What is the ‘next big thing’ that is not AI?
“Aging technology, genetic engineering,” said George Chiriac ’25, Managing Director of Investments at Prospect Student Ventures (PSV). “Nuclear fusion,” he added.
“I don’t know if I agree with it, but the vibe that I’ve gotten from some of my classes [are] these autonomous humans, like Tesla’s Optimus,” said Nick Aronow ’25, co-founder of RePaired, a customer relationship management platform connecting homeowners and repair contractors.
Some students pointed to particular fields. “The startups are going to go where the money is, and I genuinely believe that there's eventually going to be money in pro-environment things,” noted Jack Prewitt ’27, Director of TigerLaunch, a student-run entrepreneurship competition under Princeton’s Entrepreneurship Club (E-Club).
“I don’t even think AI is the next big thing,” said Nathan Myers ’28, founder of Precision Metrics, an affordable, high-precision GPS device for crew boats. Ultimately, “you can [choose the ‘next big thing’] a thousand times and be wrong a thousand times,” he explained.
Though the national conversation around technology has been laden with buzzwords like “AI-powered” or “AI-driven solutions,” these students believe that the future of tech may lie in more concrete technological innovations. In recent years, the entrepreneurial ecosystem at Princeton has flourished through students applying their technological expertise across a range of disciplines to address societal issues.
In 2005, the University founded the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education, its first formal institution for innovation and entrepreneurship, to prepare students for an increasingly technology-driven world. As the Keller Center approaches its 20th anniversary, it now offers over a dozen entrepreneurship courses every semester, as well as summer initiatives like the Princeton Startup Immersion Program and the eLab incubators and accelerators for student founders.
“As educators, we have a very broad definition of entrepreneurship,” said Beth Jarvie, the Communications Coordinator for the Keller Center. “It’s not just about creating a startup company, it’s about innovating and creating solutions that can impact society and communities.”
Jarvie also noted that Princeton students tend to be “very risk-averse.” The expectation for Princeton students to do well financially after graduation, Jarvie explained, often becomes “pushback” when it comes to starting a company. She additionally recalled that, before entrepreneurship became a certificate program, it was challenging to attract students to these courses since they did not fulfill any distribution requirements.
That reluctance, she suggested, originates from a deep-seated aversion to failure. “Princeton students aren't used to anything with an F,” said Jarvie, referencing “The Other ‘F’ Word,” a past course offered with the Keller Center. “They think that failure is a very negative word, but in entrepreneurship, failure is how we move forward.”
Yiying Zhang ’26, co-president of E-Club, has also noticed students’ risk aversion. Although E-Club is the largest undergraduate student organization on campus with over 500 members distributed across 15 subteams, he observed that most of the founders are isolated and “build in vacuum” while the rest of the student population “[moves] towards the corporate direction.”
Many Princeton alumni, Yiying Zhang noted, had a “monolithic mindset” that entrepreneurship was the “equivalent of dropping out.” Additionally, he cited the academic rigor involved in a Princeton education as an impediment, while universities like Stanford have much more flexibility in combining entrepreneurial ventures with academic credit. For example, Stanford offers many more courses and organizations for entrepreneurship, as well as launchpads, cause-specific groups, cohort-based programs, and a business graduate school.
While some students remain at Princeton while working on their projects, others take gap years from their Princeton education to pursue their ventures.
Shirley Yu ’27, for example, is working on Sign Script, an extension for virtual meetings that translates ASL gestures in real-time. It has not been easy balancing “student” and “entrepreneur,” but Yu expressed flexibility with her remaining years on campus.
“I’ll go with the flow,” Yu said. “I’ll be busy as I can, and I’ll put in as much time as it needs and make it my priority until the point where I can no longer balance it with my academics. Then, I will start considering potentially gapping for a year.”
Meanwhile, Mihir Rao ’27 is taking a gap year to spend his days refining his entrepreneurial philosophy, understanding the state of the biopharmaceuticals industry, and riding Waymos in San Francisco. During his gap year, he met a philosophically-minded colleague who challenged him to get to his first principles and helped him reorient his “why.”
“The biggest thing you get out of this is a very clear objective function,” Rao said. “What are you trying to optimize for in life?”
Although he is still refining the specifics for his startup, he hopes to build two major components: an intelligence platform that leverages machine learning to optimize drug strategies and a focus on developing the company’s own therapeutics. For Rao, the creative process is “finding vibes.”
“Vibes are just what our brain thinks is good and appealing that’s been informed by world experiences,” he explained. “Creativity is when you achieve the vibes you want to achieve.”
Yiying Zhang himself has founded five unsuccessful startups, but “learned so much” from the failures. To him, the scariest part about being a startup is not being rejected by venture capital firms or by other people. Rather, it is launching a venture and being met with silence: “Nothing happens,” he said. “That’s the scary part.”
“The way to solve this is to bring the fire together,” he continued. “Don’t just burn in your own pile. Let’s bring it into a big campfire and interact with each other.”
