Seeking the next Praxis Ventures Entrepreneur-in-Residence
Praxis is a lead pre-seed/seed investor in manufacturing and software startups. We're looking for our next EIR. In this post, Praxis EIR Darnell Epps provides an overview of our program and process.
Greetings!
I’m writing to find the next entrepreneur-in-residence for Praxis Ventures.
Ideal background: recent college graduate or graduate student (law or engineering preferred) willing to obsessively study and work in a significant problem facing American manufacturing and industry for 18 months.
At present, Praxis is working with two entrepreneurs-in-residence (“EIRS”): Scott Johnson and Darnell Epps.
Compensation: full-time salary, plus a budget for travel and educational costs.
If you’re interested: get in touch with me, Greg Ellson, or current Praxis EIRs Darnell Epps and Scott Johnson.
To: Potential Entrepreneurs in Residence
From: Darnell Epps
RE: The Praxis Ventures EIR program
Praxis Ventures’ Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) program provides emerging and high-potential entrepreneurs with the working capital, networks, and time to conceive an early-stage startup and to prototype and bring new products to market. The program is tailored toward entrepreneurs who are willing and eager to understand new concepts and disciplines, with the goal of applying those learnings to advance and scale startups in manufacturing and industry. Here’s our kick-off session in San Francisco in early 2022.
As Praxis’s inaugural EIR and a J.D. candidate at Yale, I also enrolled at a local technical college to learn and operate CAD/CAM software and multi-axis CNC machines. My days consisted of morning classes at Yale, studying case law, and afternoon classes at technical school, where I eventually earned a diploma in manufacturing technology and became a fully skilled machinist.
Praxis fully covered the cost of my technical education. Praxis EIRs receive bi-monthly payments sufficient to cover their living expenses, and the fund’s management company also maintains a separate budget for incidentals and travel expenses. Besides being a student and entrepreneur, I’m also a homeowner and the married father of two young children. Whenever extended business travel is required, the fund’s management company covers the travel and lodging expenses for my whole family.
Drafted as a high-potential entrepreneur, Praxis invests in you, not a startup. The fund will guide and advise you as you engage with various stages of new business development, pointing out blind spots and forcing you to consider new iterations, all while following your lead and judgment. You will learn to think like an owner, not an employee, and to make decisions deliberately, with the sort of empathy and conviction that comes from experiencing a market–i.e., you come to see a product from the user/consumer’s perspective, winnowing out all else. You will also read Warren Buffett and listen to Charlie Munger together to better understand capital allocation and good decision-making.
For this fall semester at Yale, I’ve bid for a few classes that coincide with my interest in entrepreneurship, like the Entrepreneur and Innovation Clinic and a course titled “Think Like a Founder.” However, while Yale can perhaps teach how founders think, and how to structure contracts or equity splits for emerging businesses, it can’t teach students to be founders. That comes from doing, and doing is what Praxis’ EIR program values most.
