Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism Fund has established a recent fellowship program aimed at bringing top engineers and technologists into enterprise investing, which could help the firm discover less obvious sources of VC talent.
The American Dynamism Fund was established in 2023, and its overall goal is to support firms building the country’s interests in hard technology sectors, including manufacturing, robotics, space and defense. Of the recent $7.2 billion a16z fund, roughly $600 million has been committed to American Dynamism.
In the 12-month American Dynamism Engineering Fellows program, three technologists will take a crash course in investing, and fellows will spend a yr learning about enterprise investing, working with partners to evaluate potential investments and engaging with the fund’s portfolio of business firms. At the end of the program, fellows will potentially find a way to join a company, join a portico or even determine to start their very own company, which is “a win in any scenario,” fund partner David Ulevitch said in a recent interview.
“We’ve always had a lot of technologists at this company, but over the last few years the people who have really aggressively applied for jobs at Andreessen Horowitz have tended to be people in finance and banking,” he said. “But we really like to have strong technologists and people who think about the product and think about the future.”
But some of these people may not initially think that investing or being a startup founder is mandatory for them. Ulevitch said the program was created as a structured way for technically minded people to consider a profession change.
“The question of how to attract tech workers is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” he said. “The people coming in aren’t always the ones we’re actually trying to find, so this is a way to open up and cast a wider net.”
“When investing, you often need people who seem the least obvious candidates,” he added.
It’s quite essential that candidates have some level of business work experience, equivalent to spending several years at a startup, but achieved individuals who have pursued advanced degrees alongside excellent business or personal projects might also be suitable, Ulevitch said. Successful fellows should have expertise spanning hardware and software and must be excited about the opportunity to scale American Dynamism’s mission more broadly.
The American Dynamism team goals to run the fellowship annually, and chosen fellows live in San Francisco or New York. Program details and link to apply might be found here.