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About the role

Blackbird is hiring an investor to find and invest in Aotearoa’s most ambitious founders, right at the very beginning.

We are looking for someone who will earn a front-row seat to the best Kiwi-led business stories of our generation, and who wants to play a pivotal role in building Blackbird into an iconic institution in New Zealand’s tech ecosystem. 

No previous investing experience is required! We are open to applications from candidates with a range of backgrounds, from those who are investing-curious to those who are more experienced investors. 

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 >130 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 Halter, Partly and Tracksuit.

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. In 2022, we raised a second, $80 million New Zealand fund. This year, we will raise a third fund to invest in Kiwis both in New Zealand and overseas.

So far, we’ve invested >$160 million in 35 Kiwi companies including leading rounds in Tracksuit, Halter, Watchful and OpenStar. We invest in everything from pre-seed to Series D, enterprise SaaS to nuclear fusion. 

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

Your job will be to invest - alongside Georgia, James and Phoebe - our 2025 Core fund in pre-seed, seed and Series A rounds. In addition, you will be responsible for ensuring our Follow-on Fund gets exposure to all world-class Kiwi companies at growth stage. To do this, you’ll work closely with the rest of our 18-strong investment team based in Sydney and Melbourne.

As an early member of our Aotearoa team, you’ll help us continue to 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 helping with, or leading (depending on seniority) new 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 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.

Read more about what we got up to in 2024 - and what you might get up to in 2025 - here.

The skills we’re looking for:

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

• Founder empathy

  • 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

• Investment thinking

  • 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

  • Honing your mental models for what constitutes exceptional startup progress  

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

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 (and 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 Australasia'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. We have a portfolio valued at over $7B, including some of the most successful Australian and Kiwi startups such as Canva, Halter 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.