Partner & General Manager, Berlin

At Entrepreneur First (“EF”), we believe that a small number of exceptional people will have an extraordinary impact by creating the technology companies which shape the future in ways we cannot yet imagine. We also believe that for many of these individuals, entrepreneurship is not an obvious or entirely legible career path. 

We exist to identify, and amplify the impact of, these individuals. We do this via our unique approach to company creation, which sees us identify and work with outliers before they even know they’re outliers, right through to the day they prove it. 

The companies built at EF are worth over $10B. They include Tractable (a computer vision unicorn), Cleo, Omnipresent, Aztec, Airbank, Transcelestial and many more. EF is funded and backed by some of the world's best founders and investors, including Patrick and John Collison (Stripe), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Tom Blomfield (GoCardless and Monzo) and Demis Hassabis (Deepmind). Having raised our Series C round of investment at the end of 2021, we are well-capitalised out to 2026 and have ambitious plans to further scale our impact over the coming years.

The role

We’re looking to hire a partner to be our senior Talent Investor and head up EF in Germany. You’ll be responsible for leading teams to identify exceptional individuals across the region and build a portfolio of globally ambitious startups. 

You’ll develop theses about where and how we should build relationships with the founders of future breakout companies and will build and develop a team to execute against these. As you become expert at this, you’ll increasingly spend your time thinking about how we can continuously raise our standards, train and apprentice new talent investors and build positive feedback loops into our business. Once the flywheel is turning in Berlin, we’ll also want you to lead our thinking about how we grow EF more broadly.

What you’ll do

In this role you’ll:

* Develop a strategy for EF in Germany, in collaboration with EF’s founders; 

* Be responsible and accountable for EF’s performance in Germany Identify exceptional founders before they have a company, become their trusted advisor and mentor, and support them to build startups from scratch;

* Build, train and apprentice small teams to do this work across the region;

* Collaborate with other leaders across EF to continuously improve our product and operations.

The core responsibility of this role is ensuring that EF finds and funds exceptional talent in your region. You are ultimately responsible for every aspect of this task, including developing a compelling thesis; mapping the talent ecosystem; identifying the most exceptional individuals; ensuring that EF is an attractive community for them to join; and making sure that they have a transformative experience and outcome once they join. We expect you to be the scout, evaluator, salesperson and coach of last resort: often you’ll need to get stuck in and work one-to-one with the most exceptional founders. The buck stops with you. Of course, EF is a team sport and an apprenticeship business, so you’ll also do a lot of this via hiring and coaching teams of talent investors. 

This is an unusual role. It’s not really an operating role (teams and budgets are small; lots of what we do doesn’t scale and we don’t want to scale) nor is it really a VC role (you’re not looking for “deals” nor will you be spending much time evaluating companies. In fact, we don’t invest in any companies except the ones we help founders to build from scratch). It’s probably not a good fit for someone who is deeply committed to either path. Rather, it’s a rare opportunity to help craft a new path and create a new category.

What you’ll need

It’s essential that you have:

* Deep alignment with EF’s mission and vision;

* Insatiable curiosity, and demonstrated ability to learn extremely quickly;

* Great “taste” in (or, put differently, discerning judgement about) people, honed through exposure to exceptional talent, ideally before their strengths are obvious to everyone else;

* World-class ability to build authentic relationships and meaningful networks;

* Extreme levels of ambition and drive (this is a very intense role with almost unlimited upside);

* Comfort with ambiguity, change and uncertainty.

It’s desirable that you have:

* Strong understanding of how startups and seed-stage fundraising works;

* Clear appreciation of the power of and opportunity in multiple fields of technology (technical background not required).

We’re open-minded about the ideal background for taking on this role. We expect to get (and welcome!) applications from former VCs and startup operators, but neither set of experiences is essential. In fact, this role will require you to drop a lot of mental models and habits that are core to those career paths.

Talent investing is a work-in-progress; there remain lots of unknowns and blank spaces. This is why we emphasise drive, curiosity and learning speed above nearly everything else. This is a difficult, intellectually complex role, but we think the right candidate will be able to get up to speed very quickly.

Multiple times in EF’s history we’ve taken a bet on people who weren’t necessarily qualified or “ready” on paper - and these have been among our best decisions. As you’d hope given the nature of our business, we’re extremely willing to take a risk on talented individuals relatively early in their career. If you think you could be extraordinarily good at this job but aren’t sure your CV reflects this yet, we’d encourage you to apply.

What we offer

* Competitive salary and bonus (though if you’re optimising for salary, you can probably do better elsewhere), coupled with uncapped upside via a significant direct stake in every startup you help to build;

* A blank canvas on which to develop and execute a talent investing thesis;

* An unusual opportunity to build deep and authentic relationships with future billionaires at the very start of their journey;

* An intense and invigorating culture and learning environment.

EF champions diversity and is committed to creating an inclusive environment in which a wide variety of backgrounds thrive. We do not tolerate discrimination of any nature, including but not limited to: discriminating on the basis of race, colour, religion, culture, nationality, gender, gender identity or expression, pregnancy, sexual orientation, age, disability, or marital status.