Blackbird is Hiring: Chief of Staff, Portfolio Analyst, People Lead

Blackbird is hiring a Chief of Staff, Portfolio Analyst and a People Lead

We’re looking for three people to join our team. We’re supercharging Australia and New Zealand’s most ambitious founders and we need your help.

Chief of Staff

Our Chief of Staff will amplify the impact of our investing partners. We hope to find a trusted confidant to help build the operational systems of Blackbird, assist with our decision making, keeping our calendars accountable to our greatest priorities and work on special projects to expand our business.

The role offers a unique way to gain an inside understanding of the business stories of Australia’s iconic startups and be apart of Blackbird’s own journey.

Roughly that will entail:

Calendar/Goal Accountability

Manage the set of projects that are most important to Blackbird, ensure that a partner’s time is spent on those most important things, uncover and unclog issues that arise and help external stakeholders interface with the partners on those projects.

Decision Making Frameworks

Help us make better decisions, more quickly, by creating frameworks and outlining possible scenarios with their respective pros/cons.

Taming our inbox

Your assigned partner’s inbox will be migrated to a tool like Front and managed like a group inbox. You will be responsible for tagging, organising, escalating and acting as the first line of response.

Automation

Automate the crap out of small day-to-day tasks.

Special projects

Work on special projects that expand our business (e.g. the Startmate Fellowship).

This role has now closed.

‍

People Lead

Blackbird is looking for a People Lead to help the portfolio companies we are in service of to hire the best people.

Vinod Khosla once said: “A company becomes the people it hires”

Your job is to give each of our portfolio companies an unfair superpower. The biggest constraint in this role is that you can’t do anything a normal recruiter would do.

The People Lead role will commandeer a number of different initiatives Blackbird drives to help connect the greatest people with Australia’s and New Zealand’s greatest startups:

People Tracker

At the present time, there are 64 executive-level people who are connected to the Blackbird partners that have asked our help in finding their next career role. Each week many more get in touch. Your job will be to chauffeur their experience to connect then with the right portfolio companies.

Startmate Fellowship

Startmate has recently launched the fellowship to take the same principle of mentors helping founders to create a company and applying that to someone’s career. You will work with the team to ensure the fellows have the best experience possible with the program.

University graduates

Startups have lumpy hiring that doesn’t tend to line up with University graduate recruitment times. Our best University students often like the idea of startups but have no idea which ones are good and which ones are bad. We’ve connected some of Australia’s brightest University students into jobs at Zoox, Canva, Baraja and many more - and we want to do this at scale.

Pioneer new initiatives

We’re just getting started and we want your injection of creativity to take our mission to the next level. Our long term audacious goal is for Blackbird to be responsible for 20% of all employees that get hired in the portfolio. There are currently 559 open positions in the portfolio, so that means we need to get 100+ people hired every month (and that’s just now!).

As important as what the role is, is what this role is not. The biggest constraint for the role is that we don’t want to do anything that the company can do or a normal recruiter can do. That means no posting to job boards and filtering candidates. No helping companies write job descriptions and exhibiting at careers fairs. We will green light initiatives that attract people only Blackbird is uniquely placed to meet.

This role has now closed.

‍

Portfolio Analyst

Blackbird is looking for a quantitative connoisseur of high business performance to help us make great investment decisions. The role is solely focused on our existing portfolio and managing our internal investment decision-making process.

About this role

The portfolio analyst role will support the four investment partners of Blackbird in creating a prepared mind on the performance of our current portfolio, particularly those at later stages of their development.

Additionally, the role will be responsible for the analysis of our own decision making. Inspired by the lessons from Ray Dalio’s book Principles, Blackbird has reformatted our decision-making process and thought deeply about what leads to great investments. You will be responsible for managing and auditing this framework and implementing constant improvements.

What this role is not:

• Cold outreach to new companies
• Meeting with and sourcing new investments
• External facing

This role has now closed.

‍

About Blackbird

Blackbird is a venture capital firm whose mission is to supercharge Australia and New Zealand’s most ambitious founders. We do this by raising venture capital funds, investing into the best startup companies and helping them succeed. We have half a billion dollars under management and a portfolio of over 60 companies including some of the most successful Australian startups such as Canva, Zoox, Safety Culture and CultureAmp.

We are inspired by investment firms such as Berkshire Hathaway and Bridgewater Associates. Like the companies we back, we want to build a business that lasts for decades and produces excellent returns for our investors. Most of all, we want to support our region’s most talented founders build category-defining technology companies.

We’ve written a lot about what we love at Blackbird, so check out our Blog if you want some more information about us.