Building a Meaningful Fellowship Program [Part 2]

Back in September, we shared details about how we created the structural foundation for our fellowship program to benefit the firm’s investment strategy and maximize the opportunities it provides for our fellows. We have now had multiple successful cohorts and wanted to provide an update on what we’ve learned thus far, how we have evolved our program, and where we are expanding our strategic partnerships.

Updating the Program

Previously, our fellows focused on research and due diligence for twelve weeks, followed by four weeks of content creation. We’ve now shifted the structure and timeline for content creation to start happening much sooner, developing the fellow’s thesis and thought paper week by week as the fellowship kicks off and advances in depth and direction. We’ve learned that finding experts to landscape with by week four, and hosting a webinar with those experts by week eight or ten, gives the fellow more meaningful guidance and information for their thesis as it develops and evolves vs. creating a content crunch and unnecessary stress in the final stage of the fellowship. This shifted approach also helps our fellows develop their research priorities earlier by identifying interesting friction points for further exploration with our expert ecosystem, and our mentors are able to insure the fellows are spending their time and depth in areas where it moves the needle for our firm and for our deal flow, as markets shift and evolve globally.

Increasing Access to Unique Experiences

In our first three cohorts, our fellows had the opportunity to attend diligence on sites in Austin and San Francisco with our partners, to participate on an in-person panel at our Breakthrough Science Summit in Scottsdale, and attend CES in Las Vegas with our investment team. While each experience is based on the unique timing, topic, and events for each cohort, we are aiming to provide experiences that our fellows may not otherwise have, at least in the same setting, adding additional value to their fellowship and networking opportunities.

Expanding Our Fellowship Partnerships

As we continue to build a strong and selective foundation for our fellowship program, one key takeaway has been that having strategic partnerships with universities and labs we respect in similar areas of interest, has been incredibly fruitful for finding our fellows. This past fall, our Venture Partner Amy Kruse and I presented to MIT Ph.D. students over tacos and it was during that presentation that we found our Spring 2023 Ocean Fellow. We partnered with MIT Sea Grant to host the session last fall, which was an intentional target, to help us lock in a climate-related fellow for our spring cohort.

Finding meaningful labs, teams, and partners within these universities is why we have built a successful strategic fellowship program thus far because we have naturally aligned priorities and offer each other unique opportunities for exploration and expansion. In December, we also visited Stanford Graduate School of Business after working with the leader of their Venture Capital Club, and two of our current fellows were able to attend in person so they could answer questions directly about their experience. One of them is currently an MBA student at SGSB and we had so many students RSVP that we had to be moved to a larger room the day of the event!

Because of the success of these partnerships, we are now working on developing fellowship partnerships with Caltech and a handful of labs at the University of California — Berkeley. More to come on this in the months ahead.

Connecting Fellows and the Ecosystem

We have begun inviting our fellows to some of the in-person events we host routinely throughout the year for our team, founders, and investors so they can spend meaningful time with each other and our ecosystem. They are also connected to each other digitally every six months, welcoming new fellows into the mix and getting updates on what each other is working on and where.

As we continue to welcome new people, perspectives, and feedback into our fellowship program, we’ll continue sharing meaningful updates on how it is growing and evolving over time. For now, it is going better than expected because of the time, structure, support, and partnerships being prioritized to provide positive and unique experiences for our fellows and our firm.

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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