We love supporting ambitious students building world-changing tech! Thanks to MTL for inviting us to participate in the first ever MTL Hackathon: AI for Microelectronics.
Shoutout to the winners!
Spicy Circuits - @hassanallail , @menamonmon07 , Jake Li
Chilly Chiplet - Zixuan Brian W., @dinesh_kinjangi , Edgar Sutawika
SOPy Times - Tamar Korkotashvili, @adriennewslai , @ada_oyku
Silicon Paella - Xabier Bastida Zubiaurre, Patricia García Herreros, @ivan_piris
MTL;DR - Abutalib Namazov, Arda Özdemir, @deniz_irem_erus
Midnight of Campus Preview Weekend. MIT students took over Building 54 and turned 21 stories of the tallest building on campus into a playable Tetris game.
The same instinct that makes someone spend 10,000 hours wiring up a building is what makes them spend the next decade building a company that matters.
We loved playing a small part in helping this hack happen!
At E14, skin in the game isn’t a metaphor. We brought @tinytattooboston to @vestercafe with DJ @mikah.wav and got inked alongside students and founders on Pi Day. Irrational? Maybe. On brand? Absolutely.
Because the founders we back don’t get the luxury of hedging. They leave jobs, burn savings, and bet years of their lives on something most people think won’t work. The least we can do is show up the same way — early, all in, and willing to commit before the path is obvious.
Irrationally comMITed to founders, from day one.
Join us at the MIT Museum for an evening focused on AI research and entrepreneurship, bringing together researchers, students, founders, and local investors for a conversation on how breakthrough technical work becomes real companies. #e14fund #mitstartups #deeptech #innovation
Don’t back decks.
Back people.
Calvin Chin (Managing Partner @e14fund ):
The best investors aren’t transactional.
It’s rarely:
📄 “Send a deck → get a check”
Instead 👇
They’re embedded in a community
→ researchers 🧠
→ founders 🚀
→ builders ⚙️
Building real relationships over time
So much context…
so much insight…
They often don’t even need the pitch deck
In many cases?
They help founders build it.
His take:
🚫 Don’t make decisions off a pitch deck alone
🤝 Founders + investors should actually know each other
Because this isn’t a transaction
It’s a long-term partnership
Most people miss that.
That’s what SFPlayground is about.
#startups #venturecapital #founders #fundraising
Our research talk series is back next week with Mingyang Deng presenting his talk, Generative Modeling via Drifting.
RSVP so we have snacks for you! /cg0ueuwj
They beat HARD MODE. 🏆
Congratulations to Dreaming Objects — winners of the HARD MODE Hardware × AI Hackathon!
The jury was blown away by their vision and creativity. Dreaming Objects imagines a future where AI lives in the things around us: stress testing intelligence not just in conversation, but in the physical world. Objects everyone can own, interact with, have fun with, and grow alongside in real life. This is the kind of bold, human-centered thinking HARD MODE was built for.
They take home a $50K investment from E14 fund to turn their vision into a real startup. We can’t wait to see where they go from here. 🚀
#HARDMODEhackathon #AdvancingHumansWithAI #AHA #MITMediaLab
