Who runs the Foundry? How did it get started?

The director of the IQSS Startup Foundry is Debi Kleiman. The Foundry is part of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science directed by Gary King. IQSS has considerable experience over many years incubating academic projects into commercial startups, nonprofits, open source efforts, and centers at IQSS, elsewhere at Harvard, and across the world. Recently, we moved a nascent startup foundry at the Harvard Business School (part of their D^3 initiative, which was itself originally incubated at IQSS) here and combined it with our ongoing efforts into what is now the IQSS Startup Foundry.