This month we kicked off year 4 of the Bowery Capital Fellowship. We’re excited to announce our 2020 Bowery Capital Fellows: Novi Zhukovsky (Dartmouth University), Hyung Song (University of California, Berkeley), Aryan Malesha (University of Michigan), and Lucy Jeffs (University of Chicago).
Kicking off a fellowship in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic was somewhat challenging. We seriously questioned whether it made sense to put the Fellowship on hiatus this year as several of our host companies were understandably no longer in a position to take on a summer intern. After lots of back and forth, we agreed that our end goal was to ensure all fellows had access to internship opportunities this summer and decided to bring the Fellowship in house. We got to work in building out a sales development bootcamp while simultaneously helping our host companies that were still hiring with recruiting and eventually spinning them out of the program.
In case you’re not familiar with the Bowery Capital Fellowship, let’s rewind a little. The Fellowship is built on 3 pillars; experience, education and mentorship. Historically, fellows have interned with host companies in the NYC tech ecosystem in a typical summer internship capacity. To round out this experience, Fellows also participate in our ‘Coffee with Closers’ curriculum throughout the summer (basically the A-Z on all things revenue), we link them up with a mentor, and of course no startup experience is complete without the social opportunities.
So what exactly has changed this year? Our Director of Growth, Evan McElwain, has spun up an internal sales development bootcamp and our Fellows are now working under our Growth umbrella. Each Fellow has also been assigned to one or two of our portfolio companies providing 2020 Fellows with the unique experience of working at a startup while being entrenched in the world of venture capital. The rest of our programming remains mostly unchanged but it is worth mentioning that given we’re still in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve also gone virtual.
We’re already at the end of week 3 and though Summer has just started, lot’s has happened. We’ve checked off bootcamp training, 2 Coffee with Closers sessions (kicking off with a very special Bowery alum, Alexandra Adamson, who built the original Fellowship program), 15+ firm wide meetings (we’re big on staying connected in the remote world!), a large-scale group social media project for our Marketing Summit, not to mention all of the firm and portfolio work in-between.
The Fellowship is truly a group effort and we wouldn’t be able to run this program without our awesome portfolio companies, mentors, and career center partners. A huge thank you to everyone involved and a special shout out to my counterpart, Evan!
Interested in learning more about the program as a potential host company or Fellow? Please reach out to Jessica Bernido: jessica.bernido@bowerycap.com.
If you liked “Announcing our 2020 Bowery Capital Fellows!” and want to read more content from the Bowery Capital Team, check out other relevant posts on the Bowery Capital Blog.
