About the role

Blackbird is hiring a Principal to invest in Aotearoa’s most ambitious founders, right at the very beginning.

Our ideal candidate will become a leader of our New Zealand team. They will play a pivotal role in building Blackbird into an iconic institution in New Zealand’s tech ecosystem. They will earn a front-row seat to the best Kiwi-led business stories of our generation.

Why we’re growing our Aotearoa team

Finding and investing in exceptional founders is our reason for being at Blackbird. 

Blackbird was founded in 2012, with a small first fund of $30M from the community of Australian technology founders. That fund invested in the very first rounds of Canva, Zoox, Culture Amp and SafetyCulture, and has a TVPI of more than 33x. We’ve invested in >100 companies and our portfolio is worth over $7B. In 2022, we raised Australasia’s largest venture fund: $1 billion for the ambitious.

But in Aotearoa, we are just getting started.

New Zealand has raised world-changing companies from Xero to Lanzatech, Rocket Lab to Vend, PushPay and Timely.

These giants have fostered talented alumni who have gone on to found their own ambitious companies, like Mint Innovation, Halter, Partly and FirstAML.

A thriving investment ecosystem has grown up to support these founders. More of our talented New Zealanders are doing their life’s work in start-ups than ever before, kickstarting a flywheel that will see even more world-changing startups founded on these shores.

We believe the coming decade of Aotearoa-founded startups presents a once-in-a-generation investment opportunity.

On the strength of this belief, in 2019, we raised a New Zealand-focused fund, opened an office in Auckland and built a dedicated Aotearoa team. Last year, we raised a second, $80 million New Zealand fund.

So far, we’ve invested $130 million in 27 Kiwi companies including leading rounds in Halter, Partly, Tracksuit and Foundry Lab. We invest in everything from pre-seed to Series B, enterprise SaaS to deep tech.

We are a small but mighty team of six, based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland.

Your job will be to invest - alongside Sam, James and Phoebe - our $80 million New Zealand fund. In addition, you will be responsible for ensuring our $650M Follow-on Fund gets exposure to all generational Kiwi companies at growth stage. To do this, you’ll work closely with the rest of our 14-strong investment team based in Sydney and Melbourne.

As an early member of our Aotearoa team, you’ll help us go from challenger brand to an iconic institution in New Zealand’s tech ecosystem.

You’re someone who has profound empathy for the journey of a founder, a mindset of enlightened hospitality, and a hunger to uncover the next great Kiwi talent, wherever they are and whatever their background.

You have a high ownership mentality, deep comfort with autonomy and ambiguity, confidence in your thought process and gut instincts, a willingness to adapt it to new information, a hunger for finding the truth, and a desire to help founders bring their better version of the future into the present. 

You’re passionate about growing, strengthening and diversifying Aotearoa’s tech ecosystem.

What you’ll do:

• Generating Dealflow — You will create your own initiatives to magnetically attract the best founders to you. In the past, other Blackbirds have created things like Sunrise (our annual, in-person, love letter to founders), Giants mentoring, Foundry, or our Wild Hearts podcast.

• Making Investments — You will be responsible for leading investments, including due diligence, running the process to get Investment Committee approval, negotiating the term-sheet and convincing founders to choose us as investors, getting agreement from all parties on the legal docs, and finally wiring the money. 

• Supporting Founders — As a board member, observer, shareholder, or advisor, you will provide exceptional support to the teams you interact with.

• Doubling Down — For our best portfolio companies, you will help identify which companies we should continue investing in, and support follow-on investments into the companies we back.

• Representing Blackbird to the World — You will become known to founders as someone they can trust, someone who treats founders with the highest level of integrity and care, and someone who people regularly send new, and interesting companies to meet.

• Building Community and the Ecosystem - You will be a core part of building up our Blackbird community not only of founders but also operators, and LPs to connect the dots and make Australia and New Zealand the best place to build a startup.

• Making Us Better — You will constantly question, and seek to improve our investment decision making processes, strengthen our culture, and lift up your colleagues in every way you can.

• Supporting the Investment Team — Reporting into Blackbird’s General Partners, you will form an integral part of our 14-person strong investments team across Australia and New Zealand, including mentoring and managing junior investors. 

The skills we’re looking for:

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

• Hospitality Mindset

  • Either having been a founder, or worked closely with them

• Relationships

  • Leading projects you are passionate about, and building community around them

  • Advising and helping founders who go on to be successful

• Investments

  • Articulating what you think makes products great and companies valuable

  • Having strong opinions on what are the greatest businesses and markets of tomorrow

  • Evaluating the psychological traits that lead founders to create the greatest companies ever built

  • Measuring the culture of an organisation and what environments lead the best people in the world to join and do their best work

  • Making investments into startups — both new and follow-on

  • Managing the investment process — from negotiation, to execution

For more info, check out our blog on How to Be an Investor at Blackbird, and our Growth Framework which we use to measure performance and make promotions.

Working at Blackbird

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.

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 20 weeks of parental leave for all parents (an additional 4 weeks for the birth parent), with no minimum tenure. In addition, we offer IVF, adoption and surrogacy leave. We also continue to pay superannuation and vest carried interest for up to 12 months of parental leave, and offer a supportive return-to-work policy to help with the ramp back.

• Learning & Development Budget: Our team is hungry to continuously learn and you’ll receive a budget to spend on books, conferences, training, coaching and courses relating to your profession.

• Wellbeing: We think in decades not days. To support our Blackbirds over the long haul we offer a range of holistic wellbeing benefits including a monthly healthy living allowance, 24/7 access to wellbeing support, a home office allowance, personal kit-kat days, and more!

• 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.

• Connection: While being big fans of a fully distributed workforce, we value our vibe and time to connect online and IRL through team and company offsites, monthly social activities, weekly lunches and our many social clubs (#fun-manis, #fun-fantasybookclub, #bb-craft just to name a few!).

• A share of Blackbird’s success: We think it is important to share successes with the whole team. All Blackbird employees receive carry in funds raised and ownership in management companies formed while they are at the firm.

Blackbird is a Pledge 1% member —  we pledge 1% of our time, equity and profits to help not-for-profit causes in our community. Through Pledge 1%, we established the Blackbird Foundation to supercharge the creative capabilities of young people.

We are also very proud to have won the 2023 AFR Best Place to Work award in three categories including Overall winner. In 2022, we became certified as one of Australia’s Great Places to Work.

About Blackbird

Blackbird is an Australasian venture capital firm whose mission is to invest in wild hearts, with the wildest ideas, right at the beginning. We back generational ambition with generational ownership by raising funds and investing in the best startup companies all the way through their journey from idea to beyond IPO.

Our portfolio is worth over $7B and includes more than 100 companies across Australia and New Zealand, from Canva and CultureAmp to rising stars like Halter, Partly, Carepatron, Gilmour Space, Eucalyptus, Fleet and Tracksuit.

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 watch Blackbird partner Sam Wong pitch Blackbird VC to founders, read about our mission and values, Blackbird’s Operating Principles (BOPs) and what we look for in founders.