Every Harvard student who opens a laptop to catch the latest episode of “Girls” owes a debt of gratitude to Mark Zuckerberg.

The Facebook chairman and his dorm-room buddies, who created the $64 billion social-media site at Harvard in 2004, sparked a startup culture at the university that’s still gaining momentum.

Additional Photos

Harvard, with the Charles River in the foreground, is putting more emphasis on entrepreneurship. Its Innovation Laboratory hosts more than 100 fledgling companies. Kevin Ma/Bloomberg News

One campus-hosted company, Tivli, is using software and TV-network deals to offer the HBO series and other fare to students. The startup is not only breaking a longstanding restriction on cable in Harvard’s housing, it’s also vying to reshape how pay-TV is delivered.

Harvard is fostering a reputation as a hotbed for innovation, working more actively than in the days of Mark Zuckerberg — or Bill Gates before him — to promote entrepreneurship and weave it into campus life.

The school’s Innovation Laboratory, or i-lab, is the headquarters for Tivli and more than 100 fledgling companies founded by students and alumni.

“Harvard’s attitude toward entrepreneurship today is a complete 180 from what it used to be,” said Tuan Ho, who founded Tivli in 2009 with Nicholas Krasney — in their dorm room. “Now, computer-science classes encourage students to come up with ideas and take them over to the i-lab to turn them into businesses. That would never have happened years ago.”

Located next to Harvard Business School in Boston, the 18-month-old i-lab also hosts student-founded companies such as RallyPoint, a networking website for military members, and Vaxess Technologies, which is working on a way to reformulate vaccines so they don’t need refrigeration.

Harvard plans to use the facility as a hub of innovation for the entire university, much as the seeds for Yahoo and Google were planted in Stanford University’s California computer labs. It’s a way to avoid losing students like Gates, who dropped out in 1975 to found Microsoft.

“There’s always been a focus around here on investment banking and consulting, but you can feel an entrepreneurial spirit sprouting,” said Will Ahmed, who graduated from Harvard last year and now runs i-lab tenant Bobo, a technology and data- analysis company providing health feedback for athletes and coaches. “At Stanford, starting a company is a career path. Now it’s beginning to be one here, too.”

For Tivli, Harvard is both a home base and a blue-chip client.

The company provides a way for the university to offer cable channels via Internet connections, allowing students to watch on computers and tablets for free, akin to applications offered by pay-TV providers such as Time Warner Cable.

While companies such as Comcast, Dish Network and Intel are working on similar concepts, Tivli is offering its service to universities in partnerships with pay-TV providers. Users can view live and on-demand TV and are able to record shows to watch online later.

The channel lineup includes Time Warner’s HBO, which sees Tivli as a way to directly market its programming to college students — a group the cable industry is concerned may never sign up for pay-TV after becoming accustomed to free online video.

Harvard is paying Tivli for its service and providing it for no extra charge to students who live on campus. That’s a big shift for the university, which long resisted giving students cable TV in their rooms for philosophical reasons, Leo Donnelly, Harvard’s information-technology infrastructure director, said in an interview.

The original idea was to prevent students from watching too much TV, a principle that’s become impossible to enforce in the era of YouTube and Netflix.

“It used to be that Harvard had some control of the amount of video students could watch,” Donnelly said. “Those days have changed.”

Zuckerberg, who met with Tivli’s founders when he visited the i-lab in 2011, didn’t have the kind of support from Harvard that the TV startup and its cohorts now enjoy. When Facebook was getting off the ground, the university didn’t adopt the site as its official online “facebook,” sticking with its own less- developed house directories.

Zuckerberg declined to comment, according to Larry Yu, a Facebook spokesman.

“While student entrepreneurship has been historically less of a focus at Harvard, the university has developed a novel and innovative approach,” Gordon Jones, the i-lab’s managing director, said in an interview.

Facebook grew by spreading among colleges, campus to campus, a tactic Tivli is imitating.

The TV startup has struck deals with Yale University, Texas A&M University and the University of Washington, among others. Once it gets enough traction with colleges, Tivli plans to market its service to hotels and apartment complexes, according to President Christopher Thorpe.

Related Stories