Building is dating problems - you explore, you learn, you grow with each one. Starting a company is a marriage to one of those problems, a deep commitment to solving it.

This dating phase is uncertain and often thankless. The effort-to-reward ratio looks terrible on paper, especially when you have a quant internship offer in the back of your mind - offering you the kind of money your parents have never seen.

But you might feel your inner compass pull in a different direction. The compass speaks with the voice of your 15-year-old self, the one who stood in front of a mirror and promised to do something that matters. The zero-sum games of climbing corporate ladders at Google or trading options at Citadel feel hollow against that promise.

It gets confusing...

So you make a compromise. "I'll make money first, then build later." Unfortunately, this is a bit iffy. Some people do return, but the golden handcuffs get tighter with time. Life grows more complex as you grow up - partners, mortgages, weddings, kids. You go from maximizing expected value to minimizing volatility. And building is nothing but volatility.

So later in life, after giving it a lot of thought, you make the rational decision, and commit to your line of work, making the temporary stint a permanent career. Your 15 year old voice is gently but conclusively silenced, locked in a box with all your other naive and idealistic ideas.

But it’s that naiveté and idealism that moves the world forward. For example, if 99% of ideas fail, a pessimist that automatically labels every idea bad would be right 99% of the time. That’s an A+. But they will add exactly 0 value.

Pessimism is usually accurate, but usually also useless.

Conversely, the naive optimist that labels every idea good would be right just 1% of the time. But they would add far more value.

We're here at FAF to encourage that idealism for as long as possible. We are all at the inflection point where careers—and lives—get defined. The question is: how do we make it easier for people to listen to their inner 15 year old?

In our experience, the three most impactful things here are:

1. Support from your community for the milestones that only other builders would celebrate. People want respect from those they respect, so your surroundings affect you a lot.
2. Money to feed you and to buy tools. This money also reminds you, your parents and your circles that you're not jobless, that others value what you're doing.
3. Feedback from people who benefitted from your work. This is the most addicting. Once you taste this, you're hooked for life.

Our goal is to be a catalyst, reducing the activation energy necessary to get to 3. We've made good progress on 1 —the members of FAF genuinely care about and inspire one another. (ask folks in FAF if you don't believe us).

We've always got great energy in the room.

We are now tackling 2. Traditional VC isn't the answer for this - it prematurely constrains the space of problems you can tackle. Words like TAM shouldn't have even entered your head yet. Your sole focus should be on shipping something and getting to 3.

Hence the builder fellowship. We give small non-dilutive grants of $1-10k to projects that can meaningfully add value to a group of people. In return, people condense their learnings regularly and share it with FAF and sponsors (+ the broader community if they choose to). Could be through open source code, detailed blog posts, videos, updates on user impact. Something tangible.

Flavors of projects we plan to fund:

1. 3D printed robot that prints any website on the internet in Braille
2. AI graphic designer with taste
3. Democratizing AI through edge compute by optimizing single-batch kernels
4. Understanding AI models better using physics inspired mech-interp probes
5. AI English tutor that democratizes Stanford education (built on super low latency avatars trained from scratch)
6. A generative storybook printing press, complete with beautiful illustrations.

We hope to provide the timely nudge for brilliant people to stay on the path their 15-year-old self would be proud of.

Happy times.

Join us