Shasta Ventures (Linkedin, Crunchbase) is growing! We are looking to hire associates to join our investment team to help us find, analyze and make investments across the Shasta investment practice areas: Enterprise, Consumer and Emerging Platforms. This is a great “first job” in venture capital, providing the opportunity to learn about and get exposure to the venture capital business during a two to three year time period — prior venture capital experience is not necessary or expected. High integrity, a friendly, welcoming personality and a strong work ethic is a must.
Shasta Ventures is a San Francisco Bay Area venture capital firm focused on early-stage investments in enterprise, consumer, and emerging platform companies that are building products that change the way we live and work. The teams behind these ground-breaking technologies and services are passionate, possessing unique and oftentimes contrarian insights with the grit and instinct to bring their visions to life. Shasta is investing out of its fifth fund with more than $1 billion under management. Notable investments include Anaplan, Apptio, Dollar Shave Club, Nest Labs, Nextdoor, Turo, Zuora and more.
What’s Involved
Investing
As a core member of our tight-knit investment team, you will take part in the full spectrum of venture capital investing — supporting Shasta Partners to find, analyze and invest in the best people, products and companies across our focus areas:
- You will do broad scale industry research and analysis to learn about and understand industry landscapes within our focus areas.
- You will meet with entrepreneurs on a daily basis to help screen and filter opportunities.
- You will work with Partners to dig into specific companies to learn more about their product, business model, market size, go to market plan, technology stack and opportunity.
- You will help build investment cases for specific companies, writing investment memos and co-presenting opportunities during weekly Partner Meetings.
- You will support deal negotiation, winning the deal and closing.
- Post-investment, you will support our entrepreneurs and portfolio companies.
- Your opinion will be highly valued and your initiative to dive into white spaces and help the entire Shasta partnership learn about new industry focus areas will be welcomed.
Portfolio Support
- Post-investment, you will be called upon to support our entrepreneurs and companies however is beneficial. This will include support in marketing and PR, interviewing and hiring, product testing, pitch feedback, business development, introductions to potential sales opportunities or any other function where we can help.
Thought Leadership, Network Building & Marketing
- You will represent Shasta around the industry, on social media, at industry events and conferences, with some US travel.
- You will help produce and staff Shasta events including dinners, meetups, conferences and other.
- You will help us prepare for our annual LP meetings and presentations.
Skills Required
- Passion and deep knowledge of the early stage technology ecosystem.
- Hard working self-starter, with an entrepreneurial mindset who excels in open working environments with little direction.
- People-first, with a personable and humble demeanor interested in supporting others.
- Hungry to learn new things, and driven to turn over the rocks within the industry to identify great investment opportunities.
- Naturally analytical mindset, proficient in using analytical tools.
- Sufficient level of technical and product knowledge to quickly assess company / product viability.
- Financial management and modeling skills are a plus, but not necessary
- Strong verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to quickly synthesize large amounts of information and provide an analytical breakdown of strengths and weaknesses.
- An executive presence with the confidence to state your opinion and advocate for it.
- A strong personal network in the early stage startup ecosystem — and the eagerness to continue building one — will be important.
- Growth mindset and ability to project into the future to consider new technologies and how they may or may not be adopted by consumers and businesses.
Shasta Sector Specific Requirements
Enterprise
This role is ideal for a curious and energetic person with 2 to 6 years of work experience in challenging and analytical roles either within or advising Enterprise technology companies. If you are passionate about enterprise technology and eager to discover how businesses are using SaaS, artificial intelligence, big data, and blockchain to increase customer revenue, drive employee efficiency and tighten enterprise security, then this role is right for you. If you would like to help find and build the next Salesforce.com, Workday, Cloudera, Twilio or Anaplan, then come join us!
Consumer
This role is an ideal position for someone with 2 to 4 years of prior work experience directly for, or associated with, consumer technology companies. If you’re someone who loves playing around with new applications on your phone, buying from brands before they’re “hot,” dabbling in consumer finance products, or studying global consumer trends, then this position may be for you. Ideal candidates will have a Bachelors degree from a top university, and be extremely passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, business, as well as meeting new people, and hard work!
Emerging Platforms
This role is an ideal position for someone with 3 to 6 years of prior work experience in engineering or technical product development, who has an interest in learning about venture capital, and a keen ability to spot coming technology trends and identify industry-leading companies within the fields of robotics, space, AR /VR, computer vision, connected hardware and Internet of Things. Ideal candidates will have a Bachelors and/or Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering, or Computer Science or Electrical Engineering with a strong interest in physical hardware, with work experience in Robotics, Autonomous Systems, hardware, and/or Aerospace.
How to Apply
If this opportunity excites you, we’d love to hear from you! Like most of venture capital, a warm introduction from someone whose opinion we trust and value is the best way in. In that intro, please share:
- Which Shasta practice area you are interested in — Enterprise, Consumer, and/or Emerging Platforms
- A short paragraph about yourself
- A link to your LinkedIn profile,
- And two short writing exercises: 1) pick a company in our portfolio that you respect most and tell us why. Then tell us which company we shouldn’t have invested in, and why; and 2) Tell us about a new market that you think is important — one that you would be interested to “map”– and how you would go about that.
We look forward to hearing from you and learning how you think about the start up community and what excites you about new markets and technologies. Thank you!
