Hillfarrance is looking for a one-of-a-kind Associate!

About Hillfarrance

When a Brit, an American, and a Kiwi walk into a venture capital office…

Hillfarrance Venture Capital is the leading pre-seed and seed-stage fund in New Zealand. We fund exceptional entrepreneurs exploring the frontiers of artificial intelligence, media and gaming, and solutions for the climate crisis. Established in 2020 by Rob Vickery, an experienced VC who learnt his craft in the UK and California, Hillfarrance’s $NZD 36m Fund I invested in 22 startups and achieved top global quartile performance within two years. Utilising New Zealand's unique sandbox, we introduced a revolutionary platform for founders, our LPs and the overall startup market. We are now raising a $50M Fund 2 to continue our thesis in New Zealand, targeting $86M AUM between the two funds.

About the role

Our ambition is ever-growing, and thus, we are expanding our team and bringing on an Investment Associate. Our Investment Associate will focus on four main activities that live under the Operations arm of Hillfarrance Venture Capital: Deal Sourcing, Due Diligence, Portfolio Reporting & Content Generation.

Here’s what you can expect:

1. Deal sourcing

The lifeblood of venture capital is, and always will be, the amazing companies that we invest and partner with. Supporting the sourcing of new investment opportunities for Hillfarrance will play a critical role for the Associate, from joining initial introductory meetings with founders all the way to making the final investment alongside the investment team. You will be mentored and trained to decide on what opportunities should advance based on our fund's thesis and continue to investigate the deal with further research. This research includes online research through various databases, meetings with the founders, and calls with our venture team. We will even give you an expense budget to take founders for coffees and lunches, when ready, to further our deal-flow-building relationships.

2. Due diligence & Investment Memos

Due diligence for us means to dive deep and get an extensive understanding of a company, its assets (financial position), liabilities, management, market size, competitors & commercial state. As we progress through the deal-sourcing stages with various companies, you will support the team to ensure that all risks are accounted for and understood regarding investment into a company. This means identifying obstructions to us making an investment, understanding the potential growth of a company and concluding where this is an investment opportunity for Hillfarrance. In this fast-paced environment, you will be undergoing diligence on several companies at once at various stages using the plethora of tools at our disposal. You can expect to do market analysis on companies, build financial projections and budgets, create cap tables, and do other qualitative research.

Additionally, a big part of when we decide to invest is to write up investment memos reflecting our conviction in a company. You will be mentored and tasked to support the write-up of full investment memos on various companies that we choose to invest in to provide to our own investors.

3. Portfolio Reporting & Management

A big piece of what we do is assisting and supporting portfolio companies post-investment, as well as reporting back to our own investors on a regular basis. You will be supporting the team in putting these reports together, assisting us in collecting data/information from Founders, CEOs and CFOs on company metrics, and putting these numbers together to make regular reports. This takes great attention to detail and a willingness to meet deadlines and get ahead of schedule when possible.

4. Content Generation

As a firm, it’s important for us to be at the forefront of the VC space, talking about the verticals that we invest in, the future of venture capital, the intersection of business and technology, etc. You will play a hand in generating content for our blog, LinkedIn, General Partners, and others to keep our firm in the limelight of our industry. Being able to write a cogent, articulated argument advocating a position in the venture capital and entrepreneurship world is an important aspect of being a part of our firm.

What does success look like?

To be successful in this job, you must be proactive, curious, conversational, organised, hyper-communicative, and hungry to find the best investments. In addition, you should be interested in entrepreneurship, building businesses, have a brain for numbers and finance, and have some experience in finance, whether that be education or practical experience.

To elaborate, here’s what we're looking for:

1. A deep passion for uncovering the non-obvious and unknown: We pride ourselves on uncovering opportunities where others are not looking. You will be analysing multiple industries and technologies that may be unfamiliar to you, where success is measured by the speed at which you learn new things.

2. An understanding of financial analysis: A successful associate should be able to identify and benchmark financial metrics and compare those between other companies. This could be benchmarking revenue growth rates, churn rates & revenue quality of the companies that you assess.

3. A detail-oriented person: A lot of your day-to-day will be combing through the details of a company and understanding every bit of it, maintaining tasks in Trello (our project management software), and executing investment or LP-related tasks for both our principal and General Partners. 

4. Emotional and Analytical Intelligence: A successful associate will be focused on listening and observing data, personalities, and processes to internalise and summarise later on to others. The ability to absorb and convey nuanced details to the rest of the investment team throughout the investment process is a vital part of the growth of this role to a more senior role.

5. A bottomless bundle of curiosity: While we are focused on our investment thesis in AI/ML and the future of media, content & video gaming, there are many avenues within these to explore and what a potential investment would look like. A successful associate will be able to create new theses within these, which our investment team should be spending more time on. For example, are you excited to uncover new opportunities within game technology and tools?

Tangibles 

• Support deal flow operations.

• Analyse and diligence prospective companies.

• Meet and speak with entrepreneurs.

• Deliberate with the venture team on investment.

• Creative projects designed to fuel your growth and advance the firm.

Working at Hillfarrance

Hillfarrance is an equal opportunity employer that promotes diversity and inclusion within our team. Hillfarrance is comprised of a small, dynamic team of three investors. As an Investment Associate, you will be learning from Alex Dam (Principal) and Andrew Leahy (General Partner), who have several years of experience in venture capital and operating within startups. You will also learn every day from a range of extremely impressive founders within our portfolio who are looking to change the world and solve problems that matter.

Benefits & Remuneration

• Salary: A Competitive Salary with the potential for a bonus.

• Hillfarrance offers flexible working and a generous learning and development budget. 

Requirements

• You must be a NZ Citizen and/or Visa holder.

• You must be able to work from our Devonport office most of the week. We are a small team and value learning through osmosis.

Apply

To apply, please email careers@hillfarrance.com with your CV/resume. In the body, we would love you to answer the following three questions:

1. Why are you interested in this Associate Role? 

2. What skills will help you thrive in this role? 

3. What is your favourite tech company founding story to success, and why?