Laurie Stach is Founder, President, and CEO of LaunchX, an entrepreneurship education program for high school students. An MIT engineering graduate with a Harvard MBA, she started the program after reflecting on her own frustration as a young person wanting to build something rather than wait for adulthood to start acting on ideas.
LaunchX is built to let students found and run real companies rather than just study business theory in a classroom. Under Stach's direction, more than 1,600 students have completed the program's summer session, and participants have gone on to launch over 350 startups.
Stach has made inclusive representation a deliberate part of the program's design, keeping female participation near 40% and making sure students from different backgrounds can see role models who look like them, alongside maintaining high standards for the ventures students build.
