Kauffman Fellows: From a Kauffman Foundation Experiment to a Global Venture Capital Elite Network — Trish Costello, Jeffry Timmons, and 30 Years of VC Talent Infrastructure

1. The first issue to clarify is that Kauffman Fellows was not founded like a conventional startup by a single entrepreneur, and Ewing Marion Kauffman should not simply be described as its sole founder.

Today, Kauffman Fellows is essentially a nonprofit education, leadership-development, and long-term professional network for the venture-capital industry. Its core product is the two-year Kauffman Fellows Program, but its value extends well beyond coursework: it has become a curated VC peer network, GP-LP relationship network, professional credential, research platform, and investment-ecosystem connector. Its legal nonprofit entity is Center for Venture Education, Inc., a U.S. 501(c)(3) organization tax-exempt since February 2002.

The most accurate way to describe its founding is through four layers.

First, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation was the institutional creator and original sponsor. The Foundation itself states that it created the Kauffman Fellows Program in 1995 to improve entrepreneurs’ access to venture capital by improving understanding and relationships between venture capitalists and entrepreneurs.

Second, Patricia “Trish” Costello was the central operating co-founder, first CEO, and a principal architect of its eventual independence. Kauffman Fellows currently identifies her explicitly as its “co-founder, first CEO and CEO Emeritus.”

Third, Jeffry A. Timmons was the principal intellectual and educational architect. Kansas State University describes Timmons as the “creator” of the Kauffman Fellows Program and its Dean of Faculty Emeritus. He helped transform entrepreneurship, venture capital, capital formation, mentoring, and experiential education into a teachable system.

Fourth, Michie Slaughter was a crucial early institutional champion. The idea was controversial inside the Kauffman Foundation. One board skeptic characterized supporting venture capitalists as “investing in the enemy.” Slaughter, then President of the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, helped facilitate the internal debate that allowed the experiment to move forward.

The founding chain is therefore better understood as:

Ewing Kauffman’s entrepreneurial philosophy → Kauffman Foundation philanthropic capital → Michie Slaughter’s institutional sponsorship → Jeff Timmons’s intellectual framework → Trish Costello’s organizational execution → the Charter Fellows network → an independent Center for Venture Education → a self-reinforcing education, network, and capital system.

2. Why do public sources cite 1993, 1994, and 1995 as the founding year?

There is a genuine discrepancy in the public record.

Kauffman Fellows’ own profile of Trish Costello says the organization began with its “founding in 1993 at the Kauffman Foundation.” Forbes says Costello founded the program in 1994. By contrast, the Kauffman Foundation and Kauffman Fellows’ own historical retrospective both identify 1995 as the year the program was formally created or launched, with the first class graduating in 1997.

Public accounts differ.

The dates can nevertheless be reconciled as stages rather than necessarily contradictory events:

Around 1993: internal conception and incubation at the Kauffman Foundation;

Around 1994: program design and organizing work by figures such as Costello and Timmons;

1995: formal launch of the Charter Class;

1997: graduation of the first two-year cohort.

Thus, 1995 is the most defensible formal launch date, while 1993-94 can be treated as the incubation and founding-design period.

3. Kauffman Fellows was created to solve a structural problem between entrepreneurs and capital, not merely to teach people how to invest.

The Kauffman Foundation was initially divided over whether it should support venture capitalists at all. Its mission focused on entrepreneurs, while some viewed VCs as the capital side of a potentially adversarial relationship. The phrase “investing in the enemy” captures that original tension.

The program ultimately embraced the opposite conclusion:

If risk capital is essential infrastructure for high-growth entrepreneurship, improving the quality of venture capitalists is itself a way to improve entrepreneurship.

Its founders saw innovation as dependent partly on trust, not merely financial transactions. The program therefore did not become a CFA-style examination course centered on financial modeling. It treated investors as long-term partners, board members, mentors, coaches, and resource connectors for entrepreneurs.

That decision explains why Kauffman Fellows eventually became a professional network rather than simply an educational course.

4. Ewing Marion Kauffman was not the operating founder of the program, but he was its most important philosophical source.

Ewing Kauffman was born on September 21, 1916. According to the Kauffman Foundation, setbacks on his family’s farm led the family to move to Kansas City. He grew up surrounded by books and the Boy Scouts, served in the military, and at age 33 began an entrepreneurial venture in a basement that became Marion Laboratories.

