Principal, Venture Investments (Client Role)

Mach49 is the Growth Incubator for Global Businesses. 

Mach49 pioneered and leads the venture-driven growth category. We were founded on the belief that only global businesses have the scale, reach, and resources to solve the world’s most pressing problems. We help ambitious global companies tackle these challenges through Venture Building and Venture Investing. How? Focused 100% on execution, we bring Silicon Valley expertise to building and investing in a portfolio of ventures — building capability, not dependency.

Our Mach 49 Venture Investing team operates as long-term Partners-in-Residence for both emerging and established venture capital funds launched by corporates, family offices, government entities, and more. We act as extensions of their team, attending Partner meetings and offering unbiased perspectives borne from decades of experience in venture capital and strategic investing. We provide critical insights throughout the entire venture capital lifecycle, from fund design to recruiting and deal sourcing/execution to portfolio management. We partner with our clients to disrupt existing markets and create new ones through a strategic mix of incubations, corporate venturing, and ecosystem creation.

Our client, a leading global natural resources company operating across three continents, is seeking to add a Principal, Venture Investments based on the West Coast of the United States or Canada to its dedicated internal corporate venture capital business unit (“CVC”). The client’s CVC was established to build and manage a portfolio of technology investments that not only help accelerate the firm’s innovation activities today, but also seeds future growth options for the company to thrive for decades ahead. 

Principal, Venture Investments (Remote - West Coast United States or Canada)

The CVC team works with teams across the entire corporation and with our external partners to generate opportunities that support the company’s most important strategic priorities, engaging as closely with C-suite as with our start-ups, to drive mutually beneficial outcomes.

As a Principal you will be a critical and highly visible member of our client’s global team, driving deal flow and portfolio management in order to create strategic, financial and insight returns for the enterprise. In addition to sourcing, evaluating, and leading select minority investments, you will also manage these relationships on an ongoing basis to achieve strategic outcomes for the corporation, informing the strategy of business units and delivering against specific opportunities through partnerships, investments, or other strategic relationships. 

You will be responsible for end-to-end investing activities from deal sourcing through due diligence, deal management, negotiation and execution, building portfolio company value, and managing exits in early-stage ventures. The Principal will also play a leadership role in identifying strategic investment areas that will enhance our capabilities or enable new products and services whilst also developing investment frameworks for new solutions and technology domains.  This role will require articulating enterprise capability needs in close engagement and collaboration with key internal stakeholders as well as external ecosystem partners.

What will you do? 

Every day you show up at work, be that at home, in the office or anywhere else, you’ll demonstrate a commitment to the corporation’s values. That means an overriding commitment to health, safety, respect, integrity, environmental responsibility, and sustainable development with an obligation to comply with Our Charter Values.

Your key responsibilities as a Principal will include:

• Gaining fluency in, and meaningful exposure to, key mining industry concepts and cutting-edge technologies of strategic relevance to the corporation, as well as developing relationships within the tech investing ecosystem that enable you to identify, assess, and access attractive investment opportunities; 

• Undertaking independent market analysis to develop new and existing investment theses,  identifying market trends and specific opportunities across multiple verticals, to guide our investment strategy towards maximizing both financial and strategic returns to the corporation;

• Qualifying, screening, prioritizing, establishing relationships with, and tracking a high volume of ventures to develop our pipeline of new investment opportunities for the corporation;

• Conducting end-to-end due diligence activities including market and competitive research, financial analysis and modeling, due diligence, obtaining venture and founding team references from customers and other investors, authoring investment memoranda, and presenting investment recommendations to our Executive Leadership Committee;

• Managing the investment processes from start to finish, including coordinating with business units, legal and finance teams, deal structuring and negotiation, and ensuring transaction timelines and milestones are met;

• Engaging our portfolio companies and maintain relationships with key external and internal stakeholders to activate strategic collaboration with the corporation;

• Synthesizing and disseminating insights from your market engagement and end-to-end investment activities to drive additional revenue and savings across the corporation:

• Growing and maintaining our internal tools and knowledge database (e.g., relationship management platform) and creating standardized operational processes to enable our team’s growth.

You will also play a pivotal role in supporting and enhancing our client’s world class CVC operations by (amongst other things):

• Enhancing the team’s internal efficiencies and communications by identifying opportunities to continually improve how we do our work;

• Communicating and collaborating with the utmost respect and integrity with all internal and external stakeholders;

• Creating content, events, and more to enhance the corporation’s venture brand;

• Developing key relationships across the corporation’s stakeholders; 

• Mentoring other team members on key aspects of corporate investing.

You may also have the opportunity to rotate to other teams critical in developing and delivering the corporation’s most important strategic priorities.

What we are looking for… 

Candidates should have previous technology investment experience, with an understanding of risk and how to price it, and a familiarity with investment process, transaction documents, and key terms.  

You could be a good fit for the role if you have 8-10+ years of professional experience with 7+ years in a direct venture investment role. This should include extensive experience sourcing, conducting due diligence (including in-depth financial analysis), negotiating investment deals, building value with portfolio companies, developing investment thesis, and managing exits in early-stage ventures.

You must be a fast learner, a careful listener, curious about everything, and able to quickly assess a range of technologies… Can you navigate from quantum physics to equipment autonomy to carbon capture and sequestration, quickly determine what could be real and what is likely to just be hype… all in one day? 

You must be comfortable and thrive in a fast-paced and unstructured working environment, which means you have a strong bias for action and impeccable attention to detail.  You’ll need to take initiative and be resourceful… the corporation is a big, global company, but we are a small, nimble team engaging with leading start-ups… and you will be expected to make that integration “work”.

To be good at this, you will clearly understand the value of relationships and drive yourself to build and maintain your own broad network, internally and externally. That means being comfortable picking up the phone and calling someone; it means knowing how to write an engaging email, being responsive but not overly aggressive. It means listening to what people are actually saying and knowing how to see through the noise to spot the win-win outcome.

Perhaps most importantly, you need passion… passion about sustainable business practices and investing for global impact, passion for driving outcomes as part of an awesome team and passion about building your own career as a prolific investment professional.   

Some other important points…

Our client supports their people to grow, learn, develop their skills and reach their potential. With a global portfolio of operations, they offer a diverse and inclusive environment with extraordinary career opportunities.  The corporation focuses on creating a safe work environment where employees feel strongly connected to the corporation’s values and objectives, and where the capability of its people is key to its success.

Our client recognises they are strengthened by diversity and are committed to providing a work environment in which everyone is included, treated fairly and with respect. The corporation is an Equal Opportunity employer and encourages applications from women and Indigenous people.

Our client knows there are many aspects of employees’ lives that are important, and work is only one of these, so they offer benefits to enable your work to fit with your life.  These benefits include flexible working options, a generous paid parental leave policy, other extended leave entitlements and parent rooms.  

Important

The safety of the corporation’s people and its candidates is our number one priority. Due to the unfolding circumstances of COVID-19 and the Government regulations in place to deal with the pandemic,  your working location and/or roster as advertised in this advert may be temporarily subject to change whilst the government regulations are in place. This is to ensure the health safety of our client’s workforce, and to implement effective social distancing measures.  These changes if applicable will be discussed at screening and interview stage.