• Boston Business Journal, Friday, February 14, 2014 1:12 PM

For John Harthorne, going to work every day as a consultant for Boston-based global management consulting firm Bain & Co. literally made him sick.

"I hated consulting," Harthorne, founder and CEO of startup accelerator program MassChallenge, told students at Boston University's TechConnect event on Feb. 7.

Harthorne talked about the genesis of MassChallenge days before the accelerator kicked off its fourth annual program, which will give hundreds of startups the opportunity to compete for space at the program's new offices in south Boston.

In 2008, Harthorne was thoroughly disliking his job (even though Bain & Co. has been named the Best Firm to Work for by Consulting magazine for 11 years), and he longed to be an entrepreneur. But he was focusing too much on trying to launch a for-profit tech company -- something like the next Google or Microsoft, he said.

He didn't immediately see that his past success in the 2007 MIT $100K Business Plan Competition and his experience with startups could be the catalyst for launching his own business.

"Right in front of me was this opportunity that I totally overlooked," Harthorne said at the event.

But then, "like an adrenaline shot to the heart," he had an idea. He'd launch the world's biggest startup competition, attract tons of money, and give entrepreneurs resources and mentorship to succeed during the economic recession.

People thought he was crazy, he told the students. But launching a startup is the hardest thing anyone will ever do, and crazy is good, he said.

"However trivial or grand (the idea is), it will sound crazy to everyone else around if it has any merit at all," he told the students.

Since it launched in 2010, MassChallenge has supported nearly 500 startups, which have collectively raised more than $470 million in outside funding and have created almost 4,000 jobs.

But it took persistence, Harthorne said. His advice to students: "At the end of the day, do you care enough to get up in the face of a thousand 'no's' and keep banging against the brick wall until it falls down?"

MassChallenge's new 26,000-square-foot industrial office space at 21 Drydock Ave. in South Boston will host more than 100 startups this year.

The four-month program is funded by sponsors and doesn't take any equity in the participating companies. Grants awarded to startups this year through the program will total $1.5 million.

The program — which bills itself as the world's largest startup accelerator — provides free space to 128 finalist teams each year, along with mentorship and services such as legal advice.

Read the whole story at Boston Business Journal »