You may not need a degree to start a great company, but many founders have degrees — advanced degrees — from top business schools. One such school producing tech startup founders is Harvard Business School — some of the most successful startups that came out of it include Gilt Groupe, Rent the Runway and Birchbox.
At Harvard Business School, student ambitions aren't what they used to be. In the old days, the top program pumped out management consultants and investment bankers. Today, entrepreneur in residence Jules Pieri says she has to counsel students to not feel guilty if they don't start a business on the side while in school.
See also: 15 People Shaping Boston's Tech Scene
Whether a business degree will get you closer to your startup dreams is for each to decide, it's worth recognizing the variety and number of successful startups coming from Harvard.

Image: Rent the Runway
Jennifer Hyman and Jenny Fleiss met on their first day at Harvard Business School in 2008, and went on to start Rent the Runway together in 2009. The site allows users to borrow designer wear for several days and provides the item in two sizes to ensure fit.
Hyman says she makes a point to do dinners, trips and phone calls with entrepreneurial friends from HBS, and Rent the Runway has had HBS students as interns, who then have gone on to start their own companies. In the early days, the founders themselves gained actionable advice from fellow alums.
"As the idea for Rent the Runway crystallized, Jenn and I reached out to the co-founders of Gilt Groupe," Fleiss said in an email. "I remember a particular conversation we had with Alexis [Maybank] who expressed how important the consumer’s emotional connection with an e-commerce site is, something that we've certainly taken to heart at Rent the Runway."

Ovuline is a women's reproductive health startup in Boston that has helped more than 50,000 women get pregnant to date, thanks to big data and machine learning. The app connects with fitness trackers such as Fitbit and Withings and helps women to track fertility while they're trying to conceive, and track health after they conceive for a healthy pregnancy.
The company's team is made up of a majority of women — 15 total. Two co-founders are from Harvard Business School: Gina Nebesar and Paris Wallace, and it's each of their second startup. Wallace is also a mentor at Techstars in Boston.
Rita Lee (HBS 1997) didn't have a startup in mind while attending HBS, but she knew she'd start something eventually, and thus enrolled in several entrepreneurship courses. In 2011, she founded Dermeta, a company that creates applications to provide intelligence on skin to the professional skin care industry. Lee also blogs at JustAboutSkin.com to help people navigate skin care and set some facts straight — she's a biochemist by training.
Generator Ventures runs two programs — Aging2.0, a network of innovators in the aging market, and Aging2.0 GENerator, an accelerator program based in the Bay Area. The company publishes a bi-weekly newsletter and is funded by events and sponsorships. Co-founder Stephen Johnston graduated from HBS in 2002 and says he is not the only HBS alum in the aging market — he regularly interfaces with fellow HBS entrepreneurs and one of his GENerator portfolio companies is run by two HBS students.
The idea for one central online destination in which to access fashion boutiques from New York City to Paris to Los Angeles came to founder Olga Vidisheva when she was working for Goldman Sachs and would stop in small boutiques on business trips — then wondered why she couldn't do the same from the comfort of her own computer. She researched the idea while at HBS and raised funding a few months after graduation. Shoptiques was founded in 2012.
The site helps small boutiques deal with the ebb and flow of seasonal foot traffic, and stores accepted into Shoptique's system use the platform instead of running their own ecommerce site. Vidisheva also participated in Y Combinator's accelerator as the first non-technical, solo founder.
Blue Apron wants to cater towards busy professionals who want home-cooked, healthy meals and want to cook it themselves — but not spend too long in the grocery store. The startup sends out meal kits each week which include already-measured ingredients for specific recipes, which require the user to only have standard cookware on hand and meals take around 40 minutes to prepare.
Co-founder Matt Salzburg attended HBS and graduated in 2010, and received a Rock Center Fellowship from the school to work on his business ideas. Blue Apron launched in spring 2012 in New York and has expanded to serve all but a few central U.S. states.

Peek is a new kind of travel guide — the site turns local- and celebrity-curated activities into a killer selection of awesome things to do in cities around the globe. Founder Ruzwana Bashir graduated from HBS in 2010 and previously worked with startups Art.sy and Gilt Groupe as well as working in investment banking. Peek launched in 2012 and is currently active in 19 cities.
Co-founders Daniella Yacobovsky and Amy Jain met as investment bank colleagues and were fellow HBS grads who launched BaubleBar in 2011 to sell reasonably priced, on-trend jewelry directly to consumers. Now the ecommerce site has its own brick-and-mortar presence (by appointment) as well as partnerships with traditional retailers such as Anthropologie.

HBS grad and co-founder Michael Schrader teamed up with fellow Harvard students from the chemistry department and law school to launch Vaxess, which uses silk to preserve vaccines well enough to be shipped to remote parts of the world.
Launched in 2009, ThredUp makes consignment easy by allowing users to simply ship a bag of used clothing to the company, which in turn takes responsibility for resale. The seller will get reimbursed based on the quality of goods, and ThredUp is clear about what brands it accepts (kids and women's) and thus curates its storefront.
ThredUP was a semi-finalist in the HBS Business Plan Contest and co-founders James Reinhart and Chris Homer met at HBS. Initially launched ThredUp as a clothing exchange in 2009 but later shifted to a more flexible model that allows users to buy or sell directly.
What's your favorite HBS startup? Tell us in the comments.
If you're in Boston, join us at a travel-themed hackathon, where you can win a trip to Dubai.
Event Details:
MashHacks: Travel, presented by Emirates Airline
Saturday, March 22, 2014
8:30 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Location: hack/reduce
275 3rd St.,
Cambridge, MA, 02142
Register on Eventbrite here
Hashtag: #MashHacks
*Food and beverages provided