Axis Fellowship
A fellowship to train the next generation of hard-tech founders, starting w/ ex YC founders.
We’re going to significantly increase the number of hard-tech founders.
Today we’re introducing the Axis Fellowship, a program that trains ex-YC founders to build the next generation of hard-tech companies.
Axis Fellowship
Axis is a fellowship that matches recently exited YC founders to internships at early-stage hard-tech startups. It’s designed for ambitious founders who want to break into hard-tech — but don’t yet have the idea, technical depth, or domain expertise to build their company yet.
It’s a win-win because
Founders want a hands-on way to see hard-tech companies, build conviction, upskill technically, and plug into the right network
Hard-tech companies want to hire high-agency operators who can contribute immediately across GTM, ops, and technical sales.
Read on for why we’re building this and how the Axis Fellowship originated.
We need to train hard-tech founders
The Axis Fellowship exists because we want to see more complex-coordination startups be built (SpaceX, Tesla, TSMC, Anduril). We want to see founders tackle hard-to-penetrate industries like energy, manufacturing, materials, biology, defense. Unlike traditional software startups, however, complex-coordination startups demand massive capital, deep technical expertise, and years of R&D before revenue. So the “ship fast break things” software playbook doesn’t work.
Conventional wisdom suggests you need to build a billion-dollar company first, then use that capital and credibility to enter hard-tech.
Elon Musk: PayPal → Tesla, SpaceX
Palmer Luckey: Oculus → Anduril
Eric Lefkofsky: Groupon → Tempus
Peter Thiel : PayPal → Palantir
The problem is that the world can’t afford to wait for every would-be hard-tech founder to become a billionaire first.
So a few of us YC founders came together and imagined a different path.
We believe the best risk-adjusted path to becoming a hard-tech founder isn’t starting a company from scratch with 0 ideas, skills, capital and network. A better strategy is to first work inside an early-stage hard-tech startup, ideally one led by a founder who’s done it before. This kind of experience teaches you the “rare knowledge” needed to build a hard-tech.
Ideation: How to identify the right problem to bet years of your life on
Technical depth: How much physics and engineering you actually need to lead effectively
Capital strategy: How to think about timing, risk, and raising for long-cycle, capital-intensive bets
Founding team design: Who you need by your side to build something that touches atoms
Network: How do you build an effective network of advisors and talent in the hard-tech space?
We think hard-tech founders will significantly increase their probabilities of success by first helping another ambitious startup succeed first. You can think of the Axis Fellowship as helping ambitious founders find their version of the Paypal mafia for hard-tech.
The origin story of Axis Fellowship
I am a YC founder and this started because my first company did not hit true PMF. It’s been 205 days (~7 months) since I made the mental decision to walk away. Since then, I’ve been on a long journey of anxiety, soul-searching, aimless wandering, trying to figure out what’s next. It turns out a lot of founders, after finishing their companies, struggle with finding something meaningful to build.
After reflection, I realized I want to spend my life building ambitious hard-tech startups that I think will have a meaningful impact on the world. But then a torrent of questions…
How do I find the problems that I believe are worth solving?
How do I know what industry to go into?
How do complex coordination startups get built?
What skills do I need to pick up (physics, electrical engineering, AI, business)?
Elon (SpaceX), Lefkofsky (Tempus), Palmer (Anduril) - all built complex-coordination startups without specific domain knowledge? How?
Can their methods be replicated or do you need to be a billionaire?
This led to my substack post on how to systematically build $10B+ industrial startups.
How does a normal founder (i.e. no breakout success $1B outcome) realistically figure out their life mission company?
Is it possible to be intentional about this?
What would step 1 look like?
The truth is I don’t know the answer, but I have a perspective.
Axis is that perspective.
Because I’m not a billionaire / famous founder, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best risk-adjusted path to becoming a hard-tech founder is to first work at an early-stage hard-tech startup with capable founders. This would enable me to be inspired and learn how these startups are built before venturing out again. The wrong path (for me) is to venture out and try to build a hard-tech startup immediately w/ 0 ideas and 0 experience because I’ll likely just fail.
After realizing this, I looked for internships that fit a few criteria.
Ambitious mission
Inspiring founding team
Likely to succeed (e.g. past experience, traction, etc)
I eventually landed an internship at a nuclear enrichment company called GeneralMatter, a FoundersFund incubated startup. Oddly, I noticed Vinay Hiremath (cofounder of $1B startup loom) also took a similar path and started a mechanical engineering internship at a stealth defense startup.
CEOs to interns? What if the key to nurturing the next generation of hard-tech founders is to help ex-founders land awesome hard tech internships!
I pitched this idea to the YC community. Surprisingly, we found a small enthusiastic group of believers (founders who wanted to do internships AND companies who wanted to offer internships). One week later, we made it official, found more founders, found more companies and started telling the world.
Our Plan
We built the Axis Fellowship because we realized that while there are a lot of fellowships / internships for young people in school, there’s no hard-tech fellowship/apprenticeship/internship for founders who just transitioned out of their companies.
This is all an experiment, but our current plan is
Find 10 YC founders who are interested in becoming hard-tech founders
Help them find hard-tech internships and bootstrap expertise
Use this community of aspiring hard-tech founders and convince really good multi-time 10x founders who have built hard-tech companies before to share their expertise on building ambitious companies (e.g. Peter Thiel, Trae Stephens, Eric Lefkofsky)
Build more products that make becoming a hard-tech founder a much more accessible path
We’re starting with YC founders because our network gives us a unique advantage, but if this works, we’ll expand to a more diverse set of founders.
If any of this is exciting, please reach out and consider applying at https://www.axisfellowship.io/.
Let’s build the future — one internship at a time,
Andy Lee, Oliver Wendell-Braly (Axis fellowship founding members)
p.s. special thanks to John Robinson (Bits to Atoms) for introducing us to our first cohort of companies. Bits to Atoms helps hard-tech companies fill hard-to-find technical roles.