The little known ($1,000,000) Shuttleworth Fellowship
TL;DR There’s this foundation based out of South Africa that supports amazing people doing amazing work with fellowship grants and a network of entrepreneurs.
The Shuttleworth Foundation offers fellowship opportunities to individuals with an innovative idea for social change. Our niche funding is available to ideas that use open licences and open approaches to social change. We are most interested in ideas focused around knowledge and learning, access to information, and technology.
We offer a fellowship grant (salary equivalent to the Fellow) as well as $245,000 project funding to implement the idea. The Fellowship is for one year and renewable for up to 3 consecutive years.
Apply today. (Deadline Oct. 31)
There are many fellowships out there. The MacArthur Genius Grant gives fellows $500,000. The Thiel Fellowship gives $100,000 to teenagers who agree to drop out of school. Then there’s the Shuttleworth Fellowship; the least known and most awesome of them all.
It was April of 2012 and I was coming up on a year of self funding a start-up. Unlike most start-ups, everything we built was open sourced on Github.
I realized from the beginning that I’d need to raise funding. The $25,000 I got from Kickstarter was more validation of the idea than anything else. I had co-founded a start-up prior and was only familiar with angel, seed and VC type investments. So that’s what I naturally went after. I saw VC funding as a double edged sword. A necessary evil, in a way. One I’d have gladly stabbed myself with.
My idea was to fix the problems inherent with companies that store your data for you. I was most interested in photos; after-all I spent 4 years in the space at my prior start-up. I’ve never trusted a company or website with the archival of my photos. Furthermore I believed that local archives were going to be a thing of the past. So how could cloud storage solve the problems with companies shutting down, products sunsetting and the idea that a local NAS wasn’t the future?
Turns out it was simple. Separate the application and data logic, let users choose where their content is stored, let them migrate it elsewhere without involving a giant zip file and do all of this as easily as it is to create a Flickr account.
And what if someone didn’t trust me to run the servers which that application logic is executed on? Or what if they didn’t buy into my idea that a NAS device in the basement wasn’t the future? Open sourcing the work solved that in a couple ways. It let users install the software on their servers and phones. And if they opted not to they can still have reasonable confidence to know what actual code is running on on their mobile phones and the servers that I was footing the bill for.
I wasn’t trying to build a $1 billion company but I knew what we were building had to be comparable to the big guys else it would only fill a FOSS niche.That niche is being well served by many great projects. My goal was always to get the software used by the average person. And I needed it to be a profitable business to get there. Not exactly the type of story that resonates with for-profit investors. But I needed their money, right?
Back to that April in 2012. I was coming up on a year of bootstrapping. Patrick had recently quit his job and joined me full time as a co-founder. We had a community and we had momentum. But our bank accounts were running dry.
I somehow found out about the Shuttleworth Foundation. I watched the video on their site and thought I could be a fit. That day I tried to find out how I was connected to one of their existing fellows. I found my way to Philipp Schmidt who had a fellowship for P2PU. To be completely honest, I was looking for money so I could keep building and growing OpenPhoto (now Trovebox). What I got was so much more.
There’s nothing I could say about my fellowship that would do the experience any justice. I don’t believe there’s anything quite like it. If you’re doing something that falls in line with their funding model then I implore you to apply.
