Personal Projects The Company Fellowship for Inevitable Hosts The Company Fellowship is a fellowship I co-founded with Jake Sacks, with its first cohort beginning in 2027. I announced it with the following speech, given standing in front of the largest collection of records in the world, because why not?
It gives a window into our view on what’s important today and what we think will be increasingly important tomorrow. It began with a recitation of the following essay from Steph Ango. I’ve read it to every team I’ve worked with for the past three years.
In Good Hands Steph Ango There is a feeling I search for: being in good hands. It is the feeling I look to give and the feeling I look to receive.
I know I am in good hands when I sense a cohesive point of view expressed with attention to detail.
I can feel it almost instantly. In any medium. Music, film, fashion, architecture, writing, software. At a Japanese restaurant it's what omakase aims to be. I leave it up to you, chef.
When I am in good hands I open myself to a state of curiosity and appreciation. I allow myself to suspend preconceived notions. I give you freedom to take me where you want to go. I immerse myself in your worldview and pause judgement.
I want to be convinced of something new. I want my mind to be changed. Later I may disagree, but for now I am letting the experience soak in.
That trust doesn't come easily. As an audience member it's about feeling cared for from the moment I interact with your work. It's about feeling a well-defined point of view permeate what you make.
If my mind was changed, I must have been in good hands.
The reason this felt important to bring into the room today, even though none of us are working together yet, is that it’s the best articulation I’ve found of our ambitions for this fellowship: why we think it’s important, who we’re building it for and, maybe just as importantly, who we’re not.
Vision, volition and POV We are building this fellowship for people who have vision, volition and a distinct point of view, along with the technical skills to make that point of view permeate everything they create.
Leaders who get it. We will invest in leaders first and foremost. But they will be leaders who know how to gather people around an idea and build an audience through extraordinary hospitality. When I say hospitality, I’m not talking about hotels. I’m simply talking about how you make people feel.
A great host creates the conditions under which people become more alive, curious, agentic and connected. They are able to turn a collection of individuals into a community capable of changing things in a way they never could on their own. They are simply exceptional at creating the conditions for people to connect, trust one another and act together, whether that is through media, experiences or any other medium.
And that kind of hosting cannot be learned in isolation. Its most important elements are tacit: judgment, timing, taste, knowing when to intervene or when to disappear, understanding how a room should feel and diagnosing when it’s missing the mark.
You learn those things by watching someone extraordinary do them. It’s why the apprenticeship model has existed for hundreds of years. It’s why restaurants have stages.
The fellowship will therefore be built around short, embedded apprenticeships with some of the most innovative and storied hospitality and community projects in the world. Places like the NFL, Babylonstoren farm and hotel in South Africa, Disney Parks, Reed Hastings’s project at Powder Mountain, or Pioneer Works here in Brooklyn. We want to take people we believe are inevitable and dramatically expand their bank of experiences. We’re intentionally keeping the cohort small so that we can assure these experiences, our fellows and our close connection to them throughout can be up to our highest standard.
After those apprenticeships, the fellows will come together for a week with one another and the 3rd Space team. They will share what they learned, develop and present a capstone project and begin building a community of peers they can draw on throughout their careers.
They will leave with experiences they could not have gained in a classroom, a network of exceptional operators and leaders, access to the broader 3rd Space ecosystem and a more developed practice of their own. 3rd Space will, if we do our jobs correctly, be left with a deep connection to these operators and the networks they’ll go on to create, feeding other Company experiences and Company Capital’s investment deal flow.
The defining technologies of the next decade will dramatically increase what individuals are capable of. The defining social challenge will be what we do with one another when that happens.
We want to bet on the people who know how to design the answer.
The details are still early and a little hazy, but that’s intentional.
We wanted to bring all of you into this now because you may know one of those people. You may know the place where they should learn. Or you may know a partner who could help us make it possible. If you do, please reach out.
Fellowship for Inevitable Hosts
