Fellowships usually require an institutional affiliation and many institutions are borderline predatory when it comes to IP/equity stake in spinoffs.

If you take a fellowship to start a company and then spin that company off from a university, you've gotta be careful to choose the right uni and structure the work appropriately. Some universities will take pretty big stakes when they can.

Calling this a fellowship is a bit confusing, but I'm not sure it's anything more nefarious than perhaps simply misleading/confusing. At least they're up front with the fact that they'll take a 10% stake. Many universities that will try to take a pretty similar stake aren't so up-front.

I'm sorry you feel that way -- we did discuss this when deciding what to call it, but ultimately decided that what the community we aim to create is much closer to a fellowship and peer group of scientists than a VC fund.

We're optimizing how we run things to build a community of scientists over maximizing our financial returns. We care most about about inspiring scientists to pursue translational research with greater resources and team coordination than they may find in a more traditional pathway.

Then don't misappropriate words or apply them in a contextually incorrect way, thinking you know better or have some keen insight into utilization.

Learn about how scientists actually work and meet them--don't twist the jargon around to suit your marketing needs.

Fellowship also has a specific meaning in Middle Earth, but that doesn't mean that it must match coincide with every other application of the word.

Words can have multiple meanings; sometimes troublesome ones (i.e. 'tabling' an item on the agenda).

Scientists, not hobbits, are the target of this fellowship. Most scientists spend at least half a decade of their early career in academia and will therefore use "Fellowship" the way it's used in academia.

I don't think this offering intersects with Middle Earth.

One definition of "fellowship" is actually "a group of people meeting to pursue a shared interest or aim", which describes both the Sci-Founder Fellowship and the Fellowship of the Ring.