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The Inflection Program gives builders the confidence to trust their "crazy idea" by acting as an early believer. We want to catch spikey personalities before they take the safe path (big tech or academia) and help them transition to doing their own, riskier thing. We provide enough activation energy to get something done, and reward those with a bias to fast experimentation and iteration.
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We're hiring a Program Director to own the Inflection Fellowship and Inflection Grants as institutions: to find extraordinary young builders before anyone else does, to design an experiential fellowship unlike any other in the world, and to nurture the people who come through it into a network that compounds for decades.
This is a founding, full-time, long-term role, not a cohort-by-cohort contract. The role includes founder-level ownership as well as hands-on execution. We now have multi-year backing for these programs, and we want someone who will take co-founder-level ownership of what they become over a three-year-plus horizon.
Over the longer term, this role could develop into a broader leadership role of Edge Institute, our non-profit arm with 501(c)(3) status.
Before the detail, the shape of the person:
A sourcer with reach and taste. You find exceptional people through your own networks and know how to leverage ours. You treat talent-spotting as a craft, and you're excellent at interviewing and judgment.
A strategist and owner who's hands-on. You think on a three-year view and act like a co-founder of the program: setting vision, making calls without waiting to be told, building systems and culture that outlast any cohort, and owning the funder relationships that make the program sustainable over the long term.
Genuinely nurturing, high EQ. You help people see their own potential by creating the conditions for them to discover it, not by telling them. Fellows trust you with how they're really doing. You understand people stay when they feel seen, and that the best talent development looks more like real relationship than program management.
Operationally solid. You run a smooth application process, track outcomes, communicate clearly, and build systems that don't depend on you. You're comfortable living and working embedded with a cohort for the duration of each village.
Everything above rolls up into three capabilities. If you're strong on all three, we want to talk.
The single most important skill in this role is spotting extraordinary people before they're obvious, and then actually landing them. You live for this. You keep lists. You follow the weird 19-year-olds on X. You ask everyone you meet who the most impressive person they know is, and you go find them.
The best fellows almost never come through an open application form. So sourcing is the core of the job, not a step in a funnel. You bring your own networks (university tech scenes, hacker houses, builder and research communities) and you know how to work ours: the Edge community, Long Journey, past fellows and grantees, and the residency leads and mentors moving through each village. You're as comfortable cold-reaching a stranger you're convinced is special as you are asking a past fellow for their three most talented friends.
You’re also excellent in the room. Interviewing well is a craft: reading potential under nervousness, telling real spikes from polish, and figuring out fast whether someone is at a genuine potential inflection point. You'll own and keep improving how we evaluate people, and your judgment will set the bar for the whole program.
This is what makes it a Director role. We don't want someone to run the program we have; we want someone to think hard about what it should become and build it.
The strategic question you'll own: how do we make this the most unusual, experiential talent program in the world, something categorically different from a Thiel Fellowship wire transfer or an Emergent Ventures grant? Our answer so far is that the fellowship is lived, not administered: fellows don't get money and a Slack channel, they get weeks inside a village of hundreds of builders, researchers, and investors, with daily rhythms, mentors in the sauna, demos over dinner, and a cohort they live alongside. That experiential layer is the moat. Your job is to deepen it.