Photo by Dylan Goodman

Campus & Community

Bringing startup energy to whatever he does

Christina Pazzanese

Harvard Staff Writer

May 16, 2025

4 min read

Michael Oved builds community around passions for entrepreneurship, Republican politics

Part of the
Commencement 2025
series

A collection of features and profiles covering Harvard University’s 374th Commencement.

Do well by doing: That’s the attitude Michael Oved, a graduating senior, says he brought to his time at Harvard College.

An economics and history concentrator with a passion for entrepreneurship and Republican politics, Oved says he takes an economics approach to projects, whether academic or extracurricular. At College, that meant identifying an unmet need and then building something new to serve that need and connect people.

“Everything I’ve done at Harvard has been about doing,” said Oved, who grew up in New York City and attended a Jewish high school in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn.

After a summer job at a startup in Barcelona, Oved wanted to bring some of that same startup buzz to Harvard and to other college students in Boston. A member of the Harvard Venture Capital Club, he envisioned an entrepreneurship summit where young aspiring VCs could meet and hear from real-world experts. Since nothing like that existed, Oved decided he’d just have to start one. Naysayers thought it was too ambitious and costly to pull off, he said, but the conference sold out and has continued for the last three years.

“I’m interested in building, I’m interested in doing, and that’s what the venture capital group was about,” he said. “It was about me using my platform as a sophomore at Harvard, an 18-year-old kid who felt like the world was at his fingertips. How can I do something with that feeling?”

Oved brought that same zeal and drive to the Harvard Republican Club, another group he joined as a first-year student looking to explore as much as the College had to offer.

“I want everyone to experience what I’ve experienced here.”

For a while, Oved kept his political views to himself. But in “Ec10,” a 500-plus student survey course taught by Harvard economists Jason Furman and David Laibson, he started speaking up in class. People took notice.

“I think people had a sense that I was asking questions from a very Republican-leaning perspective. I got dozens of people coming up to me on the street, literally, coming up to me on the street saying, ‘Michael, thank you for asking that question. I had the same question,’” he said.

Furman, Oved’s senior thesis adviser, called him “as brilliant as he is charismatic,” and said he stood out in class for his “openness to debating alternative perspectives.”

Though the cohort of Republican-leaning students on campus was thought to be small, Oved sensed there was a “hunger” for community, but no outlet where they could get together and share viewpoints. “And so, I said, how can we build something to meet that need?”

In late 2023, as president of the Harvard Republican Club, Oved grew the mailing list to 850 members and brought in high-profile speakers like tech investor Peter Thiel and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ’76, now the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.

His goal was to move the club from the campus social fringe to the center. He did just that when the club offered its full-throated endorsement of the Republican Party candidate, Donald Trump, in August 2024.

The move turned a bright, national spotlight on the club. Not long after Trump’s victory, Oved penned an essay in The Harvard Crimson, “Being Republican at Harvard Has Never Been Better,” about the need for students from across the ideological spectrum to engage in real life, not argue on the internet. But not all of the attention was welcome.

“It was a very, very difficult time for me when we endorsed,” Oved says now. Though he expected to receive some criticism for the decision, the vitriol from strangers, particularly online, was “difficult to endure.”

Still, that experience hasn’t dampened his enthusiasm for being bold and building new things. Drawing on his religious education and family values about the importance of giving back, last year Oved launched the podcast “30 Years in 30 Minutes,” where guests share life lessons from pivotal points in their lives.

“How can I bring world-class speakers that only someone from Harvard would have access to, how can I bring them to the average person?” he said of the podcast’s origin. “I want everyone to experience what I’ve experienced here.”