One of Kauffman’s core beliefs was that entrepreneurship could be an engine of social mobility.

The Kauffman Fellows historical retrospective explicitly identifies Kauffman’s belief in entrepreneurship as a driver of class mobility as one of the ideas underpinning the program.

The philosophical logic was therefore not simply “create more financial elites.” It was:

create better capital allocators who understand entrepreneurs, support new companies, and direct resources toward new opportunities, thereby strengthening the economic and social mobility entrepreneurship can produce.

This helps explain the program’s long-standing focus on women, underrepresented investors, nontraditional regions, and ecosystems beyond Silicon Valley.

5. Trish Costello was the person who turned that philosophy into an organization.

Costello is arguably the most important individual in the operational history of Kauffman Fellows.

She is associated with Pittsburg, Kansas, and official Pittsburg State University alumni records show that Patricia “Trish” Costello earned a BSBA in 1978 and received the university’s Outstanding Alumni Award in 1988. Public professional biographies also report an MBA from Rockhurst University.

Detailed public information about her parents, childhood household, family class, and early family resources is limited / cannot currently be confirmed.

Her early career is nevertheless revealing because she did not follow a conventional Wall Street-to-Silicon Valley venture-capital path.

At AT&T, she worked on small-business products and marketing strategies around the Bell System divestiture. She later became executive vice president at Child Health Corporation of America, helping launch medical ventures for an investor group of approximately twenty children’s hospitals and working with the Children’s Health Network. She also led Rose Brooks Center, a residential organization serving battered women and children, participated in a family business, and consulted in healthcare, communications technology, and software marketing and distribution.

This background matters.

Costello first encountered entrepreneurship and capital not from inside a large VC partnership, but from the intersection of enterprise development, nonprofit work, healthcare, entrepreneurship support, and education.

She then joined the startup team of the Kauffman Foundation’s entrepreneurship center, where she worked on venture capital, angel investing, high-potential entrepreneurs, and programs supporting women entrepreneurs.

That experience led to a crucial insight:

training entrepreneurs alone was insufficient; the people controlling capital also had to change.

Kauffman Fellows institutionalized that idea.

6. Jeffry Timmons was the intellectual architect behind the system.

If Costello solved the organizational problem of building the program, Timmons addressed what venture investors should actually learn.

Jeffry A. Timmons was a major scholar of entrepreneurship, new venture creation, entrepreneurial finance, and venture capital. He held professorships at Babson College and Harvard Business School and in 1995 became Babson’s first Franklin W. Olin Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship.

His 1971 Harvard doctoral dissertation studied entrepreneurial and leadership development in an inner-city community and a depressed rural area. Kansas State University notes that it was among the earliest doctoral dissertations to place “entrepreneurial” in its title.

In 1984, Timmons worked with the Price Institute to launch the Price-Babson College Fellows Program, pairing entrepreneurship educators with successful entrepreneurs in an effort to transform entrepreneurship teaching. Babson later described the initiative as pioneering in the field.

Kauffman Fellows therefore was not Timmons’s first experiment with a model built around fellows, peer learning, practitioner mentors, and experiential education.

His major books included:

New Venture Creation;

The Entrepreneurial Mind;

and, with William Bygrave, Venture Capital at the Crossroads.

The intellectual thread connecting this work was the idea that entrepreneurship is not a lone heroic act. It is a continuous process of matching opportunities, people, resources, financing, and execution.

Timmons became a charter board member of the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership and directly participated in building Kauffman Fellows. Kansas State University explicitly calls him the program’s creator and Dean of Faculty Emeritus.

He died on April 8, 2008, at age 66. Inc. described him at the time as a pioneering thinker and educator in entrepreneurship.

His most durable asset was therefore not a venture fund but a methodology for systematically developing entrepreneurs and investors. Kauffman Fellows is one of the most durable institutional expressions of that methodology.

English Translation: Organization, Assets, Capital Relationships, and Business Model

7. Spinning out from the Kauffman Foundation was one of the most important structural turning points in Kauffman Fellows history.

Kauffman Fellows began entirely inside the Kauffman Foundation.

Remaining permanently inside the Foundation, however, would have left it dependent on philanthropic budgeting, strategic cycles, and foundation governance.

The leadership therefore pursued independence.