One group on campus has been watching the bonfire of entrepreneurship grow throughout the years: Prospect Student Ventures (PSV), a student-run venture capital group that provides VC education to its members and equity-free grants to founders. It has witnessed the growth of campus entrepreneurship from the investing side — in particular, a fivefold increase in funding applications since 2020.
According to Elise Kait ’25, one of the PSV’s biggest challenges is raising enough funds to keep pace with the growing number of applicants.
According to Jason Bohner ’25, PSV funds both for-profit and nonprofit companies, spanning fields from hardware to educational technology. The process starts with an application and a detailed meeting with the founders, followed by investment memos assessing risks and impact. Applications then go to a full team vote before final approval by PSV’s grant committee, a panel of industry professionals who evaluate the group’s decisions.
“We look for a problem that is real, [where] people have or provide very tangible value to its customers,” Chiriac explained. “We look for a good team and product fit. We want our companies to have a big opportunity to scale.”
Unlike traditional venture capital firms that must generate returns for their investors, PSV operates without third-party investors and does not take equity in the startups it supports.
“We don't have that problem, because we don't have to pay anyone back, and [the founders] don't have to pay us back,” explained Elise Kait ’25. “So, we're really focused on finding companies where our money will make an impact for them.”
PSV itself was initially funded by a founding lump sum in 2020. According to Kait, the group is approaching the "tail-end" of the original fund, but the members are actively raising a new fund to support its operations.
However, over the past five years, PSV has consistently contributed to the ideation and growth of a variety of startups where they can make such an impact.
Every month, female athletes push through intense training sessions, often ignoring the silent rhythms of their menstrual cycles. This gave Katherine Kalap ’25, Sterling Hall ’25, Shelby Fulton ’25, and Nina Weeldreyer ’26 the inspiration to create Eir, a solution based on hardware and software.
Eir develops athletic wearables that help female athletes optimize training based on their menstrual cycle. According to Hall, the hardware consists of a device that tracks biomarkers during workouts, while the software is an app that analyzes this data alongside menstrual cycle records to monitor symptoms and provide recovery and nutrition insights. Eir also intends to create a coaches’ dashboard, where they can access the data and inform training adjustments.
“There's a lot of coaches that don't really understand the impact of menstrual cycles on athletes’ performance,” Weeldreyer said. “Eir also serves to educate coaches and provide [a] layer of connection between them and their team.”
Sometimes, a refrigerator breaks down in June and remains broken three months later. This was the case for Nick Aronow ’25. He and Chase Magnano ’25 then came up with the idea for RePaired, a platform connecting homeowners and repair contractors. On the homeowner side, it helps them gather information and optimize scheduling. For the repair professionals, it helps them generate and manage leads. It was a practical solution born from personal experience.
“The idea doesn’t have to change the world,” Magnano said. “It just has to be good enough for someone to take a leap of faith with you and realize that they get some value from what you did.”
In rowing, a cox box provides the team with data like stroke rate and elapsed time, and helps amplify the voice of the coxswain, who steers the boat and directs the team. However, each cox box costs around a thousand dollars for what Nathan Myers ’28 believes to be very old technology. Frustrated by both the high price and frequent malfunctions, Myers decided to take one apart. Inside, he found components that were not only obsolete but also worth a fraction of the price.
Myers especially hopes to resolve the problem for lower-income rowing teams, for whom the coxboxes are a “huge prohibitive cost.” He opted to tinker by hand, frequenting the makerspaces on campus and recreating the cox box with more advanced batteries, GPS technology, and colored screens.
“We have ChatGPT now — it can code so many things, but it can’t install an Ethernet USB dongle on a low-power fork of Raspbian, right?” Myers said. Raspbian is an operating system designed for use in the family of single-board computers known as Raspberry Pi.
Another expansion in entrepreneurship is TigerLaunch, an E-Club subteam that hosts some of the largest student-run entrepreneurship competitions in the world. Founded in 2014, its regional events span not just the U.S. coasts, but Europe, Asia, and Africa. In January, they hosted competitions in Paris and Singapore. Athan Zhang ’27 noted many founders involved in AI, hardware, and med tech at Princeton, while the focus in other countries was very different.
“When we go international, we see a lot of different types of startups, like sustainability and green startups,” Athan Zhang said. “In the U.S., VCs have a greater focus on AI, technology, and that type of bubble, [so] a lot of people are more pushed towards those domains.
So, what is the ‘next big thing’ that is not AI?
In Yiying Zhang’s perspective, revolutionary technologies like AI are impossible to predict: a person from the steam age would have found the digital age unimaginable, a person who grew up with the combustion engine could never have envisioned high-speed rail, and the CEO of IBM himself predicted the world would have a market for five computers in total.
“But what I can predict is that humans always stay the same in this framework,” Yiying Zhang said.
“Find the next group of people who are the biggest thing instead of the next technology,” he continued. “No matter how much tech evolves, in the end, humans [are] the constant factor.”
Coco Gong is a head Features editor for the ‘Prince.’
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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