Sidewalk Labs is an Alphabet company tackling the challenges of urban growth. Our vision for cities is rooted in a cross-disciplinary approach that is reflected in our team, composed of experts from real estate, government, finance, technology, engineering and more. Since our founding in 2015, we have grown into an organization of over 100 employees based primarily in New York and Toronto.
We are currently designing a new kind of mixed-use, complete community on Toronto’s waterfront in partnership with the tripartite agency Waterfront Toronto and the local community. This joint effort, called Sidewalk Toronto, will combine forward-thinking urban design and new digital technology to create a people-centered neighborhood that achieves precedent-setting levels of sustainability, affordability, mobility, and economic opportunity.
We are working to achieve something unprecedented — help us build it!
What is the role?
In this role you will be a key member of Sidewalk Labs’ infrastructure investment team. This team, called Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, seeks to bring together world-leading partners to focus on catalyzing technology-enabled infrastructure. Emerging technologies such as autonomous vehicles, distributed renewable energy, real-time controls, robotics, and machine learning are poised to both disrupt and enable infrastructure. Historically, infrastructure as an asset class has been resistant to innovation, resulting in many traditional infrastructure investors mispricing the risks of technology disruption and failing to capitalize on new infrastructure opportunities enabled by technology. We hope to help close this gap.
Sidewalk Infrastructure aims to catalyze innovation in both companies applying technologies to enhance infrastructure performance and underlying advanced infrastructure projects utilizing such technologies. Sidewalk Infrastructure will focus on verticals including advanced mobility and energy, water and waste, and digital and social infrastructure throughout North America, including providing the option of financing for advanced systems. Bringing together an experienced team with world-leading partners, the team will seek to facilitate the application of technology to enable more sustainable, distributed and intelligent urban infrastructure, creating jobs, improving mobility, and advancing cleaner water and waste and more environmentally friendly and renewable energy.
As an Associate, you will contribute to all phases of an investment process from origination through diligence, execution, and asset management. The role spans developing and evaluating thematic areas of tech-enabled infrastructure, rigorous financial analysis, the preparation of investment memoranda, supporting commercial due diligence, and managing portfolio investments.
This work is fundamentally cross-cutting and collaborative. In addition to our Investment team, you will work closely with companies and teams with diverse backgrounds in areas such as technology and sustainability. You will bring the work of world-class visionaries to life, using technology and other forms of innovation to unlock the true potential of the place.
What you have to achieve:
- Within your first three months, you will dive into investment opportunities as well as engage in thematic sprints to identify actionable investment opportunities based on Sidewalk Infrastructure’s focus sectors and areas of market development and demand. You will provide support to existing teams while quickly getting up to speed on the team mandate.
- Within your first six months, you will have completed at least two thematic sprints, completed market maps, and identified a range of potential transaction concepts. You will also have developed a firm grasp of the sectors of the team’s mandate. You will also have developed a working understanding of the enabling technologies and policy innovations.
- Within the first year, you will have completed one or more investments, including, potentially, growth/VC style and / or project finance style investments to scale the technology across North America.
- From there, you will be responsible for executing on all aspects of the investment process. As a small team charting a lot of unknown territory, you will need to be flexible and work cross-functionally.
What leads to success:
Experience, drive, and intellect
- We seek candidates who adopt a “firm-first” mentality, are consistently rigorous in work product and analysis, foster internal collaboration and mentorship, and are accountable to outcomes;
- Ability to quickly develop domain expertise in new areas of technology, finance, and infrastructure;
- Have 3-6 years of finance, investing, and/or technology experience in private equity, venture capital, project finance, principal investing, project development, or a technology research or development role;
- Expertise in advanced quantitative modeling and financial accounting;
- Ideally would have experience with advanced technology and engineering related to urban infrastructure;
- Exceptional academic performance
- Thrive in a rigorous, analytical environment with high attention to detail;
- Are a sharp and precise communicator.
Passion
- At Sidewalk Infrastructure, we believe that infrastructure will be fundamentally transformed by technology. We are very excited to hear from individuals who are passionate about achieving precedent-setting levels of sustainability through innovation.
If interested, please apply here.
