Blackbird Aotearoa is hiring a Principal

Date Published:

February 14, 2023

Let me tell you about the best job going in Aotearoa this year.

We are looking for a Principal to join our investments team in Auckland.

Being a Principal at Blackbird means spending your days meeting the most ambitious Kiwi startup founders - like Craig; Sam & Jenny; and Jamie & David - investing in them right at the beginning, and watching their stories unfold over the coming decades.

It means day-dreaming about the technologies, products, companies and markets of the future.

It means supporting the visionaries who see this future with a technicolour vision to turn those dreams into reality.

It means becoming a founding member of Blackbird's six-strong Auckland-based team, with the opportunity to help take us from new kids on the block - a startup within Blackbird - to a cultural icon in Aotearoa's startup scene. We're diehard believers in the potential of this ecosystem, and the role Blackbird can play in helping it soar.

It means learning from, and working everyday alongside, the wider Blackbird team: a group of 70+ incredibly talented, humble, hungry humans for whom no job is too small and no idea too ambitious.

Our six-strong Auckland-based team in Dec '22

Let me tell you why you should apply.

We believe team diversity of all kinds leads to better decisions. Investors make decisions all day: about which opportunities to spend time on, which ones are a quick-but-kind "not for us", and which ones come with "hell yes" intuition. Our investment team includes former startup founders and operators, as well as lawyers, athletes and scientists. Your unique background and perspective will level us all up as decision-makers.

You may not be a professional investor. You may not know a convertible note from a founder secondary, an LTV:CAC analysis from a rule of 40 benchmark. But you know what makes a product so compelling it completely transforms how a customer does something important to their life or business.

You may not have invested a cent in startups before. But you have a sense for outstanding founders: those rare few with unreasonable grit, get-stuff-done energy, a certain amount of perfectionism, and burning impatience to create a fresh and different way of doing things.

You may not have written up an investment thesis before. But you have strong opinions about what makes a valuable idea, and why. You hold these strong opinions lightly, constantly looking for alternative perspectives and updating your views.

You may not have considered a career in venture before. But throughout your career so far, you have magnetised outstanding people to you - whether it's through community initiatives you've explored in your spare time, or in work teams you've founded and grown. You've built strong relationships with all sorts of people.

This opportunity won't repeat itself soon: we've only hired at Principal level once previously, and never before for the Aotearoa fund.