Venture Capital Investment Professional

Job Description

Note on applying: >>>Please do NOT submit a cover letter!<<< Instead, please submit an answer to the question, ‘Name one European startup with <£10m funding to date that you think would be interesting for investment, along with your reasoning’, as indicated in the “how to apply section” below

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Introduction:

We are looking for someone who is fascinated by software, deep tech and startups to join our London investment team. We are searching for the one amazing person early in their career that complements our UK Investment team. You will be working closely with Theo, Josh, Pratima, Carles, and a wider team of analysts and other teams across our offices in Europe. You will spend your time building new investment theses, sourcing and assessing investment opportunities, building your own investment track record, and helping us build Nauta.

In the past, our investors have gone on to do amazing things within the firm and beyond: some have become partners at Nauta, others have left to start their own VC firms (or have been poached by other VCs, which we take as a compliment of our training). A few have decided to become Entrepreneurs, whom we supported and mentored through the transition and even funded their business in one instance.

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General details:

• Application period: Throughout September 2023
• Role type: Permanent
• Start date: Immediate
• Interview dates: From 10th September 2023
• Location: London (candidates must have UK working rights) and work 3+ days per week from our beautiful penthouse office in Soho.

We understand that flexibility is important and have a hybrid policy (3:2 office:WFH) to accommodate people’s lives outside of work, however, we find there’s a great benefit from being able to communicate quickly, share ideas, and learn from one another in the office.

An important note on diversity: We strongly believe that diverse backgrounds and life experiences are key to creating a successful VC firm. At Nauta, we are committed to creating a diverse environment where talented people from any backgrounds want to come and do their best work, as is the case for the 20+ talented professionals from many nationalities and diverse backgrounds that constitute Nauta today. We particularly encourage applications from people representing groups that are underrepresented in the VC industry due to their upbringing, nationality, ethnicity, and education.

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Nauta Capital – Background

Nauta Capital is a pan European Venture Capital firm with €550m AUM, which we hope is just the beginning. We are building a Venture Capital firm that will outlive any of the existing team, which means we are looking for some of the most talented individuals to join us and become an integral part of our team.

We have been investing in Enterprise Software since our foundation, almost two decades ago. Over that time we have invested across the different stages phases of the software industry, from the 00’s days of on-prem software and e-commerce (with successful exits in that period such as Privalia ($600m), GreatCall ($400m) and Socialpoint ($250m)), through the rise of Cloud Computing and SaaS (with success stories in this period including Brandwatch ($450m), PromoteIQ (sale to Microsoft, undisclosed value), Holded ($135m to Visma) and GetApp (undisclosed sale to Gartner) and beyond.

Today we have an active portfolio of promising companies across SaaS (e.g., Onna, Lodgify and Connectbase), Fintech (e.g., Cledara), Open Source & Developer tools (e.g., Boxy, Treblle), Future of Work (e.g., HappySignals, AppFollow) and a range of other domains

We are currently investing from our Fifth Fund of €190m, focused at Seed and early Series A. We love being around entrepreneurs in the earliest stages and we feel particularly proud when they choose us to be their first investor in the company.

As part of the new fund, we will also invest £100-£250K in 16 pre-seed enterprise and deeptech companies through our Nauta Labs initiative. At pre-seed stage we have backed companies such as Boxy, Universal Quantum, Lupovis and Net AI

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Tasks

• Sourcing: finding new early-stage investment opportunities by screening lists of companies, building your own dealflow sources, meeting with other investors, attending events, meetings with founders, and researching new themes.
• Day-to-day deal flow management: liasing with founders, requesting data, and preparing for key meetings.
• Assessing opportunities: Completing analyses, researching markets and technologies, and conducting reference calls.
• Developing presentation materials: writing investment memos for the investment committee, presenting research to your team and the firm, data gathering and synthesis, constructing professional presentation materials
• Other: Infrequent requests and projects outside of dealflow to support domains such as portfolio support and fundraising, Nauta fundraising, developing Nauta’s processes, and helping to establish the Nauta brand.

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Requirements

We are very open-minded about the people we think can bring value to VC, but there are some things we feel are essential. The more you can highlight these in your CV, the better!

• A demonstrated passion for technology, software and startups: whether as a developer, a user, or otherwise we would like to find someone with a passion for tech. We all love startups and aren’t put off by the idea of trawling through yet another list of 1000 companies and taking 50 calls with the outside chance of finding something we love.
• Ruthless attention to detail: If someone recommends an investment to their team but they can’t answer essential questions with very precise and numerically supported answers it’s hard to believe the recommendation.
• Thrives when building and maintaining relationships: The paths to generating dealflow are diverse but many great opportunities come from building close human relationships. An investor needs to be able to build and nurture trusted relationships with founders, VC peers and angel investors to share deals and collaborate.
• Puts the team before themselves: working in venture quickly becomes unpleasant when people start behaving fighting over opportunities and not supporting one another. Sometimes that means doing work that doesn’t benefit you directly, or playing second fiddle for a bit, knowing that you colleague will do the same for you when the time comes. We say “we”, not “I”, when talking about what we’ve accomplished as a team and cringe when people do the opposite.
• Owner that takes responsibility: The people that do the best at Nauta are the people who take responsibility for projects and take the lead on shepherding them through to completion. Ownership also means taking responsibility for failures, which is the one time we do say “I”, even if there was a team involved.
• Opinionated yet humble: Investors are paid for taking a view and being able to support it with data, so we need to have opinions and to be able to discuss them. At the same time, we have to be humble to work as a team and resect each other’s opinions, move on when an investment opportunity that we love doesn’t go through and have respect and empathy for the founders we work with who shoulder a much heavier burden than us!
• Understanding of business and finance: an understanding of key financial concepts.

How to apply:

If this sounds interesting, please follow this the steps on this page and submit:

• Your CV
• An answer to the following question (<300 words): ‘Name one European startup with <£10m funding to date that you think would be interesting for investment’, along with your reasoning.

NOTE: we do NOT need a cover letter, just the answer to the question. Apologies, we have to work around this slightly inflexible hiring platform