About the Role

Blackbird is looking for a Program Manager to lead our two flagship products, Giants and Foundry, and help us supercharge our impact on the ecosystem. 

In early 2021, we launched our Giants program to help more founders at the very beginning of their journey take their first steps towards building their product. It is a community to help aspiring founders realise their boldest ambitions, interrogate their problem space, and test their solution with some of ANZ’s greatest mentors. Giants exists to find the wildest hearts, wherever they are. 

In 2021, we launched our Foundry program to help PhD students and early-career researchers to hone an ambitious frontier-tech startup idea. Our mission is to unlock a path for the world-leading scientists within our universities and research institutions to scale their impact through startups. We offer participants content, community and mentorship from investors and frontier-tech founders from around the world.

We are looking for someone who is as hungry and passionate as we are about building community and supporting early stage founders on their ideation and validation journey. This person is comfortable with less structure and thrives on autonomy. They get their energy from taking ownership of, innovating, and building world-class products from the ground up. Someone with a mindset of enlightened hospitality for the founders that they serve, who is excited to become a custodian of the Blackbird Mission, Values and Operating Principles.

Key responsibilities

The Program Manager will report to our Investments Chief of Staff, Alex Gifford (AG), and work closely with Investment Partners, Michael Tolo on Foundry and Tom Humphrey on Giants.

You will be the quarterback of our Blackbird program team, spearheading cohorts from pre-program to alumni and designing and developing new initiatives to build on our two communities. You’ll quickly become our go-to person for all things programs, build close relationships with founders, mentors and internal Blackbird stakeholders. 

Some responsibilities include:

• Program Management: You’ll plan and deliver all aspects of Giants and Foundry cohorts from start to finish (each ~8 to 10 weeks with hundreds of diverse ANZ founders). This includes hosting cohorts and events, cohort communications, program operations and platform management (Slack, Notion). You’ll have playbooks for these but bonus points if you’ve already run programs before. 

• Sourcing, outreach & community-building: You’ll work with AG and Partner sponsors to deliver outreach strategies that attract participants, mentors and other new faces into the programs (this could include events, content or partnerships).  You’ll build flourishing communities around the programs. 

• Program Operations: You’ll lead the internal operations for each program, including running WIPs when cohorts are running and reporting back to the team on performance against our key objectives.

• Mentor Relationships: You’ll become the key touchpoint for our mentors throughout and beyond the cohorts, imbuing our spirit of hospitality to ensure that both participants and mentors get great value out of their participation in the programs.

• New Products: You’ll work with AG and Partner sponsors to develop creative new ideas for the programs to expand and have greater impact through these programs. We believe that what we have is just the start for these two programs! 

Position Requirements

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

• Founder empathy:  you may have run a program before, been a founder yourself, worked as an operator in a startup or been a mentor in a program. 

• Community-obsessed: The communities we have in our ANZ ecosystem are our magic. Through our Giants mentoring and deep-tech Foundry programs, we have connected >1500 startups with hundreds of ANZ’s most epic mentors, supporting founders at the very earliest stages to validate their product through free content, programming and mentoring. 

• Relationship management and communications: Effective communication is at the heart of this role. The ability to communicate and engage with multiple stakeholders with diverse subject matter expertise is critical - anything from quantum computing to SaaS!

• Humility: Blackbird is a startup — no task is too small for us and no ambition is too big. We all take out the garbage. You will be scrappy, move quickly and never hesitate to roll up your sleeves.

• Hospitality mindset: We believe in the philosophy of "enlightened hospitality" and it lies at the heart of everything that we do at Blackbird. We serve our founders, not the other way around. We are about people, not companies. You will be generous with your time to create delightful experiences for founders, never losing sight of the people behind the numbers.

• Product mindset: You thrive on the ability to launch something from 0-1 and create world-class programs at scale. This includes the ability to quickly take a program on, tear it apart and rebuild it, and be hungry and passionate to do so.

• A creator and ideator: Not only will you operationalise our Giants and Foundry programs, you will experiment and iterate on opportunities that expand our community reach. This may include testing, running and scaling into new markets or scaling how we do community at Blackbird through Giants and Foundry - and even broader Blackbird products.

• You do not need to have worked at a venture capital firm or startup: We love it when people have bootstrapped themselves into a skill as much as gaining the skill from working at an established organisation.

This role calls for a hyper-organised person who's excited by the idea of building our Giants and Foundry communities. If you want to play a lead role in how Blackbird supports ecosystem startups from the very beginning, we want to hear from you. 

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!).

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 Australia's biggest venture capital fund whose mission is to supercharge Australia and New Zealand’s most ambitious founders. We do this by raising venture capital funds, investing into the best startup companies and helping them succeed. Our portfolio is worth over A$7B, and includes more than 130 companies across Australia and New Zealand, from Canva and CultureAmp to rising stars like Halter, Partly, Carepatron, Gilmour Space, Eucalyptus, Fleet and Tracksuit.

We are inspired by investment firms such as Berkshire Hathaway and Bridgewater Associates. 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 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 Blackbird’s Operating Principles (BOPs) and what we look for in founders.