Lessons from the Brains Accelerator - by Ben Reinhardt

In April, we wrapped up the Brains Research Accelerator’s first cohort with an idea-packed demo day. As a reminder, Brains is an accelerator that helps ambitious individuals hone the ideas, skills, and opportunities to execute on impactful research visions that are too early for a company but are too big for a single academic lab; the program is designed to raise their ambitions, help them build skills and refine their ideas, and then go execute on those ideas – whether by running it as a program in a foundation, becoming a program manager at a government ARPA, or starting a Focused Research Organization (FRO). As tends to be the case with the first iteration of anything, the cohort was an adventure that taught us many lessons that seem generalizable beyond our specific context. In the spirit of institutional experiments, these lessons learned seemed worth sharing. Thanks for reading Spectech Newsletter! Subscribe to receive new posts and nudge the world just a bit closer to having spa

In April, we wrapped up the Brains Research Accelerator’s first cohort with an idea-packed demo day. As a reminder, Brains is an accelerator that helps ambitious individuals hone the ideas, skills, and opportunities to execute on impactful research visions that are too early for a company but are too big for a single academic lab; the program is designed to raise their ambitions, help them build skills and refine their ideas, and then go execute on those ideas – whether by running it as a program in a foundation, becoming a program manager at a government ARPA, or starting a Focused Research O