The Investment Associate role at Underscore is a high-paced, analysis-driven position, that plays a part in determining the allocation of millions of dollars of investment funding. Working in apprenticeship with senior team members, s/he brings an informed, equal voice to the investment team, and a champion of our Core Community. Immersed in the daily operations of the fund, the Investment Associate balances high-paced, outward facing responsibilities with deep research and analytical obligations.
As former product managers, researchers, engineers, and entrepreneurs, we’re interested in a diverse array of backgrounds and experiences. Regardless of your background, if you have a demonstrated interest in venture capital and want to better understand where venture capital sits in the intersection of technology and business, we’d like to meet you.
The Investment Associate works closely with the firm’s Investing Team, with a focus on sourcing and managing deal flow, refining our thesis and representing Underscore to the broader community. The role is roughly broken down as follows:
Investment Process Management and Opportunity Sourcing
Finding and investing in great opportunities is at the core of what we do. Proactively, systematically managing this process from start to finish is essential to the success of the firm and provides a rich and exciting learning opportunity. Your investment discretion and diligence significantly impact Underscore’s most mission-critical process.
- Serve as the first set of eyes on all inbound investment opportunities and justifying your own recommendation of whether to pursue or pass. Prepare general information, background research, and detailed notes on all Investment Opportunities.
- Provide entrepreneurs with an end-to-end A+ Underscore experience, while building your own relationships with key entrepreneurs and other game changers in our community.
- Work through diligence items and investment memo composition with the investing team
- Provide a monthly review & improvement cycle for managing our internal deal flow processing systems.
- We have a strong bias towards community-driven sourcing, building communities and engaging networks of people that know our firm well to refine but also develop our investment theses over time. You will be responsible for creating curated networks of individuals in service of sourcing and developing our investment strategy in specific domains.
Thesis Refinement
At the heart of every VC firm is a set of “theses” on how different industries and technologies are likely to evolve and where investment opportunities are to be found. We give you autonomy to pursue your specific interests within our focus domains, performing in-depth research to refine Underscore’s theses in selected areas.
- Identify business and technological trends, detailing industry opportunities and problems
- Convert research and insight into powerful, authoritative writing to be published via Underscore
- Proactively source great potential investments in your thesis areas
- Build a core community of experts around your thesis
External Representation
Underscore is privileged to sit in-front of hundreds of entrepreneurs annually. You will consistently be required to represent Underscore VC to entrepreneurs and engage with the broader entrepreneurial community in Boston.
- Engage and build the Boston entrepreneurial community
- Attend entrepreneurial events in the community
- Help blow up the “black box” of VC as a conduit for people to better understand how venture capital works and what VCs are looking for
- You will be the “concierge” to entrepreneurs coming to Underscore — making sure they have a really great experience in visiting with us.
About You
For starters, you don’t need to look like anyone else on our team. At Underscore, we want to hire a person, not a resume, and we welcome myriad perspectives and experiences. That said…
- You’ve had 3+ years of professional experience, ideally in a startup (e.g., Product Management, BD) or a startup-facing role (venture capital, technology investing/banking).
- You have strong empathy for the entrepreneurial journey from working with entrepreneurs or being an entrepreneur yourself. You have experiences at the ground floor of an early-stage/high-growth startup or have worked closely with founders in starting/growing their ventures.
- You have a uniquely differentiated network of Boston-based entrepreneurs and/or domain experts or demonstrated experiences in building analogous communities in other geographies.
- You bring a product, engineering, or design mindset to creating, managing, and constantly iterating on working rhythms that serve the teams around you and are the first to identify how/why internal processes can be better.
- You possess strong interpersonal skills, a creative problem-solving style, and an exceptional work ethic.
- You have a knack for identifying promising, high‐growth businesses and transformative entrepreneurs — maybe you’ve sourced for VC firms in the past, advised early-stage startups, or even done some personal investing!
- While you’re not afraid to ask questions, you harbor a self-starter mentality, which enables you to initiate projects and work independently.
- You’re a strong writer and an impressive presenter, and you balance confidence with humility.
- You’ve got fierce quantitative and qualitative analytical skills, and you’re comfortable sharing your point of view.
- You relentlessly adjust as necessary; this position requires agility and an entrepreneurial attitude as we continue to build the firm.
- At your core, you believe that entrepreneurship can change the world, particularly when it resides at the intersection of great teams, technology, and large markets.
About Us
Underscore VC is a venture capital firm investing in the earliest-stage of SaaS applications and infrastructure startups that are located in or moving to Boston. We back transformative entrepreneurs from idea to scale with an aligned community. To surround our founders with the experience, skills, and knowledge they can leverage to succeed, we’ve brought together a community of leading entrepreneurs we call “Cores” to partner with us in investing our assets under management. These curated groups of peers have created billions of dollars of value and thousands of jobs while building enduring, high-impact businesses. This community has convened with a personal desire to give back and support the next generation of up and coming entrepreneurs.
We look forward to hearing from you. Please submit resume to jenn@underscore.vc as we’ll follow up from there should there be an appropriate fit.
