being a student is a remarkable starting position for a founder.
at eighteen, you're surrounded by people learning things they may spend their lives working on. a lecture can give you an idea. a classmate can become a cofounder. a question you bring to a professor can turn into your first experiment. you have reasons to be curious, and people to be curious with.
we think more companies should begin here. curiosity is already in motion; it needs somewhere useful to go.
“There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating college student.”
the difficult part is often what happens after the idea. you want to build a robot, but need someone who understands controls. you have a promising experiment, but need help designing the next one. you're ready to start a company, but don't know a founder you can ask an honest question.
those gaps are small enough for a community to help close. left alone, they can cost months.
E0 Labs brings together people who care about the details: students, researchers, engineers, founders, mentors, and investors, wherever they live. someone who has solved your problem can save you a week. someone working beside you can keep you going for a year.
you can stay in school and build. the things you learn have somewhere to go; the problems you encounter give you reasons to learn more. we want to make that loop easier to sustain.
the problems worth working on often take patience: a material that behaves differently, a robot that can handle the unexpected, a tool that gives a researcher a new way to see. the difficulty can be what makes the work valuable.
“Here, as so often, the best defense is a good offense. If you can develop technology that’s simply too hard for competitors to duplicate, you don’t need to rely on other defenses. Start by picking a hard problem, and then at every decision point, take the harder choice”
an idea becomes useful through experiments, mistakes, and another attempt. a community can help with that work. it cannot do the work for you.
“People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves. It does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better.”
E¹, our first incubator, is for young deeptech builders, primarily undergraduates and others around ages 14–25. it runs from November through January, mostly remotely, with NYC meetups. we're focusing on the Northeast while welcoming founders beyond it. we want more people here to find the peers and support they need close to home.
we'll begin with PhD & peer-to-peer student mentorship, warm introductions to VCs, partner perks, and people building alongside you. no fees. no equity. no separate application: we'll invite selected community members to interview. you can arrive without a company or an existing project, ready to start one and show your progress at demo day.
we'll write here about what we're trying and what we learn. our deeper research lives at RABBIT.
if there's a problem you keep coming back to, join us. we'd like to hear about it.