The EntropyFellowship

We were born to inherit the stars.

Apply now

We Believe

We believe entropy is the one law nobody escapes. Left alone everything runs down. Bridges rust. Knowledge fades. Empires fall.

We believe decline is the default. Nothing good lasts on its own. Every road and vaccine and library is still standing because somebody keeps choosing to hold it up.

We believe the people who push back are rare. Most of us inherit order and spend it. A few leave behind more than they were given.

We also believe entropy can be pushed back. History is the story of the people who did it. They lit fires and wrote laws and built the machines that carried us further.

We believe the strongest way to push back today is to build a company. A company can gather people and capital around one problem and keep at it for decades.

We believe humanity’s best years are still ahead of it. The Entropy Fellowship gives $100,000 and one-to-one mentorship to the founders who will bring them closer.

The School of Athens by Raphael

On Entropy

/ The thesis behind the fellowship

Portrait of Erwin Schrödinger in 1933

The second law of thermodynamics says disorder only grows. Heat spreads out. Stars burn down. Everything we build starts to come apart the moment we stop tending it.

Physicists call that disorder entropy. Boltzmann counted it as the number of ways a system can be arranged. The more ways there are the less any one of them matters.

Life is how the universe pushes back. A cell takes in energy and turns it into order. It pays for that order by giving off heat. Schrödinger called this feeding on negative entropy.

Civilization is the same trick at a larger scale. Roads and laws. Libraries and vaccines. Each one is order that somebody fought for and somebody still pays to keep.

That is why we back founders. A company is the best machine people have found for turning energy into lasting order. The great ones leave the world more ordered than they found it.

The stars are where that road leads. Earth is where humanity started. It does not have to be where it ends.

“What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy.”
Erwin Schrödinger in What Is Life? (1944)

The Future

/ From the trees to the stars

The Earth rising over the Moon, photographed from Apollo 8
Earthrise. Bill Anders took it from Apollo 8 on Christmas Eve 1968.

A few million years ago our ancestors came down from the trees. They had no fire and no words and no tools beyond a sharp stone.

Every step since has been a fight against entropy. Fire against the cold. Writing against forgetting. Medicine against decay. Each one took a disordered world and left it more ordered.

We think the biggest steps are still ahead. Energy that never runs out. Disease that no longer kills. Cities on other worlds. A species that spreads to the stars and keeps going.

  1. 01/3 million years ago

    We stood up

    Our ancestors left the trees and walked upright across open ground.

  2. 02/1 million years ago

    We tamed fire

    Warmth and light and cooked food. The first order we made against the dark.

  3. 03/12,000 years ago

    We planted fields

    Farming turned wandering bands into villages and then into cities.

  4. 04/5,000 years ago

    We wrote things down

    Memory moved out of our heads and onto clay.

  5. 05/1769

    We harnessed steam

    Machines began to do the work of a thousand hands.

  6. 06/1903

    We flew

    Twelve seconds in the air at Kitty Hawk. The sky stopped being a ceiling.

  7. 07/1969

    We walked on the Moon

    Twelve people have stood on another world. That number should be far bigger.

  8. 08/Next

    We go to the stars

    Mars. The moons of Jupiter. The stars beyond. There is no last step.

Terms

We back founders early and keep the terms simple.

  • A $100,000 grant to work on the problem you care about most
  • No equity taken so the company stays yours
  • One-to-one mentorship from people who have built before
  • Freedom to work from anywhere in the world
  • Applications open all year round