Today is the first day of the 2026 Yale Innovation Summit, convening “thousands of founders, funders, researchers, policymakers, creatives, and operators from across the globe” for two days of learning, connecting, pitching and investing right here in New Haven.
The summit’s organizer, Yale Ventures, asked us to produce a limited-edition Chaser passport for attendees, connecting them in turn to special offers from dozens of local restaurants and bars. YV also asked us to include an essay introducing visitors to New Haven, whose amazing history of entrepreneurial and innovative spirit, extending up to the present, provides not only a perfect primer for guests but also a point of pride for locals.
Indeed, that history is so remarkable that we want to share it with all our readers, starting right now.
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New Haven has changed even more than you might know since its heady first startup days in 1638. Founded by the minister John Davenport, the merchant Theophilus Eaton and their flock of English Puritan settlers, New Haven was America’s purest theocracy—the colony organized in most devoted accordance with scripture. But New Haven was also, per capita, America’s best-funded early venture, founded on a dream of building not only virtue but also wealth.
That investment was even bolder than it sounds. Unlike, say, Massachusetts Bay, New Haven lacked a royal charter from England, meaning it really was a startup—a scrappy, new, entirely independent company working out of a proverbial garage, in a wilderness first named for its native people, the Quinnipiac. The absence of a charter bolstered the settlers’ spiritual mission, preventing any moral compromises England might try to impose. But it also spelled doom for New Haven’s early business ambitions, as only chartered colonies could trade with England’s powerhouse economy.
Decades of stagnation ensued, eventually forcing New Haven’s impressively stubborn residents to accept English hegemony. A tri-party agreement signed in 1662 absorbed New Haven into the northerly Connecticut Colony, to which England granted a royal charter. In return, the crown was owed allegiance plus 20% of any gold and silver mined in Connecticut, whose negotiators secured a remarkably free and self-directed existence otherwise.
Many startups end up merging with other ventures. And you could say New Haven did that again the following century, in the years after 1775, when its most diehard patriot, Benedict Arnold—a local businessman enraged by British taxes and regulations, who really was, before he so famously wasn’t, the most committed of patriots—put the city on his back and carried it into the American Revolution. Arnold later did the same with the entire cause, singlehandedly willing the patriots to victory at Saratoga, which convinced the French to support the rebel cause and turned the tide of war.
Another New Havener, Roger Sherman, was critical in shaping the nation that emerged. During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Sherman proposed an innovative idea that came to be known as the Connecticut Compromise, uniting smaller and larger states around the dually representative legislature we still have today—and breaking a stalemate that threatened the entire American enterprise. He was also the only founding father to sign all four of the major founding documents: the Articles of Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and, finally, the Constitution.
Sherman’s effectiveness as a statesman grew from his experiences as an entrepreneur: first as a shoe cobbler, then a land surveyor, then an almanac writer, then a lawyer, then a retailer. As his business endeavors expanded, so did his reputation. He served in significant private and public positions, from treasurer of Yale to New Haven’s first mayor, an office that arrived in 1784 with the city’s official incorporation into the United States.
Yale had been founded in 1701, completing a move to New Haven from Saybrook, a town up the coast, in 1718. And by the turn of the next century, New Haven’s unique confluence of scholarship and entrepreneurship would make it a driver of a new Revolution, this time Industrial. Recent Yale graduate Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin here in 1794, then helped innovate a much broader and more enduring development: the manufacture and assembly of interchangeable parts, allowing for consistent, efficient, scalable production. Meanwhile, in 1811, to facilitate custom with ever-larger ships, the great local entrepreneur and engineer William Lanson extended New Haven’s main trading pier, already called Long Wharf, so far into the shallow harbor that it became America’s longest—ever.
New Haven’s industrial innovation, production and trade would accelerate all the way through the 19th century, with enough momentum to carry the city well into the 20th. Inventors and manufacturers here developed vulcanized rubber, the lattice truss bridge, “the gun that won the west,” the telephone exchange, even the lollipop. Factories sprouted up in outlying neighborhoods but also right downtown, alongside too many other businesses to count. New Haven industry was impressively specialized, with some of the world’s leading makers of clocks, carriages, hardware, munitions, matches, boilers, even wire bird cages. And yet, as that list indicates, industry here was also remarkably diversified. By the turn of the 20th century, when the average small manufacturing city had homed in on just a single industry, New Haveners worked in factories spanning more than 100—roughly one distinct area of manufacturing for every 1,000 residents.
The decline of local manufacturing—alongside the rise of new pathways of entrepreneurship and innovation—over the course of the 20th century was an echo of a more devastating tale told in less resilient cities. But we’ll tell that story, along with this century’s, in tomorrow’s edition.
Written by Dan Mims. Image features “The First Sunday at New Haven” (Asa Coolidge Warren, ca. 1878), depicting chief spiritual officer John Davenport addressing his fellow settlers upon their arrival in 1638.
