The Circuit: Your Monthly Dose of Tech Insights from HBS

Welcome to “The Circuit,” your new monthly dose of tech insights and trends from the heart of HBS. Each month, we’ll distill actionable lessons from the tech speakers who visit campus and (if their talks are good enough) transform them into key takeaways you can use. Want to be a collaborator? Have notes from a recent session or a personal insight to share? Email me at samit@mba2026.hbs.edu.

For our inaugural piece, while HBS slowly warms up and prepares to kick off its series of speakers, we’re focusing on the people keeping tech at HBS alive and well over the summer: the Rock Summer Fellows.

Building Startups or Resilience? Overcoming the Rocky Side of Rock

“Entrepreneurship is completely self-motivated. I had weeks where I thought, ‘do I really want to do this? I feel alone on an island. What am I doing?’, and other weeks where I thought, ‘this could be a real thing.’ It’s isolating and exhilarating at the same time.”

Rock Summer isn’t a traditional internship. There are no weekly feedback cadences, no managers tracking your progress, and no clear benchmarks for success. Instead, it’s just you, your co-founder, and your idea, along with the challenge of figuring out whether you’re actually making any progress at all.

To get a sense of what the summer felt like, I spoke with five Fellows who founded tech startups: Shivam Parikh (Revision), Cameryn Boyd (Alterna Studios), Allan Korir and Alex Karani (Eida Health), and Kyle Weil (Tummy). Their stories paint a picture that is far less glossy — one filled with fragile wins, contradictions, and pivots. To me, this begs the question: is Rock truly about building startups, or is it about building the resilience to withstand the inevitable chaos?

Challenge #1: How Do You Know You’ve Made Progress?

“A big founding thing [asks], ‘when does it feel real?’ Maybe it won’t until we hit a certain [number] of customers or when we hire our first employee. Rock is a cushion, and our idea [will] really be tested when we step out of HBS. I’m super skeptical about how materially far we’ve gotten because I’m still here.”

Every Fellow can point to milestones. Revision, a productivity platform for real estate brokers, has closed its first paid customer. Tummy is ready to launch with a waitlist of 70 Crohn’s and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients. Eida Health has a beta and 1,000-person waitlist. Alterna Studios has convinced beta consumers to buy furniture through their recommendations.

While this is undeniable progress, in reality, it often felt like sand slipping through their fingers. When founding, there’s a constant nagging question of whether you’re moving forward or in circles.

Challenge #2: The HBS Bubble

“HBS tries to make science out of art.”

“No RC classes made me want to be a founder. Not to sound like a Reza follower, BUT that was the first class [at] HBS [that] actually added to my self-motivation to want to found something. It made me realize [that] founding is about real commitment, not ‘Go-NoGos,’ and I plan to keep going until we crash and burn.”

“People are too concerned with psychological safety when the best thing they can do is give honest feedback and not concern themselves with how they come across.”

Part of what makes resilience so necessary is the environment HBS creates. We learn about entrepreneurship through tidy frameworks: objectives and key results (OKR) for discovery, checklists for validation. However, startups rarely fit into clean boxes.

Rock adds funding and community, but it lacks the one thing most Fellows say they needed: blunt feedback. Instead, classmates nod politely. Nobody wants to be the person who says, “your market is too small” or “your product isn’t compelling.” That benevolence feels supportive, but it’s a trap. It cushions shaky ideas long past their shelf life. If they’re not careful, founders will find themselves surrounded by HBS students who don’t understand that their tough questions are what founders need to hear.

Challenge #3: Valuing Scappiness over Perfection

“It’s not about the time you spend on something but the number of iterations you have. You need to get feedback on whatever hypothesis you have as soon as you can. Compress your learnings into short periods. That can only be done with deliberate iteration and fake deadlines.”

The clearest lesson is that validation doesn’t come from polish; it comes from creativity. A few startups ran a “Wizard-of-Oz” beta, manually producing results they plan to automate later. Eida Health tested every hypothesis it had in a condensed number of days full of user interviews. On the flip side, others say their biggest mistakes centered around spending too long on an overly-functional MVP when they should have been running quick, low-tech experiments.

Each of these decisions tested resilience in its own way. Can you admit when weeks of effort were wasted? Can you pivot without letting ego get in the way? The Fellows who learned the most weren’t the ones who built the cleanest MVPs; they were the ones who could take the punch and keep going.

Founding as the Therapy Session No One Advertises

“All the chaos of building made me understand [that] I must really want to do this. Generally, I’m pragmatic and like financial stability. The unknown is scary. My life can change, and things might not be fun for a while, so if I’m onboard, I must really want to do this.”

“You have six pivotal learning events a week. You need to grow thick skin to handle the ups and downs.”

Alterna Studios spent weeks hand-coding a website that AI tools could have spun up in hours, battling with the tradeoff between wasting time and potential learning that would benefit them in the future. Early inbound interest pulled Eida Health into investor meetings that mostly ended with “let’s reconnect later,” highlighting the value of limiting fundraising to a defined window.

Rock, more than anything, sounds like a crash course in founder psychology. Fellows describe the summer as a pendulum: exhilaration one day, doubt the next. Talking to founders, I was amazed to hear how small failures can be turned into positive signals. Eida Health, for example, celebrated each bug that their users found, as it was a sign that people care about the product and want it to work.

For some, the biggest takeaway is simple: you can’t treat pivots as failures. Rather, you have to see them as survival. Each mistake felt big in the moment, but in hindsight, they read more like the tuition bill for entrepreneurship. In other words, Rock doesn’t just tolerate failure; it subsidizes it. And maybe that’s the greatest value Rock can guarantee: the best summer internships are those in which you stretch yourself. 

The Reality Check

Rock won’t guarantee you a unicorn, but it will give you clarity.

When the Fellows each decided to continue their venture past the summer, none of them had certainty. However, they did have a clearer sense of their tolerance for chaos, appetite for risk, willingness to pivot, and ability to keep going without external validation.

Maybe that’s the real product of Rock. The myth is that it builds startups, but the reality is that it builds resilience, and that resilience may be the most important signal you’ll ever get about whether entrepreneurship is really for you.

Shira Amit (MBA ‘26) is the current HBS Tech Club Co-President. She graduated from the Hebrew University with a degree in Philosophy, Political Science, and Economics and is a UWC alumna. Prior to HBS, Shira served as a Product Manager at Wix and is from Tel Aviv, Israel.