Blackbird is hiring a Community Lead in Aotearoa

We’re hiring a Community Lead to help us deliver on our mission to supercharge Aotearoa’s most ambitious founders. By delivering epic events for Kiwi founders and operators, you will help Blackbird foster and serve our community.

>> This role has now closed <<

About The Role

Our goal is to make Blackbird a Kiwi founder’s first choice of investor to lead their Seed or Series A round. By delivering epic events for Kiwi founders and operators, you will help Blackbird foster and serve our community. As someone plugged-in to the ANZ startup scene, you are passionate about supporting startup founders to do their life’s work. You love meeting new founders, operators, advisors and other investors across the ecosystem and are a known ‘connector’. You can quickly identify draw-card event speakers, the best venues and suppliers to deliver engaging events this community wants and needs. Working closely with both our Australia-based Founder Success team and our Auckland-based investments team, you will deliver Blackbird's overarching Community Strategy in the New Zealand context. Regular travel throughout Aotearoa will be an expected component of this.

Key Responsibilities include:

Localise Blackbird’s community strategy in Aotearoa: We have a number of initiatives that were developed in Australia and are launching in New Zealand over 2021. You will be responsible for bringing them to life in the Kiwi ecosystem and ensuring their success. From Sunrise and Giants to our Portfolio Founder programming such as the Blackbird Founder Academy, you will bring the NZ to our ANZ programming.

Develop new, Aotearoa-specific initiatives: Drawing on expertise from our Australia-based Founder Success team, you will be empowered to experiment with a number of new initiatives specific to the Kiwi market. You will use a test and learn approach, iterating these ideas quickly.

Coordinate all aspects of Blackbird's community events in Aotearoa, from intimate Founders' Dinners to conferences, investment team roadshows, investor (LP) events and an annual founder retreat. This means creating event timelines, finding speakers and developing the content, curating attendee lists, defining runsheets, negotiating contracts and bookings, managing budgets and engaging in post-event follow-ups with attendees to make each event better than the last.

What we are looking for

Your background is less important than your key skills and attributes, which include:

Working at Blackbird

This is a full-time role based in our Auckland office and reporting into Phoebe Harrop on our Auckland-based Investment team. We’re looking for someone who is as passionate as we are about building an iconic investment business. You must have a high ownership mentality and the ability to take responsibility for goals and outcomes.

An integral part of your role is working with the Blackbird NZ team to help them achieve their investment goals, while also liaising with the Founder Success team (Community and Communications Manager, People Lead, Head of Community). You will communicate the vision and results of your localised projects in New Zealand to the Founder Success team in Australia.

You need to be comfortable with a remote-first culture and are adept at working effectively and building great relationships through collaboration tools like Slack, Zoom and Notion.

We believe that building a diverse and inclusive team is critical to Blackbird’s success. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, or marital, veteran, or disability status. We use Applied to ensure every applicant gets an equal chance of success.

Our December 2020 Culture Amp engagement score was 93.

We offer:

• Flexible working: Whether it’s working from home or leaving early to pick up the kids from daycare or school.
• Generous parental leave: We know family comes first and we are proud to offer generous parental leave — 16 weeks for primary carer and 6 weeks for a secondary carer, subject to a 12 month minimum tenure. This includes a continuation of super payments while on unpaid parental leave and a supportive return-to-work policy.
• Learning & Development: Our team is hungry to continuously learn and you’ll receive a budget to spend on whatever you’d like to learn — from coding courses to meditation.
• Unplugged weekends: We work hard without letting work get in the way of life. We’ve implemented no Slack or emails on weekends, so you can switch off.
• Sharing in Blackbird’s success: We think it is important to share successes with the whole team. All Blackbird employees receive carry in our funds and are the equivalent of owners in the management company.

Blackbird is a Pledge 1% member — we pledge 1% of our time, equity and profits to help not-for-profit causes in our community. The Blackbird Foundation has been set up explicitly to partner with organisations that believe in the potential of young people, and the importance of creativity.

About Blackbird

Blackbird is a venture capital fund based in Australia and New Zealand. We invest in every type of technology from software to space, unified by the biggest of ambitions. We invest in wild hearts with the wildest of ideas, right at the beginning. We invest in wild hearts with the wildest of ideas, right at the beginning. As a result, we have a unique working culture, captured in our Mission & Values and our Operating Principles.

We have more than a billion dollars under management and a portfolio of over 70 companies including some of the most successful Australian and Kiwi startups such as Canva, Zoox, SafetyCulture, Ask Nicely, Mint, Halter and Partly.

In 2019 we raised a $60 million fund to support Kiwi founders. In Auckland we are a small-but-mighty team of two (Sam and Phoebe), but we have big plans and will be growing the Aotearoa team further in 2021.

While we love to invest at the very beginning of the startup journey, we also aim to be a generational owner of the companies we invest in, long after they grow up. 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 to 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. In particular, you should read about our mission and values, our master plan, and what we look for in founders.

Good Luck!