Introducing Fusion Fund's VC Fellowship!

I wanted to share an exciting project that my Managing Partner Lu Zhang and I have been working on the past few months – Fusion Fund’s inaugural VC Fellowship program! If you are currently a working professional in a STEM role or a post-graduate/PhD, and are thinking of exploring a career in VC, the VC Fellowship program is a terrific way to learn the VC decision making process and the various mechanical and strategic considerations that most early-stage VCs will emphasize when building conviction in a startup.

The inspiration for Fusion Fund’s VC Fellowship program partially stems from my own experience transitioning to an investment role at an institutional venture fund – particularly the first few months which could effectively be summarized as drinking from a firehose of VC knowledge. I was extremely fortunate to have the in-house training infrastructure to help me quickly ramp up (and the guidance and extra rope that my partners gave in case I stumbled!). The training at Fusion Fund helped add new dimensions to my investment mindset that I had already begun forming from prior my angel investing adventures. It also honed the various skillsets in my VC “toolkit” required successfully execute a deal (complex scenario modeling, surfacing problems in lengthy legal docs, etc.). As a result, my accelerated ramp-up culminated in my first investment just a month into my time at Fusion Fund!

Since my first investment, I’ve seen hundreds of decks and pitches, and have leaned on my extended engineering network to help Fusion Fund better understand deeply technical domains, from space tug technologies to next generation battery systems to federated learning in healthcare. Throughout this process, the Fusion Fund investment team and I have come across many individuals with tremendous potential to be great investors, but have never had the chance to step into the at-times “mysterious” VC ecosystem. We have tailored Fusion Fund’s VC Fellowship program for these motivated individuals (leveraging Fusion Fund’s extensive training platform and drawing from my own experiences transitioning from engineering to VC), with the goal of helping to foster the next generation of great technical investors. Ultimately, we want to help our Fellows build a mental framework to identify startups that can successfully execute in large, winner-take-all markets, and analyze companies across multiple dimensions, including founder-market fit, technology differentiation, market sizing/growth.

Over the 4-month VC Fellowship program, Fellows will have exposure to the internal workings of the entire VC investment “loop”, from sourcing to conducting due diligence to portfolio support (and learn exactly happens at those Monday IC meetings!). The Fellows will also have access to customized trainings & hands-on tasks to get “reps” in for every stage of the investment process and the opportunity to assist the investment team with ongoing deals. We will also host talks featuring founders, operators, and investors as well as in-person events in the Bay Area (safety permitting) to help the Fellows build closer ties to the startup and investing communities.

If you are interested, applications are now open (additional details about the fellowship can be found here, application here) and will be reviewed on a rolling basis until May 6th, with the program officially launching early June. Questions can be directed to fellow@fusionfund.com, or you can reach me directly via LinkedIn or Twitter.