Building a Meaningful Fellowship Program [Part 1]

We recently announced our $500 million early growth fund, bringing the firm’s total assets under management to more than $1 billion USD. As mentioned in the announcement, “Prime Movers Lab’s access to high-quality deal flow and technical due diligence capabilities position the firm to be the leading breakthrough science venture fund.” And as our General Partner Amy Kruse said, “Prime Movers Lab prides itself on our due diligence. Our team of technical experts, advisors, and industry leaders helps us invest in companies that have retired science risk. This allows us to focus on ‘how big can it become?’ rather than ‘will it work?’”

We applied a similar philosophy to building our fellowship program, focusing on how big it can become rather than whether or not it’d work. In this two-part series, I hope to provide a more in-depth look at what we are building, how it is going, what we are learning, and how we are adapting as we build our fellowship offering in venture capital and breakthrough science. Here are the questions I hope to answer along the way:

• How are we building a fellowship program that allows our team, alongside our incredible advisors and industry leaders, to be experts in each of the areas we are considering for investment? What about with shifting global regulatory and physical environments?
• What type of program successfully supports deep scientific and technical diligence given the volume of breakthrough technologies that we review each year?
• How can venture capital firms welcome more people into the venture community that maybe otherwise wouldn’t have direct access?
• How can we use venture capital fellowships to build a larger pool of talent that add value to the startup, private equity, and venture capital ecosystem to create pipelines for each other?

So, let’s begin.

Getting Started

Here is the outline we created for our fellowship planning program document as we kicked off development:

• Duration and details
• Work products
• Research focus areas
• Access and opportunity

Duration and Details

We based the duration and volume of fellows in each cohort on the preference of our internal team and their desired bandwidth when it comes to providing a positive and rewarding experience for each fellow. There was no mathematical equation, it was based on meaningful discussions with our team about how they want to spend their time and how we can make sure our fellowship program is valuable to others. We landed on 2 fellows per person, every 16 weeks. The first 12 weeks are spent doing landscaping, discovery, and diligence with the last 4 weeks spent doing content development.

We adopted an optional compensation philosophy for our fellowship program, allowing fellows to choose between an hourly rate or receiving carry in our fund, based on their risk appetite vs. their desire for a more immediate payoff. They have been chosen equally at this stage in our fellowship program, with half the fellows choosing the hourly rate and half choosing the carry.

Work Products

Work products for fellowship programs are different for every venture capital or private equity firm and even more so for startups themselves offering fellowship programs. The way you need to support an investment team of 80 is different from the way you need to support an investment team of 8, just like the tools and solutions you need to support an investment portfolio of 45 companies are very different from when you are supporting an investment portfolio of 450 companies. And if you are supporting a startup, you are looking to maximize completely different outcomes.

The key work products, and key reasons behind, creating our fellowship program for venture are the following:

• Landscaping: Identifying interesting companies and technologies in the area of interest and expertise.
• Market Summary: Active market players in the area of interest and expertise.
• Internal Research Presentation: Present findings for our entire team.
• Content Generation: Multiple Medium posts on discovery and findings from diligence, one webinar hosted with a technical partner along with one formal thought leadership paper at the end of the fellowship.

Research Focus Areas

As Forbes mentioned and Dakin stated, Prime Movers Lab is quite clear about which scientific discoveries we are most excited about. The hard part is finding the deals that our team wants to do. Our fellowship research focus areas thus far have included mineral extraction and the electric grid, with our fall cohort focused on robotic assistance while we onboard new team members and have others head out on paid family leave. As our Breakthrough Science Roadmap highlights, our interests include niches like graphene, labor augmentation technology, and decarbonizing agriculture which will guide our priorities in future fellowship cohorts.

Access and Opportunity

Part of our intention in developing our fellowship ecosystem is to create lasting relationships with our experts and fellows, despite what they go on to do professionally after spending time with us. Another intention is to expand access to venture capital career opportunities for people with technical and scientific backgrounds, who may not be aware of our industry or how valuable they can be on teams like ours.

When we launched our first cohort of fellows, we proactively recruited experts in the niches we wanted to focus on. We didn’t wait for people to come to us, we took the opportunity to help us establish the prestige and value of our fellowship directly to the experts we wanted to work with. This was by no means the easiest way to get started but it was the best way to lay the foundation for the type of fellowship we want to build.

We’ve kept the desired background and academic prestige of our fellows flexible by design, welcoming Ph.D. students, MBA students, MBA grads, and post-docs who want to gain exposure to venture capital and startups working in scientific breakthroughs. This allows us to help bridge the gap between academia and the private sector, while also creating opportunities for our fellows to join the startups we have invested in when they might not otherwise be exposed to those companies and roles.

As we moved into the second cohort of fellows, we began laying the groundwork for our university partnerships. The goal is to build relationships with top programs relevant to our work streams, in key markets with exciting deal flow in our investment verticals, that can streamline quality fellows to us for consideration. So far, we have built fellowship partnerships with innovative programs within Stanford Graduate Business School and MIT, and are working on building similar relationships with elite programs and incubators within Georgia Tech, Harvard, and UC Berkeley. We will be expanding our university partnerships as we continue welcoming additional cohorts of future fellows.

The second cohort of fellows also brought an exciting and unexpected development, a waitlist. We started having the ability to place future cohorts before current ones kicked off. So what do we hope to do with this momentum in the future? We’ll see. Maybe we will have our founders vote on which fellows they’d like us to bring on board. Maybe we begin connecting our fellow cohorts to each other for collaboration and incubation. Maybe we generate great pipelines of people for our portfolio companies to hire directly. Maybe we will find a couple of future founders to invest in. And maybe our fellowship becomes so valuable to scientific and technical experts that word of mouth and competition between referred fellow candidates becomes our key pipeline. The fellowship program enables us to expand our expert ecosystem in meaningful but flexible ways over time, while also encouraging the fellowship ecosystem to directly engage with each other, our founders, and our advisors as they all work through different scientific breakthroughs.

The value and opportunity we hope to provide our fellows is more expansive visibility of their expertise and the opportunity to expand their own personal brand, direct access to our founders and advisors, unique features on our social media channels, invites to our winter and summer summits, as well as invites to intimate dinner parties and curated tours of innovative startups hosted for elite audiences all over the world.

Evolving the Program

When fellows start, they are given a 16-week Fellowship Roadmap which they are walked through alongside one of our technical partners, who mentors them and meets with them weekly throughout the fellowship. This outlines key details, meetings, people, goals, and outcomes for the fellow to focus on in four-week sprints.

As fellows settle in, we send out an anonymous survey to collect their feedback on how the experience is going. The first survey is sent four weeks after they start and focuses on whether or not expectations for their fellowship were clear, how their onboarding experience was, and what has been most exciting and challenging thus far. The second survey focuses on whether or not our Fellowship Roadmap has been reflective of their experience, deadlines, and deliverables. It also begins to lay the groundwork for the fellow to start thinking about what is resonating with them thus far in their research. The third survey is focused on how they feel wrapping up their research and if they feel confident and clear about moving into their content creation. The fourth is a reflective survey focused on what they would change, what they wished they got to do more of, what they would like to do next, if and how this experience changed them, and who they want to recommend to do the next cohort.

It takes a village to create abundance at scale, and we hope our breakthrough fellowship program will help free people from constraints and raise collective consciousness allowing each of us to use our skill sets to help create the world we want and need to build moving forward. We’ll follow up with part two of this series as we move into the end of the year, reflecting on improvements we are implementing going into our fourth cohort in 2023.

Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.

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