Phil Wickham, a member of the 1995 Charter Class, says in his official Kauffman Fellows profile that in 2001 he helped create the original independent board of the soon-to-be-spun-out Center for Venture Education. The process was driven by Trish Costello, while Charter Class Fellow and later Emergence Capital co-founder Jason Green became founding chairman.

Kauffman Fellows’ own retrospective says a $3.8 million grant in 2002 became the financial foundation for independence and helped the program develop a sustainable multifaceted business model.

Tax records show that Center for Venture Education received U.S. 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status in February 2002.

The 2001-02 period can therefore be understood as the organization’s real institutional entrepreneurial moment.

It was no longer merely creating a course. It was:

spinning the course out of a parent foundation and creating an independent organization capable of generating revenue, governing itself, and accumulating assets.

That decision ultimately gave Kauffman Fellows its own:

brand;

board;

program revenue;

investment assets;

fund relationships;

research activities;

global alumni network;

and long-term capital base.

8. Its governance model is not founder-owned; it is increasingly governed by the venture ecosystem it created.

Trish Costello does not “own” Kauffman Fellows, and there is no family equity structure.

CVE is a nonprofit governed through a board. Current board members come from VC firms, LP organizations, universities, and foundations, including Itxaso del Palacio of Notion Capital, Susan Mason of Aligned Partners, Marlon Nichols of MaC Venture Capital, Melissa Richlen of the MacArthur Foundation, Allen Taylor of Endeavor Catalyst, and Matt Auxier of the University of Chicago.

Past board and governance figures include:

Trish Costello;

Jason Green;

Brad Feld;

Brian Dovey;

Mamoon Hamid;

Jenny Lee;

and Jeff Harbach.

This creates an unusual governance flywheel:

Kauffman Fellows trains investors → graduates join the long-term network → some become mentors, board members, or institutional leaders → those alumni then govern and expand Kauffman Fellows.

Alumni are therefore not merely customers.

Over time, they become producers, distributors, reputation providers, governors, capital connectors, and recruiting channels for the organization itself.

That is a major source of its network effects.

9. What does Kauffman Fellows actually sell? On the surface, a two-year education. In practice, five layers of value.

The first layer is curriculum.

The current two-year program describes its format as roughly 20% workshops, 40% keynote addresses and lectures, and 40% peer learning. Topics include personal leadership, investment thesis and portfolio construction, sourcing and selection, bias reduction, portfolio support, board effectiveness, fund and firm building, succession planning, and the entire LP cycle.

The second layer is high-density relationship formation.

The program includes five four-day in-person modules, one Global Summit, and at least two Global Treks. Trek destinations have included Singapore, Dubai, Munich, Tokyo, and São Paulo, while the Global Summit typically attracts roughly 300 Fellows.

The third layer is confidential peer knowledge.

Venture capital depends heavily on tacit information: how to raise a subsequent fund, manage LPs, win deals, evaluate partners, decide when to exit, handle succession, and survive partnership conflict. Much of this knowledge does not appear in textbooks. Kauffman Fellows therefore creates a high-trust, relatively closed environment for peer exchange. Its Class 31 materials explicitly emphasize confidential “under-the-hood” discussions and curated peer sessions.

The fourth layer is credentialing and a selection signal.

The program is not designed primarily for beginners. Its typical class architecture reserves much of its capacity for GPs who have already closed Fund I, Fund II or III, senior investors at Fund IV+ firms, established CVC professionals, LPs, family offices, partners, and principals. Its application materials warn that people who have not yet begun investing may be applying too early.

Consequently, the designation “Kauffman Fellow” itself communicates:

this person was already operating professionally in the investment ecosystem and passed an additional selection process conducted by an elite venture network.

The fifth and most important layer is the lifetime network.

After the two-year program, Fellows continue to access events, special-interest groups, co-investment opportunities, and the wider alumni community. The 2026 Class 31 announcement says the network now includes approximately 1,060 alumni across more than 65 countries.

The real product is therefore not twenty-some days of instruction.

It is:

education + identity + trust + information + capital relationships.

10. Its price and admissions requirements show that it has become premium professional infrastructure for venture capital, not mass education.

As of 2026, tuition for the two-year program is $80,000, payable before the first module. Travel and lodging are not included.

