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. 

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:

• Execution-focused, organised and detail-orientated: A project is the sum of many parts, and you take pride in perfecting each little part. You are a checklister and love the satisfaction of shipping projects with precision. 

• Multi-tasker: An ability to juggle a number of different projects in many different domains at the same time in a fast-paced environment. 

• Communication skills: You have strong verbal and written communication skills. You’re as comfortable preparing a Canva presentation as you are an email marketing campaign and know how to tweak tone to suit the audience.

• Technology: You’re familiar with different cloud-based software programs for managing email newsletters, spreadsheets and budgeting, WordPress and website creation software, CRMs, Zoom and online conferencing software. Social media marketing skills are a bonus. 

• Analytical: Comfort analysing data and driving insights and action plans.

• Commitment to diversity and inclusion: We believe wholeheartedly in the importance of developing a diverse and inclusive startup community in Aotearoa. You care about this too, and will consistently deliver products that attract and serve a diverse community of founders & operators. 

• Founder empathy: Experience in either creating a company yourself, even if it was not successful, or working with founders at the earliest stages, is a plus. Creating a company from scratch is a very different mindset to optimising something already established. 

You're encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. Your skills and passion will stand out – and set you apart – especially if your career has taken some extraordinary twists and turns. 

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 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 KiwiSaver payments while on unpaid parental leave and a supportive return-to-work policy. 

• Learning & Development Budget: 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, to enable your continued learning & self-development.

• 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 and enjoy yourself.

• A share of 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 owners in the management company.

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.

Blackbird is a Pledge 1% member — we pledge 1% of our time, equity and profits to help not-for-profit causes in our community, with a focus on greater gender diversity in STEM education.

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!