Urban Us is the leading early-stage investor for startups reimagining cities. We believe startups will play a central role in making city life better and more resilient as they redesign cities for radically lower greenhouse gas emissions, improved efficiency, and improved quality of life. We built Urban Us as a hybrid venture+credit investment firm and operating platform to support urban transformation and allocate financial and intellectual capital towards these goals.
Our focus on cities and climate change derive from an essential realization that cities are home to some of the most at-risk people and assets around the world and we need new ways to strengthen resilience and better manage risks.
We also believe that cities represent the highest leverage point for transformation and financial opportunity. Higher density communities have enormous advantages in driving massive impacts. Density means lower per capita costs for everything from fire fighting services to power lines, solutions can be deployed efficiently and at scale; and electrification and efficiency are among the most powerful strategies on earth for decarbonization and fighting climate change.
Our culture
Our firm values innovation, people, and relationships over transactions. Even though we are an investment firm we think and function like a startup, oriented towards solving problems, growth, and building something world-changing and impactful. We believe financial returns are a natural outcome of great company culture, passion for the work, disciplined thinking and execution. Investment acumen, technical competence, and curiosity are the minimum bar; we hire for commitment and cultural contributions. We share leadership and invest in the professional development of our team. We are also a distributed team that conducts business across geography and media and uses the discipline of writing, frequent updates, trust, and coordination to maintain high function and autonomy.
What we offer
Our team has 70 combined years of executive experience in capital markets, investing, startups, and engineering. As a core team member, you will have the opportunity to invest in urban technology startups across the capital structure including debt, structured equity, and secondary transactions. You will also be challenged and engaged across a wide range of business topics such as fund formation, legal, negotiation, and marketing, as well as the core technology themes that guide our investments including hardware, internet of things, distributed infrastructure, engineering, and design.
We will offer compensation that is commensurate with your skills. In order to align incentives with Urban Us, we will also provide equity compensation, via GP carry and other bonus structures. As our organization grows, we want you to participate in that growth.
This role is not specific to any location, though candidates must be able to work with US-Eastern and US-Pacific time zones. We will provide an offer that allows you to maintain your health and well-being.
What we are looking for
We are looking for someone with a passion for investing and a heart and mind for funding urban technology and seed-stage startups. We are looking for someone interested in fighting climate change and helping to foster innovation within cities in areas such as transportation, built environment, food, water, waste, and energy.
We are interested in discovering new ways to invest in great ideas without being trapped in conventional notions regarding hardware, asset-lite business models, or the ability to utilize project finance or structured debt for seed-stage startups.
Responsibilities
You will be a critical member of a focused investment team where we all wear multiple hats across deal sourcing, reconnaissance, and analysis and each contributes to building and managing a world-class portfolio of startup investments. This means that in addition to being a technical wizard on the team with high financial literacy and facility with Excel and modeling, you must have the ability to think critically about the businesses and markets we invest in. As you evolve with the role, we expect you will grow into a thought partner, stress testing hypotheses and investment ideas and identifying new themes and opportunities to pursue.
Functional requirements
- Translating startup business models (often with little documentation) into functional, quantitative excel models, including P&L forecasting, scenario analysis and discounted cash flow and other valuation analysis.
- Ability to create polished, well-constructed pitch decks and synthesize complex concepts into compelling presentation materials.
- Resourceful and able to conduct primary investment research in the sectors and startups we invest in.
- Ability to gather and synthesize disparate financial, research and primary startup interview data into compelling visual and written investment memos.
- Cogently present investment analysis to team members, limited partners, startups and/or other key stakeholders.
- Stay abreast of startup news and industry trends that critically impact our core urban tech thesis.
- Ability to use reading and writing to keep a distributed team in sync.
- Ability to work independently with minimal supervision as well as part of a team and will not only do the required work but naturally look for opportunities to improve the process and contribute to our overall platform growth and development.
- Comfort with (or openness to) advanced data analysis tools such as R, Tableau, Python, etc. is a plus.
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree economics, finance, statistics, business, physics or math
- 3 years (minimum) of relevant work experience in traditional finance (credit, leveraged finance, or structured finance), fund management or impact investing preferred
- Experienced in investment management and transactional finance. This experience could come in the form of deal feasibility, analysis, underwriting, structuring, consulting due diligence and fundraising
- High technical proficiency, (i.e. comfortable with three-statement financial analysis, can perform valuation analysis and quickly and effectively build P&L and lending Excel models for our portfolio companies)
- Applied interest in advanced solutions and the future of cities including electrification, sustainability, mobility/micro-mobility, built environment, public safety, and/or government efficiency.
- Quick learner and have the ability to learn/adopt new systems and technologies
- Able to derive insights from both tabular and relational datasets. Additionally, can communicate those insights via both narrative and quantitative channels.
- Able to synthesize existing visual and written data into structured memos.
- Can work independently with minimal supervision as well as part of a team
- Ability to communicate confidently and competently with sophisticated investors, institutions and corporations and other stakeholders.
- High ethical standards and can handle sensitive and confidential information.
- Team player with high integrity.
How to apply
This is a full-time opportunity to be part of a hard-working team and a growing, impactful platform. Appropriate compensation, including bonuses and General Partner carry, is provided in addition to a competitive benefits package. For consideration, please send a resume and cover letter to jobs[at]urban.us.
IF interested, please apply here.