The time commitment is also substantial: approximately 20-25 days over two years for five in-person modules, plus monthly virtual activities, a Global Summit, two Global Treks, and roughly 24 Forum meetings. Attendance at key components is mandatory for graduation.

Kauffman Fellows offers need-based scholarships, but the organization explicitly says they are limited, cover only part of tuition, and are not guaranteed. Applicants are encouraged to be prepared to cover the full expense themselves.

National-level institutions sometimes subsidize participants.

Canada’s BDC Capital, for example, has provided partial financial support for Canadian venture investors. Its public materials say it has supported at least fourteen Canadian candidates—nine women and five men—and it also developed GP Academy in consultation with Kauffman Fellows.

This illustrates Kauffman Fellows’ unusual market position:

its customers are not only individual venture investors, but also investment institutions, development-finance organizations, and public capital providers willing to pay to improve the quality of their national VC talent pool.

11. The business model has evolved from foundation grant dependence into a hybrid of program revenue and a substantial long-term asset base.

Originally, Kauffman Fellows depended on Kauffman Foundation philanthropy.

The $3.8 million grant associated with the 2002 spinout was critical seed capital.

Today the economics are very different.

The latest publicly available Form 990 data for Center for Venture Education—for the fiscal year ending June 2025 and filed in April 2026—show:

approximately $5.58 million in total revenue;

approximately $4.98 million of program-service revenue, or 89.1% of total revenue;

approximately $549,000 of contributions;

approximately $58,000 of investment income;

approximately $6.55 million of expenses;

and an accounting deficit of approximately $965,000 for the year.

The dominant operating revenue source is therefore the program itself, not philanthropy.

That makes it very different from a conventional grant-dependent nonprofit.

The balance sheet is even more revealing.

At the end of that fiscal year:

total assets were approximately $125.66 million;

liabilities approximately $4.77 million;

and net assets approximately $120.90 million.

A year earlier, total assets were approximately $109.21 million and net assets approximately $104.35 million.

Thus, even a modest annual operating loss occurs against an asset base many times larger than the annual operating budget.

The business model has effectively become:

premium education/network revenue + philanthropy + long-term investment and capital assets.

12. The relationship with TrueBridge Capital Partners is one of the most easily misunderstood parts of the Kauffman Fellows capital story.

Kauffman Fellows itself is not a conventional VC fund.

After independence, however, its leaders recognized that tuition and donations alone would not necessarily create permanent financial security, and they explored investment structures capable of supporting a long-term endowment.

Phil Wickham’s official profile says that he helped conceive, staff, and seed-fund TrueBridge Capital Partners.

TrueBridge itself says it was founded in 2007 by Mel Williams and Edwin Poston and formed a relationship with Kauffman Fellows that created two-way access between Fellows and TrueBridge funds. Its first fund closed at $311 million.

TrueBridge subsequently expanded across fund-of-funds, direct, seed, secondary, and blockchain strategies, and its own timeline reports that assets under management had surpassed $6.5 billion by 2023.

Trish Costello also became founding president of CVE Capital; Forbes described the associated vehicle as a roughly $1.7 billion fund structure.

An essential distinction is required:

TrueBridge’s multibillion-dollar AUM is not the same thing as assets legally owned by Kauffman Fellows.

Committed capital in investment partnerships belongs economically to various limited partners and investment vehicles. It cannot simply be added to CVE’s balance sheet.

For Kauffman Fellows’ own legal assets, the cleanest measure is still the approximately $125.7 million of total assets reported on CVE’s Form 990.

TrueBridge is therefore best understood as:

a strategic capital relationship, a network asset, and part of the broader endowment architecture,

not as a wholly owned $6.5 billion Kauffman Fellows subsidiary.

13. Many of Kauffman Fellows’ most valuable assets are not conventional financial assets at all.

Its assets can be divided conceptually into two categories.

The first includes items that can appear on a financial statement:

CVE cash and investments;

interests in investment vehicles;

net assets;

program revenue;

and operating and intellectual-property assets.

The second category may be more strategically valuable but is difficult to measure in accounting terms:

the Kauffman Fellows brand;

more than one thousand curated VC and LP alumni;

decades of trust among members;

nodes inside major venture firms;

GP-LP relationships;

the mentor network;

the admissions filter;

research data;

the Kauffman Fellows Journal;

Zero to Four;

Fund Returner;

global Summits and Treks;

and community infrastructure such as KF Connect.

