What Makes A Great Flagship Ventures Fellow
By: Ray Lian
In 2012, while I was finishing up school at Chicago Booth, I got an invite to join the Flagship VentureLabs Summer Fellowship program. I knew I wanted to work on a startup after school, so I decided come to Boston and check it out.
For those of you unfamiliar with Flagship Ventures, it’s a unique venture capital firm based in Cambridge, MA. Unlike traditional VC’s, Flagship doesn’t just invest in early stage companies; it also creates them. The latter is done through its VentureLabs unit.
VentureLabs has its own unique process of company creation that moves along 3 stages: Exploration, Proto-company, and Startup formation. To date, 27 life-science and technology startups have been created within VentureLabs.
The Fellowship challenged and grew me in ways I didn’t expect. I gained hands-on experience in Flagship’s unique approach and got to work with some of the smartest and most creative people I’ve ever met.
Our class of Fellows was made up of about 20 people, mostly PhD, MS, MD, and MBA candidates. To conduct the Exploration phase, we gathered into teams of 3–4 people and explored a theme or industry chosen by the partners. The goal was to come up with new venture hypotheses.
In the beginning, it felt like we were searching for a needle in a haystack in the dark. We tried our best to collect new information, parse out what mattered, and debate ideas thoroughly. But our early hypotheses were not great.
After several iterations, something click for me. I grew more uninhibited in pursing my curiosity and imagination, and my ideas got better. At the end of the Fellowship, Flagship asked me to come back to continue working on the ideas I developed.
I’ve always been fascinated by people and what enables them to thrive in certain situations. So recently I decided to interview some folks at Flagship to find out what makes someone a good fit for Flagship’s approach to innovation.
The overwhelming majority of responses pointed to intangible qualities as keys to success. These were:
- Comfort with ambiguity — Often times the topic of focus required us to go into intellectual landscapes with poorly-defined boundaries to seek solutions that may or may not exist.
- Intellectual curiosity — To make sense of a space, we had to rapidly gather and understand new information. People who are intellectually curious go farther and deeper.
- Strong imagination and creativity in solving complex problems — Many great ideas are fuzzy and incomplete in the beginning and run counter to conventional wisdom. Such ideas don’t come about through logic alone. They require a strong imagination.
- A healthy balance of optimism and skepticism — Great ideas often flow from the constant back and forth between optimism and pessimism. Optimism provides the fuel and pessimism ensures validation and rigor. Sometimes this balance can be provided by two people.
- Ability to communicate ideas persuasively —Fellows have to convince their teammates and Flagship Partners that their ideas are worth pursuing.
Such intangible qualities are often hard to decipher from resumes and interviews, and best validated by people who have worked with each other.
Today, several of the Explorations conducted during my Summer Fellowship are now Flagship portfolio companies, including one that I currently have the privilege of running called WhoQuest.
WhoQuest allows people who have worked together to endorse each other’s strengths and positive qualities in a meaningful and useful way. We focus on both tangible skills and intangible qualities.
In an interesting turn of events, Flagship is using WhoQuest to find Summer Fellows at Harvard Business School. If you think you know someone at HBS that would be a good fit for the Fellowship, go here, connect with your Facebook account, and nominate them in one of the three questions we’ve prepared.
Flagship will interview the top result for each question.
Special Thanks to Avak Kahvejian, Jordi Mata-Fink, and John Round for helping me put this together.
