TPB
We’re hiring a Principal to join the investing team at The Production Board, working closely with our partner Bharat Vasan.
About The Production Board
The Production Board works to “Reimagine Earth” by building and investing in technology businesses across human health, food and agriculture, biomanufacturing, energy, automation, enterprise AI/ML, and consumer markets.
TPB makes initial investments in businesses in the Seed and Series A stage, supporting them with follow-on capital and active operational partnership throughout their lifecycle. TPB also runs an active foundry program, building businesses with founders from their earliest stages.
TPB takes a science-led and thesis-driven approach to investing, identifying emerging opportunities with the potential to transform markets and upgrade civilization by “connecting the dots” between science and engineering breakthroughs, end-markets, and talent.
About the Role
As an Investment Principal, you’ll be working closely with Partner Bharat Vasan and our general partners to build businesses that address the core needs of humans and reengineer large markets through the application of cutting-edge software and hardware.
You’ll build relationships in key founder communities, identify the top mission-driven founders and businesses at their earliest stages to partner with TPB, drive our investment diligence and selection processes, and help our founders build their businesses from seed through scale.
You’ll be exploring sectors, markets and technologies broadly, with particular interest in:
- Vertically-focused AI/ML/LLM applications
- Consumer hardware/software products built on behavioral science
- Internet of Things infrastructure
- Human health and performance
- Industrial transformation
- Climate tech
You’ll be constantly on the lookout for how new technologies can reinvent large markets and communities in alignment with TPB’s mission and values.
Day to day, you’ll be responsible for:
- Sourcing: Engaging exceptional early stage founders to partner with TPB through active networking, strategic mapping of the space, and ensuring we see every deal relevant to our theses and sector focus.
- Research and thesis development: Identifying and tracking the new opportunities created by science, technology, market and demographic trends, analyzing market structures, and building techno-economic analyses in fast developing spaces.
- Investment execution: Leading end to end investment processes, including technical diligence, financial modeling, business and market analysis, references, etc.
- Board support: Leveraging your product and operational excellence to help founders with strategic business needs as they navigate their startup journey.
About You
- You connect with founders. You actively spend your time, personally and professionally, in communities of mission-driven, technical founders solving real-world problems. Professionally, you’ve sought out and built strong relationships with startup founders in a systematic outbound capacity.
- You partner with operators. You deploy a complete investor’s toolkit – sourcing, technical background, market research, due diligence, deal analysis, and ongoing value creation – in support of the operational excellence required to drive startup success. You’re looking to learn from an investor with deep operating experience and narrative skills.
- You’re technical. By training and inclination, you’re thinking about solving problems and investing with an engineer’s lens. You have a bias towards shipping early and often, and leveraging new tools and data sets to build strategic sourcing and analytical machines.
- You have exceptional product rigor. You’ve built and brought to market technology products in product-led organizations with commercial success. You’ve developed quantitative and qualitative tools to back up exceptional product sensibilities. You’ve built personal product and go to market theses based on strong first principles thinking.
- You’re a crystal clear writer and communicator. You write to think, distilling complex bets to the essential variables that determine the outcome. Your communication skills encompass not only the techno-economic issues at stake, but also the human/emotional variables that determine investing and operating success.
- You’re competitive. You’re intrinsically driven to win, even when it demands sustained hard work, and especially when you’re the underdog. You’re unafraid of being unpopular in search of the truth.
- You’ve got a sense of humor. Your competitive drive doesn’t keep you from finding ways to create camaraderie and joy with the people working alongside you. You expect and contribute to a sense of humor in the culture of the team.