Identify exceptional individuals with startup potential, build trusted relationships with them, advise their career and company-building decisions, and influence investment decisions. The role involves developing talent-sourcing theses, building expert networks, evaluating founders and companies, and supporting promising individuals as they create technology companies. Candidates should have founder, investor, or startup operator experience and strong intellectual curiosity, drive, networking ability, judgment, and appreciation for technology’s impact.
Find Daniel Ek before he created Spotify. Mark Zuckerberg before Facebook. Whitney Wolfe Herd before Bumble. Patrick Collison before Stripe, when he’s 16 years old winning 1st place at the Irish Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition.
Your job is to identify these outlier individuals before the pivotal moments in their lives, then make sure they reach their potential. Once you’ve found them, help them build a moonshot.
You will learn how ideas become reality, have day-to-day exposure to world-class founders, and directly influence how we deploy millions of dollars every year into founders and teams in London.
We’re creating a whole new category in venture - you can be a pioneer.
Job requirements
You have likely already worked as a founder, investor or startup operator. You likely have 4-8 years experience post-university and are keen to learn how to build your craft as a Talent Investor. We expect that our Senior Associates will become Principals in 18-24 months of joining us.
1. You are intellectually curious: Talent Investors have a deep and persistent desire to increase their knowledge of the world. They seek out the foundational ideas behind a concept or belief system. They often have multiple interests and hobbies, some of which may be quite obscure. They’re constantly updating their knowledge and beliefs through self-directed learning.
1. You are intellectually curious: Talent Investors have a deep and persistent desire to increase their knowledge of the world. They seek out the foundational ideas behind a concept or belief system. They often have multiple interests and hobbies, some of which may be quite obscure. They’re constantly updating their knowledge and beliefs through self-directed learning.
2. You are driven: Talent Investors are innately driven to achieve ambitious goals. They “run through walls” and find creative ways to achieve their desired outcomes. They are restless in their pursuit of excellence, and won’t take no for an answer.
3. You are a network builder: Talent Investors enjoy building, and immersing themselves within, networks of exceptional people. They can build meaningful relationships with exceptional people; both at peer-level, and with individuals more senior to themselves. They enjoy making intra- and inter-network connections.
4. You are a discerning judge of others: Talent Investors hold high expectations for themselves and expect the same of others. They are able to balance optimism and realism when they evaluate others. They are able to believe and see possibility in individuals where their potential may not be obvious to others.
5. You understand and appreciate technology’s potential for impact: Talent Investors are fascinated by technology’s potential for impact, particularly through early stage company creation. Even if not a technologist by training, they will have developed an understanding of, and appreciation for, various different technologies, likely through self-directed learning.
Job responsibilities
- Develop and execute theses on where you can find exceptionally talented individuals early in their career. Where’s the next Homebrew Computer Club?
- Become a trusted advisor to those individuals - help them unlock their ambition and reach their potential, from advising on career decisions to supporting them in building companies and raising funds.
- Constantly improve your mental model of what these individuals look like.
- Build relationships with experts in a broad range of fields.
- Be a key influencer in deciding which founders and companies EF invests in.
Fundamentally, your job is to find exceptional people and support them to build exceptional companies. If you do this job well, you will become part of the origin story of the iconic companies of the future - some examples from our portfolio include:
- Tractable - a computer vision unicorn, co-founded by Razvan and Alex, the latter joining EF immediately after completing his Computer Science Masters degree at Imperial.
- Magic Pony Technology - an AI company acquired by Twitter for $150m after just 18 months. Co-founders Rob and Zehan both studied at Imperial, but had never met - Rob was found by a Talent Investor as the first employee at Raspberry Pi.
- Ochre Bio - an AI drug discovery company co-founded by Jack and Quin. Quin was contacted by a Talent Investor while he was building a treehouse in the jungles of Costa Rica, taking a break after starting his own biotech.
- Cleo - an AI financial advisor now on a rocketship trajectory with $350m+ ARR. Barney, the founder, was an early employee at a high-growth Fintech in London - our Talent Investing team spent months with him prior to joining EF.
- Many others - e.g. Gensyn (distributed compute), Callosum (intelligent inference orchestration), Accurx (healthtech platform used in 99%+ of the UK's GP practices)...
Entrepreneur First London, England Office
Senna Building, London, United Kingdom, E2 8JF
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