Recently, Matthew Andrews ’25, MCS PAF for Business & Entrepreneurship, had the opportunity to conduct a series of interviews with Harvard entrepreneurs. Sitting down with Matthew in the C-House (the Harvard Hacker House), Lucas Chu, AB ’25 discussed his entrepreneurial path, the power of community-building, and lessons from his six startup ventures spanning AI, energy coordination, and crypto.
MCS: Lucas it’s lovely to meet you! Could you give us your Harvard intro?
Lucas: The fun part about my Harvard intro is they’re all half truths. I’m in Quincy house, I study economics and computer science, and I’m a senior from New York.
So first off Quincy house. I was actually previously in Dunster, before I transferred, and now I live off campus in C-House (the Harvard Hacker House). Second: economics and computer science – I’m currently double majoring, but I’m not sure if I’ll end up doing that (I also might do a double thesis). And finally, senior, I’ve taken two years off to work on startups so I’m not really a senior.
MCS: So it’s like the three lies of John Harvard?
Lucas: Exactly the half truths of Lucas Chu.
MCS: When was the first time you knew you were interested in entrepreneurship and what was that first experience like?
Lucas: It was sort of a false start. In 2019, I was talking with another Harvard guy, Luke Heine, AB ’17. He took three leaves of absence and was working on this “Summer Playbook”, which has this incredible distinction of not only being the first Harvard YC company of that area, but also the first YC company in general, to get in off of a spreadsheet. I ended up working in the Summer Playbook but eventually they ended up pivoting and launched the Fair Opportunity Project (potentially the first YC company to turn into a nonprofit but that’s not quite true – they pivoted and got acquired).
My first startup came out of this civic tech challenge, where I came up with this idea called Veer Squared or Veer 2. It was basically like Google Plus GPT, kind of like perplexity today, but five years ago…it uses Google and then AI to parse the results to generate a summary, or mind map. We were into the mind map direction, but then COVID ended up happening and we worked with another startup called Starlight. We gave them their IP for money and some help, and they got acquired.
MCS: So was it these brushes with entrepreneurship or being involved with other people’s ideas that really first really got you into it?
Lucas: I think I always wanted to do this as a kid. You know in sixth grade, they ask you what do you want to do when you grow up. I wanted to be an entrepreneur.
MCS: So you’ve taken some leaves of absence, and each of them for a different startup could you tell me a little bit about each of the big ones?
Lucas: I like to say that I’ve worked on six startup projects, and each of them, my co-founder either got either acqui-hired or recruited. So the first I mentioned was VR squared. The second startup wasn’t really a startup, it was called Erevna, which was a federation of 12 initiatives that I started. One of these initiatives ended up in TechStars, and my co-founder built that out.
Third one is the big one which we started in Spring 2022 – it’s called DAOHQ or Headquarters for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. We raised $1.5 million from Mark Cuban and friends and took a leave of absence. I ended up leaving the company and then the company got *aqui-hired, and we ended up making Mark Cuban, technically speaking, more money than he made on Shark Tank. DAOHQ was a crypto exchange – a marketplace for governance tokens. Crypto was crazy at the time and we were in Miami.
We then went to LA and worked at a16z’s crypto startup school. They had well over 6000 applications and took 26 teams, so it was something like 0.4% acceptance rate. They gave us a few $100,000 and millions in valuation to work on decentralized energy coordination systems. Essentially, we were working on whether there is a way to get individual solar panel owners to coordinate together so that they can sell electricity at a higher price. We launched a pilot, but ended up looking more into whether we could create an energy market similar to a *futures exchange. Anyhow, we ended up pivoting to decentralized AI since we were trying to coordinate a bunch of agents already, and became more interested in models at the time. And then our partner actually ended up leading a $40 million funding round into a much more mature company, Jensen AI. To me that felt like graduation. We finished the project and I came back here and walked at graduation.
*Aqui-hired is a common term in the startup world. A combination of the words “acquisition” and “hire,” it describes the process in which a company acquires the employees of another. Read more online.