Historically, Phil Wickham also developed a multilingual publishing arm, an annual research journal, and the online Kauffman Fellows Academy.

This is why Kauffman Fellows cannot be understood using ordinary educational-institution logic.

A university’s key asset includes its degree credential.

A venture fund’s key asset includes capital.

LinkedIn’s key asset includes the professional graph.

Kauffman Fellows combines elements of all three:

credential + capital network + professional graph.

English Translation: Turning Points, Achievements, Criticisms, and Current Influence

14. One of the most consequential decisions was to define “VC education” as entrepreneurial infrastructure rather than financial-career training.

Had the Kauffman Foundation decided that VCs were inherently on the opposite side of entrepreneurs, Kauffman Fellows might never have existed.

Instead, its architects concluded that:

the competence, conduct, values, and networks of capital providers directly affect the quality of an entrepreneurial ecosystem.

The curriculum therefore emphasizes both investment skill and the ability to become a better partner to entrepreneurs.

It is fundamentally different from financial analyst training.

The program addresses not only how to identify high-return companies, but also:

how to become an effective board member;

how to support CEOs;

how to build an investment firm;

how to manage partnerships;

how to work with LPs;

how to plan succession;

and how to recognize personal bias.

It is effectively training leaders of venture-capital institutions.

15. A second critical decision was to turn the fellowship into a cross-firm, cross-generational high-trust network.

Venture capital is exceptionally dependent on reputation and access.

The best deals are often not fully open to the market.

Fundraising depends on LP trust.

Co-investment depends on relationships.

Job movement, partnership formation, and new-fund creation are deeply network-driven.

Kauffman Fellows recognized this industrial structure.

Graduation is not treated as the end of a customer relationship; it is the beginning of a long-term network relationship.

Class 31 in 2026 contains only 55 people, yet those members collectively oversee approximately $101 billion in AUM and have led more than 750 venture deals. Sixty-two percent are senior decision makers and 52% are partner-level or above.

The important number is not merely $101 billion.

It shows that the program is increasingly selecting people who already control capital allocation rather than people who might someday enter venture capital.

That generates a self-reinforcing cycle:

strong investors enter
→ the network becomes more valuable
→ stronger investors want to join
→ more GPs and LPs participate
→ mentor quality improves
→ the brand strengthens
→ future selection becomes more powerful.

That is Kauffman Fellows’ central network effect.

16. A third strategic decision was to evolve from a Silicon Valley-oriented American program into a global capital-formation network.

From the beginning, Fellows were expected to become “ambassadors” not only in venture funds but also across startups, education, policy, and broader capital-formation systems.

Later leaders, including Phil Wickham, accelerated international expansion.

His official profile says the program expanded to more than forty countries during his leadership and significantly increased its budget and membership. In 2012 he also helped launch a collaboration involving Japan’s Ministry of Economy and the Kauffman Fellows ecosystem.

Globalization is now built directly into the curriculum.

Treks span Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America. Class 31 represents thirteen countries across six continents, while the overall alumni network spans more than 65 countries.

It should therefore no longer be thought of simply as a “Silicon Valley VC school.”

A more accurate description is:

a multinational GP-LP professional network built on an American venture-capital tradition.

17. A fourth important decision was to treat diversity as a capital-allocation issue rather than merely a philanthropic issue.

This theme runs throughout the organization’s history.

The early mission explicitly sought Fellows who better reflected the entrepreneurial community and society.

Costello subsequently spent years working on women entrepreneurs and women capital providers. After stepping away from day-to-day Kauffman Fellows leadership, she founded Portfolia, extending the problem from:

“how do more women receive VC funding?”

to:

“how do more women become LPs and capital allocators themselves?”

Kauffman Fellows’ current profile of Costello says Portfolia has fourteen funds, more than 2,000 limited partners, and investments in more than 110 companies, including Maven Clinic, Everly Health, Madison Reed, Canela Media, and GrubMarket.

This is not an unrelated second career.

It reflects a consistent Costello thesis:

power is determined not only by who receives capital, but by who decides where capital flows.

Kauffman Fellows trains investors;

CVE Capital helped create a long-term financial base around that educational ecosystem;

Portfolia expands participation on the LP side.

There is a clear intellectual continuity among the three.

