The Role
Identify exceptionally talented individuals early in their careers, develop talent-sourcing theses, build expert networks, advise prospective founders, and help select founders and companies for investment. The role involves evaluating potential, supporting career and company-building decisions, and influencing the deployment of venture capital into early-stage teams in San Francisco.
Summary Generated by Built In
Salary: $100,000 - 150,000 per annum
Job requirements
Job responsibilities
Find Daniel Ek before he created Spotify. Mark Zuckerberg before Facebook. Whitney Wolfe Herd before Bumble. Patrick Collison before Stripe, when he’s 16 years old winning 1st place at the Irish Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition.
Your job is to identify these outlier individuals before the pivotal moments in their lives, then make sure they reach their potential. Once you’ve found them, help them build a moonshot.
You will learn how ideas become reality, have day-to-day exposure to world-class founders, and directly influence how we deploy millions of dollars every year into founders and teams in San Francisco.
We’re creating a whole new category in venture - you can be a pioneer.
This role will be based in SF,
This role will be based in SF,
Job requirements
You are in the earliest stages of your career, maybe with 0-3 years experience post-university, keen to learn how to build your craft as a Talent Investor from scratch.
1. You are intellectually curious: Talent Investors have a deep and persistent desire to increase their knowledge of the world. They seek out the foundational ideas behind a concept or belief system. They often have multiple interests and hobbies, some of which may be quite obscure. They’re constantly updating their knowledge and beliefs through self-directed learning.
1. You are intellectually curious: Talent Investors have a deep and persistent desire to increase their knowledge of the world. They seek out the foundational ideas behind a concept or belief system. They often have multiple interests and hobbies, some of which may be quite obscure. They’re constantly updating their knowledge and beliefs through self-directed learning.
2. You are driven: Talent Investors are innately driven to achieve ambitious goals. They “run through walls” and find creative ways to achieve their desired outcomes. They are restless in their pursuit of excellence, and won’t take no for an answer.
3. You are a network builder: Talent Investors enjoy building, and immersing themselves within, networks of exceptional people. They can build meaningful relationships with exceptional people; both at peer-level, and with individuals more senior to themselves. They enjoy making intra- and inter-network connections.
4. You are a discerning judge of others: Talent Investors hold high expectations for themselves and expect the same of others. They are able to balance optimism and realism when they evaluate others. They are able to believe and see possibility in individuals where their potential may not be obvious to others.
5. You understand and appreciate technology’s potential for impact: Talent Investors are fascinated by technology’s potential for impact, particularly through early stage company creation. Even if not a technologist by training, they will have developed an understanding of, and appreciation for, various different technologies, likely through self-directed learning.
Job responsibilities
- Develop and execute theses on where you can find exceptionally talented individuals early in their career. Where’s the next Homebrew Computer Club?
- Become a trusted advisor to those individuals - help them unlock their ambition and reach their potential, from advising on career decisions to supporting them in building companies and raising funds.
- Constantly improve your mental model of what these individuals look like.
- Build relationships with experts in a broad range of fields.
- Be a key influencer in deciding which founders and companies EF invests in.
Fundamentally, your job is to find exceptional people and support them to build exceptional companies. If you do this job well, you will become part of the origin story of the iconic companies of the future - some examples from our portfolio include:
- Tractable - a computer vision unicorn, co-founded by Razvan and Alex, the latter joining EF immediately after completing his Computer Science Masters degree at Imperial.
- Magic Pony Technology - an AI company acquired by Twitter for $150m after just 18 months. Co-founders Rob and Zehan both studied at Imperial, but had never met - Rob was found by a Talent Investor as the first employee at Raspberry Pi.
- Ochre Bio - an AI drug discovery company co-founded by Jack and Quin. Quin was contacted by a Talent Investor while he was building a treehouse in the jungles of Costa Rica, taking a break after starting his own biotech.
- Cleo - an AI financial advisor now on a rocketship trajectory with $150m+ ARR. Barney, the founder, was an early employee at a high-growth Fintech in London - our Talent Investing team spent months with him prior to joining EF.
- Many others - e.g. Gensyn (distributed compute), Neoplants (genetically modified house plants), Accurx (healthtech platform used in 99%+ of the UK's GP practices)...
Skills Required
- 0-3 years of experience after university
- Intellectual curiosity and persistent self-directed learning
- Drive to achieve ambitious goals and pursue excellence
- Ability to build meaningful relationships and professional networks
- Ability to evaluate others with balanced optimism and realism
- Understanding and appreciation of technology's potential for impact and early-stage company creation
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The Company
What We Do
Entrepreneur First is the best place in the world to meet your co-founder and build a startup from scratch. We bring together and fund exceptional individuals to help them meet their co-founder, develop an idea and raise money from leading investors - as fast as possible. The companies built at EF are now worth over $10B. They include Tractable (a computer vision unicorn), Cleo, Omnipresent, Aztec, Transcelestial, Airbank and many more. We’re backed by some of the world's best tech founders and company builders, including Patrick and John Collison (Stripe); Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Tom Blomfield (GoCardless and Monzo), Sara Clemens (Pandora and Twitch); Nat Friedman (GitHub); and Matt Mullenweg (Wordpress). For more information about Entrepreneur First, visit joinef.com We're hiring! Join our global team and experience firsthand the workings of a globally unique talent investor working with cutting edge entrepreneurs on world changing technologies: joinef.com/jobs
