Update: Brains Demo Day
Further letters from the trenches
We just wrapped Demo Day for the first cohort of the Brains Fellows and it was awesome! You can watch a highlight reel here.
The 11 fellows pitched programs on, in no particular order1:
Ubiquitous space telescopes
New paradigms in magnet manufacturing
Tools to increase the success rate of clinical trials by an order of magnitude
Unlocking the power of our immune systems’ history
Turning atmospheric carbon into useful chemicals
Creating a foundation AI model of the human brain
Using new construction techniques to slash the cost of nuclear power
Ubiquitous indoor agriculture
Protein-based fibers with impossible properties
Discovering new superconductors and other materials through AI and high-throughput screening
General purpose construction robots
The work isn’t done, of course — demo day is the starting gun for these programs to get funding and find a home, whether it is in a government ARPA, an existing nonprofit, or a brand-new organization.
Even though it will still take some time for the programs to get going and even longer for us to see their outputs, we think we’re onto something important. That hunch comes in no small part from the fellows’ feedback at the end of the program — some things that the fellows have said about the program (entirely uncoerced, I swear) include:
“If you hadn’t pushed me to do this I would have given up on my idea and gotten a normal job”
“I never would have gotten this idea to the point it’s at without Brains”
“This experience has been truly formative”
These results were a team effort. So many people who were critical to the program’s success: the mentors who worked with the fellows, to the research leaders who shared their stories, the teams who helped run the events, our awesome advisors and ops team, and more. We’re especially grateful to Dr. Joshua Elliott, who co-created the program and is now moving on to his new role at Renaissance Philanthropy.
There are compounding returns to talent programs like Brains: repeated iterations enable us to refine our selection criteria and how we help the fellows; if you can maintain quality, you will build a reputation that both attracts more of the right people and makes it easier for them to be successful; and a growing community of people who have gone through a program create powerful network effects. As such, we plan to run regular cohorts as long as we can, with the next one tentatively kicking off next January.
So:
If you have an ambitious science or technology research idea that is a poor fit for a single academic lab and doesn’t make sense as a startup (or are already working on one), keep your eyes peeled for when we open applications for cohort two!
If you know someone who might be a good fit for the program, please route them our way!
If you work at an organization that might want to hire or fund current or future fellows, or support the Brains program itself – please get in touch!
Here’s to unlocking the ambitions of many more Brains 🧠
I originally listed three of them just to give you a teaser but I couldn’t decide which three because they are all so cool.