Laurie Stach '06 always had a "crazy ambition to take on the world and solve problems," even as a teenager. At MIT, she discovered she wasn't the only one with delusions of grandeur - er, we mean, entrepreneurial drive.

"Adults always see these youth who are good at math and science and say, 'You're going to do great things - someday,'" Stach says. "Meanwhile, traditional education isn't preparing them."

So in 2012, she founded LaunchX, a for-profit entrepreneurship program that gives high school students practical skills through an intensive summer program where they start real companies. Students form teams, identify a problem, and build an actual product or service to take to market - often racking up preorders or even revenue before the four-week program ends. Because nothing says "summer vacation" like a mini-CEO sprint.

Stach, raised in Texas and the Carolinas, majored in mechanical engineering at MIT and earned her MBA from Harvard Business School in 2011. She ran her first summer program on MIT's campus with 30 students in 2013, and says it "kind of snowballed." LaunchX now serves about 500 students per year across both in-person and online programs.

Read more at www.technologyreview.com/alumni-profiles.