John Harthorne, the founder and managing director of Two Lanterns Venture Capital in Boston, MA, shared his experience in startup investing and acceleration, highlighting how a party at MIT led him to his work at MassChallenge and his passion for entrepreneurship.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

John Harthorne: I am John Harthorne. As Andrew noted, I am the founder and managing director of Two Lanterns Venture Capital. Two Lanterns Venture Capital is a $25.5 million dollar seed fund, and we invest in software-only startups in the US and Israel. With our first fund, we’ve made 35 investments so far and have a couple more to make. Currently, we are fundraising for fund two and that will be a $40 million fund along very similar lines as the first.

Prior to launching Two Lanterns, I was the founder and longtime CEO of MassChallenge. While I was there, we launched nine programs running in seven cities and four countries, those were full-time accelerators. It is, I believe, the largest startup accelerator in the world, and is today graduating roughly 600-625 startups every year across those programs. And we’ve also run dozens of smaller one-off accelerator programs that have touched thousands of more startups on every populated continent. So I’ve seen a lot of startups through MassChallenge, and now also as an investor through Two Lanterns. Prior to MassChallenge, I was at Bain and Company as a strategy consultant for a couple of years and before that, I got my MBA at the MIT Sloan School of Management, which is where I really fell in love with startups deeply and learned most of what I then implemented at MassChallenge and beyond.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do when I got into business school. I thought there were sort of two paths: either I’d go into consulting, and then get an ideally CEO or CFO role at a large corporation, make good money, and get a big house in the suburbs. Or I would do a startup path, where I would launch my own startup or become a founder of a startup, and then hopefully go off and become a hugely successful tech entrepreneur. And so I did both of those when I got to school, where I fell in love with startups. And there were a couple of step-function moments in that pathway, one of which I’ll share now. I was a business school student at MIT, but I wanted to make sure that I met a lot of the engineers as well. So one day I saw a flier on campus for a mixer on the engineering side of campus. I decided I’m just gonna go to that and meet some engineers and get to know them and hopefully find some smart people etc.

So I went, and it was, I will say, the worst party that I’ve ever been to. I’m used to the business school, it was like rocking, loud dance music, you could barely squeeze your way through, and everybody was lively and chatty. And this was in an almost gymnasium-style size room. There were maybe, I think, 10 people total, in two separate groups standing, looking at the floor, very few conversations. There was a boombox on the floor, I think a table with a plastic tablecloth on it, and apple juice out. And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a terrible event’. But I came over here to meet an engineer.

So I’m gonna go and meet them and ask them, ‘So what are you working on?’. And then the first engineering student goes “I developed a system to address the largest mass poisoning in history consisting of two plastic buckets with rusty nails. That will filter arsenic out of drinking water, because the UN put drinking wells all over Bangladesh, but the groundwater is infested with arsenic. And it’s going to cause 1000s of people to go blind, lose their hair, and have all sorts of health impacts. And so we’re going to, you know, we set up a whole system for entrepreneurs to sell this system door to door that costs less than $3 to produce, and it’s gonna prevent 30,000 children from going blind in the next three years.”

And I was like holy cow, that’s unbelievable, I must have just met the most incredible person at the entire school. That’s insane! Wow”. And then I’m like, “So what do you do” to the next person? ‘I have developed a system for solar thermal energy that we’re distributing around Sub-Saharan Africa to villages that don’t have access to the grid, and one unit will cost under $300. It’s made out of old car parts and bike parts. It can be serviced locally, and it will power an entire village so that people can read at night and study and improve their education and prove their livelihood and that of their family. ‘ And I was like, Oh, my gosh, that’s unbelievable.

And then the next guy- what do you do? ‘So I developed an airborne wind turbine that is 60% more efficient than generating power with a turbine on the ground. You can put it on the back of a truck and bring it anywhere in the power village remotely and the US military is using it so they don’t have to bring gasoline trucks through the mountains of Pakistan in Afghanistan so that we’re solely we’ll say soldiers lives and be able to power these remote units’. And I was like, oh my God, that’s incredible and just kept going around.

They were just blowing my mind. And then they finally asked me what I was going to do and I replied, “I kind of thought I might be a consultant.” From there, I just felt this deep level of shame. I didn’t know I was allowed to be amazing. I didn’t know that, though these guys obviously were obviously smarter, they were socially pretty awkward and I thought that I’m way better than them at certain other elements. I can assemble an amazing group of people and make stuff happen. And I would love to be a part of projects like yours.

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