The Summer Associate plays a critical role at Underscore VC. Working in partnership with our investment team, s/he brings an informed, equal voice to the table, helping determine how best to allocate millions of investment dollars. Immersed in the daily operations of the fund, the Summer Associate balances high-paced, outward facing responsibilities with deep research and analytical obligations. If you want to build VC experience and better understand where venture capital sits in the intersection of technology and business, we’d like to meet you.
Responsibilities
Investment Opportunity Sourcing and Thesis Development
Finding and investing in great opportunities is at the core of what we do. 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.
- Serve as the first set of eyes on inbound investment opportunities and justifying your own recommendation of whether to pursue or pass
- 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
- Identifying business and technological trends, detailing industry opportunities and problems
- Converting research and insight into powerful, authoritative writing to be published via Underscore
- Proactively sourcing great potential investments in your thesis areas
- Building a core community of experts around your thesis
Investment Program Management
- Over the summer, we host initiatives like UFirst, a summer accelerator for student founders. In a portion of the Summer Associate’s time, s/he will work alongside our Principal to manage the program, working closely with founders and mentors from our Core community.
- You will play a strategic role in how our student-entrepreneurship and recent alumni programs evolve over time.
Due Diligence
- Supporting sprints on investment opportunities diving into the team, market, product, etc. You’ll use a variety of skills in market landscaping, customer segmentation, financial forecasting, etc…
- Work through diligence items and investment memo composition with the investing team
- Developing your unique narrative and point of view on all investment opportunities through interactions with entrepreneurs, their customers, advisors, and references
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’re enrolled in a graduate-level program with a few years of professional experience, ideally in a startup (e.g., Product Management, BD) or with startups (e.g., venture capital, technology investing/banking). You may also be a Boston-based graduate-level researcher with a broad network of research-entrepreneurs.
- You have a uniquely differentiated network of Boston-based entrepreneurs and/or domain experts
- You possess strong interpersonal skills, a creative problem-solving style, and an exceptional work ethic.
- You have a knack for identifying transformative technologies — 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.