18. Research became another important influence asset.

Kauffman Fellows developed a Research Center and began using startup, venture, and workforce data to study gender, ethnicity, capital allocation, and fund performance.

For example, a 2019 Kauffman Fellows study highlighted by the Kauffman Foundation analyzed more than 90,000 companies and over 400,000 employee data points. It reported that the share of women-founded companies in its sample increased from 4% in 2001 to 21.6% in 2018 and examined relationships among female founders, executive representation, and fundraising.

The strategic objective is not to become a conventional university research institute.

The more important effect is to combine:

education + professional network + data and thought leadership.

An institution that trains investors, connects them, and participates in defining industry “best practices” can move from education into norm-setting—helping shape the standards and narratives of an industry.

19. Its greatest achievement is not producing one superstar investor but creating a repeatable mechanism for developing venture-capital human capital.

By 2011, Kauffman Fellows’ own retrospective reported that 48 Fellows had launched new venture funds focused on underserved sectors or regions, more than thirty had become startup CEOs, and many others had moved into boards, education, and public policy.

By 2024, outgoing CEO Jeff Harbach said 536 of the then-882 Fellows had joined during roughly the preceding decade—about 60% of the network at that time—and the organization had substantially expanded internationally.

By 2026, the official network figure had reached approximately 1,060 alumni across more than 65 countries.

Kauffman Fellows’ defining output is therefore not a single corporate exit.

It has created a venture-capital leadership pipeline:

identify professionals already entering the industry;

place them inside a high-trust peer network;

improve their investing, fund-building, and leadership capabilities;

help them create or scale funds, become LPs, and serve on boards;

then bring some back as mentors, board members, and capital connectors for subsequent generations.

After three decades, that flywheel has a much larger cumulative effect than a one-time training course.

20. One of the most important structural criticisms concerns the tension between access and elite-network reproduction.

This should be distinguished from a scandal.

There is no credible public basis for describing Kauffman Fellows as an organization defined by a major publicly established fraud or comparable legal scandal.

The more substantive issues are structural.

In 2026, tuition is $80,000 before travel and lodging. The program requires substantial time over two years. Admissions are primarily aimed at people who are already inside professional venture capital and in many cases are already GPs, partners, principals, or institutional LPs.

That creates a legitimate question:

Could an institution originally designed to broaden entrepreneurial access to capital also strengthen the networking advantage of people already inside the investment elite?

This is a real institutional tension.

Kauffman Fellows addresses it partly through scholarships, regional partnerships, and diversity recruitment. The Kauffman Foundation has funded scholarships for Heartland investors, and BDC Capital has subsidized Canadian participants.

Yet structurally the program remains closer to:

“make people who already possess some capital-allocation authority substantially more capable and connected”

than to:

“help a complete beginner enter venture capital.”

Those are different missions and should not be conflated.

21. A second tension lies between its diversity mission and the realities of the venture-capital industry.

Kauffman Fellows adopted representation of women and underrepresented groups earlier than many traditional VC organizations.

Looking back on his tenure, Jeff Harbach said that among 536 Fellows added during roughly his decade with the organization, 198—37%—were women investors and 78—15%—came from underrepresented backgrounds.

Women constitute 38% of Class 31 in 2026.

That is more balanced than the historical gender composition of venture capital, but it is not parity.

The important question is therefore not whether Kauffman Fellows talks about diversity—it clearly does.

The deeper question is:

To what extent can a highly selective elite network change the ownership and ultimate decision-making structure of capital rather than merely improve representation inside the network?

That question also helps explain the significance of Costello’s later work at Portfolia, which shifts attention toward who becomes an LP and therefore who ultimately supplies and controls investment capital.

22. A third issue concerns the methodology of some diversity research.

In 2020, Kauffman Fellows and MaC Venture Capital studied ethnic representation among U.S. startup executives by using a Clarifai model on public profile photographs of more than 260,000 startup founders and executives. When the algorithm reported greater than 70% confidence, individuals were classified into “perceived ethnicity” categories such as White, Asian, Latinx, Black, or Other.

The resulting research reported substantial underrepresentation of Black and Latinx executives.

The methodological limitation is important:

an algorithm’s inference of “perceived ethnicity” from a face is not the same variable as a person’s self-identified race or ethnicity.

The analysis can therefore be useful for studying perceived representation, but its categories should not be interpreted as a precise demographic census of personal identity.