*A futures exchange is a marketplace where all types of futures and options on futures contracts are bought and sold. Read more online.
MCS: What did you get up to after that (i.e. his time in LA with a16z)?
Lucas: I returned back to SF to help run a side project, Cerebral Valley, which is venture number five. It’s the largest AI founder community in SF. I was co-organizing their hackathons and we partnered with Open AI and Anthropic and actually organized all of Anthropic’s official hackathons. That was really cool, just to fly in and be in the heart of the action.
In addition to these five startups, I’ve created and scaled five communities that have reached 6,000 members online. Cerebral Valley is the biggest and most recent of them. But before that there’s Erevna Coronavirus visualization team, we also had one international socio economics laboratory which both received around 3,000 applications with many more people involved. And then Gen Z mafia which reached 6,000 people and we capped it off. I then also helped other people scale their initiatives as well.
Along the way, I decided to go back to school, and I came back here last year.
MCS: Can you talk to me a bit about what you see is the power of the communities that you built both on and off campus? There’s the part where it’s really cool to bring people together and generate ideas but is there more to it than that?
Lucas: We’ve been running the demo nights at C-House, where every two weeks, we let people show what they’ve been working on. It’s about having cool people be able to find each other and connect and ultimately make cool things together. It’s a way to give back and it’s a way to just have fun and meet cool people. It’s a very meaningful experience.
MCS: On campus, have there been specific people or resources that have been incredibly helpful in any of your projects?
Lucas: Firstly, the Innovation Labs. You can claim affiliation and get a bunch of cloud computing credits from them. Number two, the house teams, because they were very chill with me taking leaves and coming back. And then number three, the community. The last time I was here, I was talking to another student who was thinking of taking leave of absence to work on his AI startup in San Francisco and he suggested I should interview with them. Every conversation, people are trying to be helpful.
MCS: Is there something you’re working on right now that’s project number seven?
Lucas: That’s the classic. That’s like, a third question people ask me, and I’ve got some things I’m cooking on but I’m not ready to share yet, which is startup slang for I haven’t finished it.
I run the house, and that’s been more work than I thought. I’m doing two theses, which I really need to get to drafting. I’ve also been exploring AI agents. Actually, the last hackathon I hosted was an AI agent hackathon. I’m really impressed with things with Replit agent and I think there’s a lot we can do to make them more usable. Whether it’s being able to talk to them or send emails or navigate websites.
MCS: I hope that comes more to fruition. People are sometimes worried about getting themselves really involved in a startup, whether that’s dropping out or lack of job security. For students who want to get more involved in entrepreneurship, what sort of advice would you have for them?
Lucas: Well, first off, Harvard is pretty forgiving with regards to going on *leaves of absence. Secondly, you can stay at hack houses, although, to my knowledge, we’re the only one. There’s also a lot of resources outside of Harvard, which take some time to find. There’s a dozen accelerators such as Prod, which I think is probably the best accelerator. There’s the Harvard Health Lab and the EdRedesign Lab. I would also say just finding people who are really smart in your classes, like Gavin and Chris from Etched, who were both head TFS for CS 121 and they just raised $120 million. You could also cross the river to MIT – there’s Sunday hackathons almost every weekend. Beyond that, the Harvard name is incredibly helpful – if you send an email, you can expect it to be read.
*For more information on voluntary leaves of absence, please consult the Harvard College Student Handbook.
MCS: If you were to look back, is there anything you would do differently?
Lucas: I think who you work with is really important. In some ways, it’s like dating where you’re excited to be with them and work together and build something beautiful. It doesn’t necessarily need to be something other people find beautiful. I think it’s more important, at least for me, than the amount of money you raise, or even the specifics of the project you’re working on. You can pivot, you just need to be excited about it. So, I’d think more carefully about who I spent the time with. I also know people usually say “Oh, I wish I did more things.” I wish I did less things. I wish I went to class more. I wish I studied more, slept more.
