Launching the Sixth Cohort of Primary’s NYC Founders Fellowship: Data

Today we’re opening applications for the sixth cohort of Primary’s NYC Founders Fellowship, a six-month, part-time immersion in business creation for aspiring entrepreneurs to supercharge the next wave of startups. After successfully running an open-source specific cohort earlier this year, we’re excited to unveil our next specialized cohort: data.

We're focusing Cohort VI on founders who are building in the data space and are interested in the modern data stack. If you’re an early-stage entrepreneur building a data startup, we’d love to hear from you!

We are focusing on data because data is the oil of the 21st century. All businesses, whether they want to or not, consume and transform data to meet their business needs. Many successful companies have and will continue to be born out of this necessity, and we want to support the best founders in NYC building around this theme.

As a leading seed-stage VC firm in NYC, we’ve guided founders along this journey many times over, identifying key skills that founders need to develop along the way:

• Establishing an early team. Who you start the journey with (and it could be just yourself) will inform every aspect of your startup experience.
• Developing a go-to-market strategy and business model. This strategy must be informed by research, expert advice specific to your category, and early tests.
• Raising money. If you have done the first two steps correctly, this part becomes easier. But it still takes work: developing a phenomenal pitch deck, building a support network, and completing a seed round.
• Mastering the inner game. Starting a company is a demanding, complex, and psychologically challenging endeavor. Peer support, honest feedback, and coaching are all needed.

The NYC Founders Fellowship is designed to coach you on all of these skills to become an exceptional founder, making room for lots of analysis, experimentation, and peer support. If this is of interest to you, you have come to the right place. This program is completely tailored to match the interests of aspiring founders:

• Part-time. We think it’s important to enable aspiring founders to explore their business ideas without the risk of quitting a full-time job. Aspiring founders deserve the chance to mitigate risk and explore new opportunities in a collaborative setting with no strings attached.
• No equity. Primary takes no equity for being a part of this program. This is a platform for participants to learn, explore, and start a business on their terms.
• Peer-based. This program centers around cohorts. Fellows will learn from each other and exchange consistent feedback from other aspiring founders. If nothing else, participants will come away with an incredible network.

Who should apply?

If you’re an aspiring founder working on an early-stage data project, we’d love to talk. We are interested in people who meet the following criteria:

• Sector: You are building, or want to build, a venture-scale data business.
• Stage: You haven’t yet raised institutional capital, but you are actively working on a specific project or have an idea in mind.
• Experience: You have “earned insights” and a competitive advantage in a market or domain from prior work experience.

What are the nuts and bolts of the program?

The program will last three months, with peer groups of four or five fellows each. The program consists of weekly peer group meetings, pitch sessions, and office hours with the Primary team. We are also thrilled to partner with some amazing thought leaders in the data community, including builders, investors, and entrepreneurs who will host fireside chats and panels with fellows.

All of this programming will be overlaid with our Startup 101 curriculum, a series of readings and content covering the most important basics of starting a company, including product-market fit, knowing your customer, business model, and fundraising. We are also thrilled to partner with SVB, Gunderson Dettmer, IVP, Vouch, and Carta, who work closely with you on starting your business and provide hands-on support and feedback.

We started this program because we want to reduce the friction that prevents talented founders from building impactful businesses. We hope this opportunity enables some of you to make the leap into entrepreneurship.

To apply, please fill out the application HERE by Wednesday, September 14th. The Data cohort will begin on Monday, October 3rd.

Questions? Reach out to emma@primary.vc. We look forward to meeting you soon!