Downing Capital Group: Investor
Location: Remote with frequent travel. Must be based and employable in the United States.
Title: Dependent on experience
Ideal Candidate Profile:
- MBA from a top-tier program (Stanford, Wharton, Booth, Kellogg, Harvard, Sloan, Columbia, Yale, Haas, Stern, and Tuck) coupled with academic success as an undergraduate at a competitive school.
- A bright, driven, curious, and low-ego orientation with a passion for entrepreneurship, innovation, and corporate strategy.
- Background at a venture builder or significant role at a start-up as well as in business analysis and diligence (including venture capital, consulting, hedge fund, or private equity).
- Excellent interpersonal skills and a strong desire for and demonstrated interest in network building.
- Affinity for joining a high-performing team that values collaboration, expectations of excellence, candor, and deep analysis.
Firm Overview:
Downing Capital Group Principals are investor-entrepreneurs. We are a new breed of venture capital firm: members of our team are business builders, not merely capital providers. Our unique model turns conventional VC on its head: we begin with our own business ideas, recruit management teams to execute on them, and then capitalize these ventures. The vast majority of the firm’s ~$80MM of capital will be invested in ideas incubated internally. The Fund will have approximately 10 portfolio companies and will be the first $5-15MM of capital provided to a given venture.
The process begins with a business idea that is validated over the course of several months with data and scores of conversations with industry experts, potential customers, and partners. Our validation process involves an intensive study of the value proposition to customers, the size of the addressable market, the competitive landscape of players, the plan to substantiate the unit economics, the budgets required to scale, the ideal profiles of the management team, adjacent markets that could be served as the company matures, and the possible paths to monetization. We engage a board of advisors who are well-positioned to advise the management team and make valuable customer introductions. We consider who the best people are to run the asset, recruit the C-suite accordingly, and then work closely with our portfolio companies to support their growth.
The firm launched in 2021 and the ideal candidate is seeking an opportunity for significant responsibility in joining a close-knit and growing team. The firm provides market-leading compensation and benefits, including covering 100% of employee healthcare, dental, and vision premiums; a generous 401(k) matching program; an annual continuing education reimbursement; gym and wellness reimbursements; a cell phone plan credit; compelling paid time off; and the ability to work from home when not traveling.
Role Overview:
Investors are deeply involved in every aspect of our mission and will work closely with our founder on:
- idea conception and serving as a highly valued thought partner to the founder to iterate on new business ideas.
- validation of the new business idea by reaching out to key industry experts, leading conversations with specialists, gathering data, and conducting competitive intelligence.
- analysis of all relevant data points to support, disprove, or evolve our thesis.
- recruiting key portfolio company management, including the CEO, CTO, CFO, and COO.
- serving on the Board of Directors of the portfolio companies in the Principal’s coverage area.
- working very closely with the C-suite of the portfolio companies in the Principal’s coverage area.
A investment team member has the responsibility to cover 2-3 portfolio companies and, once the new companies are formed, will aid members of the C-suite at these companies in varied strategy-related work on a week-to-week basis.
Background of Founder:
The firm is led by Jesse Downing, a former investor at the Baupost Group, a $30 billion investment partnership. While employed at Baupost from 2015 to 2021, Jesse made 20 investments, all of which were profitable and generated several billion in profits for clients over his tenure. As a generalist, he made investments in a range of fields including healthcare, packaging, grocery, technology, software, leisure, telecom, and media. He also co-led Baupost’s recruiting efforts on the public team and served on the firm’s Risk Committee. Jesse is a graduate of Harvard College where he studied Economics and Mathematics and graduated with High Honors. He is also the author of Investment: A History with Norton Reamer, a book published by Columbia University Press. The book, featured in The New York Times, The Economist, and Institutional Investor, chronicles the development of investing as a human enterprise from Mesopotamia to the present.
For more information, see http://www.DowningCap.com
If interested, please apply here.
