Fern Mandelbaum is a venture capital investor at Emerson Collective who combines hands-on company-building experience as a former CEO and cofounder with a rigorous, experiment-driven coaching approach that pushes founders to test their assumptions through lightweight experiments before scaling. She has pioneered teaching entrepreneurship from diverse perspectives at Stanford GSB and developed the concept of small acts of inclusion as a practical playbook for culture change, explicitly tying diversity and inclusion work to measurable business performance rather than treating it as abstract corporate responsibility.
About their Fund
Sectors
AI, Climate, Education, Fintech, Health
Rounds
Pre-Seed - Seed
Avg Check Size
$100K - $1M
Notable Investments
Emerson Collective operates as a deliberately flexible LLC that combines venture capital, philanthropy, advocacy, art, and media ownership under one roof, allowing it to use whatever tool—grants, political advocacy, or investments—is most effective for a given problem rather than being constrained by traditional fund structures. The platform functions as a hybrid family office, venture fund, and policy node for Laurene Powell Jobs, using its ownership of influential media properties like The Atlantic alongside billions invested in frontier AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral) and climate infrastructure to shape public narratives while maintaining an unusually low-visibility stance that keeps local leaders in the front.
Notable Fund
Investments
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investor name
Active in
Rounds
Avg. Check
Links
Deeptech / Hardware
Robotics
Biotech
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12
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Unknown
Pre-Seed - Seed
Unknown
$400K - $2M
Unknown
Defense
Deeptech / Hardware
Energy
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7
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Unknown
Pre-Seed - Series A
Unknown
$100K - $5M
Unknown
Defense
Deeptech / Hardware
Energy
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7
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Unknown
Pre-Seed - Series A
Unknown
$100K - $5M
Unknown
Biotech
Health
Deeptech / Hardware
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2
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Unknown
Pre-Seed - Seed
Unknown
$250K - $2M
Unknown
Climate
Deeptech / Hardware
Materials
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4
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Unknown
Pre-Seed - Seed
Unknown
$400K - $1.5M
Unknown
Deeptech / Hardware
Robotics
Biotech
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7
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Unknown
Pre-Seed - Seed
Unknown
$400K - $2M
Unknown
Deeptech / Hardware
Robotics
Biotech
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2
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Unknown
Pre-Seed - Seed
Unknown
~$750K
Unknown
Fintech
Deeptech / Hardware
Devtools
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2
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Unknown
Pre-Seed - Series A
Unknown
$250K-$1M
Unknown
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