That is a methodological caveat, not evidence that the underlying research question or all of its conclusions are invalid.

23. Leadership succession demonstrates the transition from founder-driven organization to alumni-driven institution.

The succession history itself illustrates the Kauffman Fellows model.

Trish Costello built and led the original organization.

Phil Wickham entered as a member of the 1995 Charter Class, participated in the spinout, became CEO in 2008, and handed leadership onward in 2016.

Jeff Harbach succeeded him and served as CEO for approximately seven and a half years.

In 2024, Class 14 Fellow Fernando Fabre became CEO.

Fabre had previously spent years in the Endeavor ecosystem, helping it expand to more than thirty countries and working on initiatives including Endeavor Catalyst. He is also a co-founder and General Partner of MatterScale Ventures and an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

The succession pattern matters:

Kauffman Fellows no longer depends on its original founders to survive; it can produce its next generation of institutional leaders from inside its own network.

For a nonprofit institution, that is an important sign of organizational durability.

24. Where does Kauffman Fellows actually sit in the real world as of August 2026?

The newest cohort, Class 31, consists of 55 Fellows.

They represent thirteen countries and six continents;

collectively oversee approximately $101 billion;

more than half are partner-level or above;

15% come from the LP community;

and the overall Kauffman Fellows alumni network contains approximately 1,060 people across more than 65 countries. Applications for KF32 are scheduled to open in October 2026.

Calling Kauffman Fellows merely a “VC school” is therefore too narrow.

Calling it simply a “nonprofit” does not explain its influence.

Calling it an “investment fund” is incorrect.

A better description is:

Kauffman Fellows is global venture-capital human-capital and relationship-capital infrastructure operating through a nonprofit legal structure.

It performs four functions:

selects who enters the network;

develops those capital allocators;

creates durable trust and transactional relationships among them;

and connects education, research, alumni, GPs, LPs, funds, and global innovation ecosystems into a long-lived professional graph.

Its scarcest asset is not its curriculum.

Curriculum can be copied.

The difficult-to-replicate asset is:

thirty years of member quality × alumni trust × brand-selection power × GP-LP relationships × tacit industry knowledge × a durable capital base.

That is why an organization far smaller than a university, bank, or major asset manager can exert influence disproportionate to its operating size in the highly networked venture-capital industry. Its approximately $120.9 million of net assets, predominantly program-service-based revenue model, and network spanning more than 65 countries show how far it has evolved from a 1990s philanthropic experiment into a mature institution with its own financial base, governance structure, and global professional network.

25. Compressing more than three decades into a timeline makes the evolution particularly clear.

Around 1993-94: The idea is incubated inside the Kauffman Foundation, with Costello, Timmons, and others involved in design and organization. Public sources differ among 1993, 1994, and 1995 as the precise “founding” date.

1995: The Kauffman Fellows Program formally launches its Charter Class.

1997: The first two-year class graduates.

2001-02: An independent board is created, Center for Venture Education spins out of the Kauffman Foundation, receives a roughly $3.8 million foundational grant, and gains 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status.

2007: TrueBridge Capital Partners is founded and establishes a deep strategic relationship with Kauffman Fellows; Costello becomes involved in the CVE Capital structure.

2008: Charter Class Fellow Phil Wickham becomes CEO; Jeffry Timmons dies the same year.

The 2010s: International expansion accelerates, while the organization develops additional intellectual assets including publishing, research, a journal, and an online academy, and deepens relationships with national venture ecosystems.

2016: Jeff Harbach becomes CEO and presides over substantial growth in membership and global reach.

2024: Fernando Fabre becomes CEO, reinforcing the transition toward leadership drawn from the Fellows network itself.

2025: The institution reaches the thirty-year milestone from its formal 1995 launch, with an economic structure no longer primarily dependent on its original foundation sponsor.

2026: Class 31 begins with 55 new Fellows joining a network of roughly 1,060 alumni across more than 65 countries, while the latest public CVE tax filing reports more than $120 million in net assets.

Ultimately, Kauffman Fellows’ most important contribution is not simply that it taught venture capitalists how to invest.

Its deeper achievement was to treat venture capital itself as a profession whose human capital could be educated, institutionalized, professionalized, and networked—and then spend three decades turning that professional education into a global capital-relationship infrastructure.