Founder Circles
A confidential peer pod of founders at your stage, meeting monthly. YPO-forum style: absolute confidentiality, experience over advice. 250 admitted across 28 countries; $7.9B raised by members.
Regional hubs
Founder breakfasts, dinners, demo nights, and happy hours in San Francisco, Boston, New York, London, and Berlin — plus satellite gatherings at JPM, RSA, and GTC.
MITAI
The MIT AI Conference — ten years of no vendor talks, no hype, no fluff. Deep learning, MIT style. 2026: “AI — The Age of Agency,” Oct 17 at the Computer History Museum.
Community
Firehose every week, plus the member hub, WhatsApp, and Slack for any verified MIT alum. Directories, intros, and playbooks stay members-only.
Talent density
One gate does most of the work: every room is MIT-verified, wall to wall.
Confidential by design
Circles run on forum protocol — what's said in the room stays in the room.
Social scaffolding
Matched pods, trained moderators, standing rituals. Relationships by structure, not luck.
Stage-matched
Pre-seed to post-IPO: people at your altitude, plus someone one step ahead.
Doors, not walls
Open conference, alum-wide communities, members-only directories — every ring points one step in.
Some doors are open to everyone. The most valuable rooms are for verified MIT founders. The badge tells you who gets in.
MIT AI Conference
Drink from the firehose: ten years of no vendor talks and no hype — 500 founders, 50+ sessions, AI Idol ($200M+ raised by alumni), and the stage that hosted OpenAI and Khan Academy.
Founder Circles
The room where you say the real numbers: a stage-matched, confidential pod of founders meeting monthly. What's said in the Circle stays in the Circle.
MOB — MIT on Corporate Boards
Your next room is a boardroom: MOB develops and places AI-fluent MIT leaders on public and private boards. Every board suddenly needs what you know.
Executive Briefing Sessions
Skip the vendor maze: curated MIT startups present straight to enterprise buying teams. Members pitch; buyers meet vetted companies in one afternoon.
Toolkits & Data
The unfair advantage, indexed: warm-intro requests, founder and investor databases, the CxO network, vendor directory, job board, and playbooks. Members only.
Clinics
Tactical help, on tap: Pitch Perfect, YC application reviews, GTM/PMF working sessions, investor office hours — and Founder Match when you need a cofounder.
Firehose & Events
Your way in: the newsletter of record plus hub nights in five cities. Any verified MIT alum can start here. Most members did.
MIT Founders Stories — Podcast
Alumni who built something worth hearing about, telling you how it actually went. Free for anyone, anywhere.
A community is its people, and ours had a very good year. Firehose readers saw every one of these first.
Cursor — SpaceX's $60B acquisition. All four founders: MIT.
Michael Truell, Aman Sanger, Arvid Lunnemark, and Sualeh Asif built Anysphere to roughly $4B in annualized revenue in under four years. The all-stock deal — the largest VC-backed exit on record — is set to close in Q3.
15 MIT-affiliated founders & leaders on the list
MIT-affiliated investors, ranked
#8 Douglas Leone — Sequoia Capital
#19 Hemant Taneja — General Catalyst
#28 Fred Wilson — Union Square Ventures
#54 Wesley Chan — FPV
Max Gazor — Striker
Avoca — $125M Series B at a $1B valuation
Tyson Chen '17 and Apurva Shrivastava '18, backed by Kleiner Perkins, Meritech, General Catalyst, and Amplify. AI that answers every call for home-services businesses — eight figures in ARR and counting.
Four rings. Each one points one step inward.
Come to the MIT AI Conference, listen to the podcast, share the map. Get your MITAI ticket →
Verified via MIT's Infinite Connections. Get Firehose weekly, join hub events in five cities, and jump into the member hub, WhatsApp, and Slack. Log in and join MITAS →
MIT-affiliated + founder (or early-stage employee, any industry — once a founder, always a founder). Unlocks the members-only layer: intros and the directories — founder & investor databases, the job board — plus Clinics and Exec Briefings. See member benefits →
Founder Circles and MOB cohorts — curated, confidential, stage-matched. Admission is selective on purpose. Apply to a Circle →
- Build things — companies, products, communities. Once a founder, always a founder.
- Share the hard parts, not just the wins.
- Value the room over the transaction.
- Show up when you say you will.
- Keep confidences, in Circles and out of them.
- Pay it forward: make the intro, answer the ask, raise a hand when a seat opens.
The member concierge we're building on top of the directories. Say what you need; TIM finds the member; both sides opt in. And yes, TIM is MIT spelled backwards. (The beaver, nature's engineer, has been our mascot for a century.)
Every intro is double opt-in. No cold outreach, no scraping — member data never leaves the room. And TIM is only as smart as the directory: every completed profile makes the matches better.
Our rituals
A few of the 15,000 — speakers, builders, and friends from MITAI stages over the years.
Four rooms, one key. Log in once with your MIT Infinite Connections account and every invite is waiting in the member hub. That's how the rooms stay MIT-only.
MITAS has no staff. Every program on this page is run by a founder who raised a hand.
The MITAS Fellowship
A one-year, cohort-based fellowship for members who want to run a piece of MITAS: Circles moderation, city hubs, MOB, Exec Briefings, Firehose, TIM. Real ownership, honest hours, title for life.
Apply to the FellowshipSponsor & partner
Reach 15,000 MIT founders through the conference, hub events, and Firehose — or go deeper: meet vetted startups at Executive Briefings and source AI-fluent directors through MOB.
Talk to us