From Fellow to Managing Director: Jill Fuss is a New Kind of Activate Success Story
Jill Fuss’s career path was built by enzymes. Her dad was an engineer, and he passed on a love of making things. “As a kid, I used to work with him in the shop, so I like machines—and enzymes are molecular machines,” she says.
Jill Fuss working in the lab as a Cohort 2018 fellow
The fascination drove her toward a doctorate in molecular and cell biology and an early career as a research scientist. That led her to Activate as a startup founder. Now, she’s back at Activate, but this time as managing director of our Activate Berkeley Community. The mentee has become the mentor, and her perspective as an alumni fellow enriches the fellowship experience for new fellows.
Fuss researched DNA polymerase, the enzymes that make the DNA in your cells, as a graduate student. At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory she focused on the structural biology and molecular mechanisms of DNA repair enzymes. She and another Berkeley Lab scientist, Steve Yannone, followed their scientific curiosity in archaea, a type of ancient single-celled organisms that live in extreme environmental conditions. This made them realize that these so-called extremophile enzymes could be very useful in a range of industrial applications. She and Yannone co-founded CinderBio and joined the Activate community as cohort 2018 fellows.
Jill Fuss speaking at the 2022 Activate Summit at the Exploratorium in San Francisco
In 2021, she left CinderBio and later began consulting for Activate as part of a working group that program continuum director Sarah Morrill convened in order to develop Activate’s new education framework.
Then came the opportunity to rejoin the Activate staff as managing director of the Activate Berkeley Community. It brought Fuss full circle back to the roots of her entrepreneurial journey.
Fuss sees this role as a way to make a direct impact on fellows. “I learned a lot as an Activate Fellow and I wanted to amplify those learnings. Obviously, this job is a tremendous way to do that,” she says. But the Activate community is the biggest draw, she adds. “Throughout my whole time with Activate, I've been super impressed with all the people that I've interacted with, whether that's the Activate team or the fellows or the greater community of sponsors and investors. So many people just want to help and give their time. I wanted to work with great people who I trusted and who inspired me.”
CinderBio co-founder and managing director of the Activate Berkeley Community Jill Fuss
Fuss has strongly advocated for equity and access in the sciences and entrepreneurship, staunchly supporting and mentoring women scientists. She received the Berkeley Lab’s Director’s Award for Exceptional Diversity Achievement and the Visionary Award from the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce, among other accolades.
A Homecoming
For the Activate staff welcoming Fuss back, her return as a managing director is an incredible validation of our work and the power of our community. The technical and scale-up expertise she garnered as CTO of CinderBio is especially valuable to fellows who are developing their own biotech products. But she also held the mantle of COO, so she has a broad range of operational skills to pull from—and knows how vital it is for fellows to build out a strong techno-economic analysis for their products. “We were delighted to set the precedent of Activate alumni leading one of our fellow communities. There is no one who understands the value of the Activate Fellowship better than a former fellow, and Jill has assumed the managing director role knowing exactly what to do,” says Aimee Rose, Activate’s executive managing director.
“I’m most focused on making the fellows successful in whatever form that may be. I’m completely agnostic as to their path—I just want it to match their values and their dreams, and then go from there.”
As she dives into her new role, Fuss says her top priority is being the best mentor she can be to the fellows. “I'm most focused on making the fellows successful in whatever form that may be. For some, that would be raising venture capital and moving fast, and building a big company. For others, it's going to look different. I'm completely agnostic as to their path—I just want it to match their values and their dreams, and then go from there.”
And someone who was in their shoes not so long ago and whose experience ultimately resulted in leaving her startup, Fuss is very intentional about not projecting her experiences on the fellows. “I’ve had to stop thinking about myself and my own experience as a fellow–it’s been a big switch in my mindset,” she says. “I'm being very mindful about how to impart advice. Sharing details of my experience may or may not be useful to them. Sometimes, as a mentor, knowing when it’s not helpful to share your own experience can be just as important as knowing when it is.”