Incubation Associate, Compute

About Primary

Primary is a seed-stage venture capital firm dedicated to delivering exceptional support to the founders of transformational businesses. By pairing meaningful investment resources with the largest portfolio impact team of any seed investor, our portfolio companies have reached an industry-best seed-to-A graduation rate.

Compute is core to the investment strategy at Primary. We led the seed round in Etched, alongside other incredible compute businesses like Atero (acq. by Crusoe), Haiqu, The Biological Computing Company, and stealth companies across memory, materials and more. We run The Compute 100, alongside interviews with top technical leaders across the industry. We’re specialized investors with a fundamental belief that compute is being redesigned, and startups will play a central part to that.

Primary Labs is the firm’s incubation engine, focused on turning ideas into category-defining companies. With 20+ startups launched—including Ollie, Tabs, and LightTable—we partner closely with top operators to identify, validate, and build billion-dollar opportunities from day one.

About the Role

Primary Labs is looking for an Incubation Associate to explore the frontier of semiconductor and compute infrastructure and turn technical breakthroughs into company opportunities. This role is open to candidates based in San Francisco.

This is not a traditional role. As an Incubation Associate, you will work directly with the AI Infrastructure Investment team to identify, validate, and shape new company ideas. You'll move from exploration to conviction quickly, helping determine which technical breakthroughs in silicon, systems, and compute can underpin venture-scale businesses.

You'll report to Partner Brian Schechter, who has backed and sits on the board of companies like Etched and Tabs, and is actively incubating at the intersection of compute and semiconductors. We've hit an inflection point: demand for AI compute is exploding, and the underlying hardware stack — power, cooling, packaging and more — needs to keep pace. We’re exploring incubation opportunities here.

You will operate at the edge of emerging compute infrastructure — evaluating new silicon architectures, benchmarking hardware performance, and building relationships across the chip design, fabrication, and systems ecosystem. The systems you build will not live as experiments — they will serve as the technical foundation for new ventures incubated within Primary Labs.

What You'll Do

• Lead deep, exploratory research into emerging and often esoteric problem spaces, developing original points of view on markets, customers, and underlying technologies

• Identify new technologies and market opportunities that can be exploited to build new startups, with a particular focus on compute infrastructure spanning hardware , software , and business models.

• Translate research into early company theses, including business models, product concepts, and initial go-to-market hypotheses

• Validate and refine research through primary discovery, including customer interviews, sourcing design partners, and running early pilot engagements

• Synthesize learnings into clear narratives, creating pitch decks, internal memos, and research artifacts that inform incubation and investment decisions

• Develop initial business plans for the most promising opportunities, including technology architecture, product roadmap, and go-to-market strategy.

About You

• Experience: 4+ years in a technical role within the semiconductor or compute industry.

• Compute-Native: You have deep fluency in chip architecture and hardware-systems tradeoffs — cost, power, latency, yield — and are conversant in the tools and workflows of silicon design or compute infrastructure.

• Strong researcher: You are excellent at conducting deep primary and secondary research — synthesizing customer conversations, market data, and competitive dynamics into actionable insights

• Self-Starter: You're hungry for autonomy and want real responsibility over what you ship and how it evolves.

• Entrepreneurial: You're constantly building – side projects, experiments, and late-night "what if this works?" prototypes.

• Status-Aware Technologist: You're excited by the idea that compute capability — and who can command it best — is becoming the next great competitive frontier

• Commercially minded: You are fluent in business models, unit economics, and market sizing, and can quickly assess feasibility and scalability of new venture ideas