Modern Operators in the Boardroom.
The MOB Fellowship prepares AI and cybersecurity leaders for public company board service, and supports them through the search that follows.
Every public company now oversees AI and cybersecurity as first-order enterprise risks, on a timetable set largely by regulators. The number of directors who can govern either domain from direct experience remains small.
Education is not the constraint. NACD, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon all offer strong courses on AI and cyber oversight. What the market lacks is a program that combines preparation with distribution: selecting a small cohort of genuine domain authorities, preparing them as fiduciaries, and then running an organized campaign to place them.
That model has a precedent. The Kauffman Fellowship built it for venture capital, with a small cohort, a demanding filter, a real apprenticeship, and a network that became the credential. The MOB Fellowship applies the same structure to the boardroom.
Charter
Five commitments, published and binding.
The value of the designation to a nominating chair depends entirely on how it is governed.
Published annually, beginning with MOB 1.
The founding class convenes in fall 2026, and its first outcomes report follows the completion of the Search Year. Until then there are no outcomes, and we do not claim any. The design targets, and the methodology by which a board seat will be counted, are published in advance.
Targets and methodology →the Institution
A nonprofit, deliberately.
MOB Fellows is a program of 786 Endowment Fund, Inc., a nonprofit corporation exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. That is a choice about what the fellowship is allowed to become, and it was made at the outset rather than arrived at later.
The obvious way to monetize a bench of board-ready technology executives is to charge for the introduction. A director search carries a fee of six figures, and a fellowship with sixty or seventy graduates could bill against a good number of them. That business exists. It is called executive search, it is conducted by firms with a century of relationships, and a fellowship that entered it would be a poor version of one.
It would also destroy the only thing that makes a slate worth reading. A nominating chair who receives a slate from a paid recruiter discounts it, and is right to. A slate from an institution with no financial interest in the outcome is a reference rather than a pitch, and that distinction is the whole asset.
The nonprofit form makes the commitment structural rather than aspirational. The fellowship is funded by tuition, by charitable contributions from corporate partners, and by gifts that endow scholarships. Its accounts are public on its annual Form 990. It cannot quietly become a placement agency in three years’ time when a board asks it to, because that is not what it was chartered to do.