Investment Associate

Designer Fund is looking for an Investment Associate who is passionate about investing in early-stage companies that use design to improve health, sustainability, and prosperity for all people. We're looking for someone who wants to work together for at least 2 years and is ready to start as soon as possible. If you’re passionate about the intersection of design + venture and want to be part of a top emerging fund we’d love to talk to you!

About Designer Fund

The mission of Designer Fund is to invest in leaders and empower them with design to improve the world. We invest between $350K – $1M in early stage tech startups with founders who value design including Stripe, Gusto, Notion, Omada Health, Netlify, Commure and more. With every investment, our goal is to create exceptional products in huge markets that traditionally have poor user experiences. Our community includes top designers and founders from companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, Airbnb, Pinterest, Dropbox and more.

What’s in it for you

As our only Investment Associate, you’ll get to collaborate regularly with our General Partners and portfolio founders. While we have almost a decade of investing knowledge and expertise, we are also looking for someone who can bring new perspectives, ideas, and networks to our team.

You'll also get to collaborate and learn from exceptional design leaders and investors on a regular basis through our programs, events and content. As part of our team you’ll have an immediate impact on Designer Fund’s success. You'll have many opportunities to lead projects, improve investment operations, and prototype new initiatives. We'll also offer a competitive market salary and can provide a lot of schedule flexibility. Finally, we'll also invest in your personal and career development to ensure we’re aligning with your long-term career goals.

You’ll be responsible for

• Sourcing: help find exceptional founders who value design in different networks or geographies.
• Diligence support: screen inbound opportunities, consult with domain experts, conduct customer and market research, and support investment decision making.
• Investment operations: improve efficiency and excellence across our collaborative process and tools like Affinity, Airtable, and Notion.
• Value add: provide expertise that helps our portfolio founders and their design teams while improving our internal process and programs for delivering value-add at scale.
• Network building: Build relationships with great founders and company networks to keep Designer Fund top-of-mind for investments.
• Develop investment theses: Help us refine our point of view on market opportunities and focus on our target impact outcomes of prosperity, health, and sustainability.
• Build the Designer Fund Brand: Our brand with founders and co-investors is everything and we expect our investment associate to be a true ambassador when engaging with founders and our portfolio companies.

Sample projects

• Proactively source exceptional founders in a given domain or network – e.g. the intersection of design tools + AI, or YC founders that value design.
• Optimize our current investment pipeline process and tools like Affinity, Airtable and Notion.
• Assess a broad space like Climate Tech and come up with a thesis of where great design could have the most leverage on creating business impact.
• Assist in diligence of high-priority opportunities to accelerate getting to an investment decision.
• Managing founder-focused offerings like Designer Fund Partnership - https://www.designerfund.com/partnership
• Supporting founder-focused content, events and workshops

Who we’re looking for

Our ideal candidate shares our belief that startups can be a driving force for positive change and that design is a key ingredient in the success of the next generation of great startups. We want someone who can work with autonomy and a sense of urgency, is an excellent communicator, is highly collaborative, is a fast learner, and has a strong finance foundation.

Ideally you have 3+ years of work experience and some track record either as an angel or working in an investing capacity at another organization. Finally we want someone who is a systems thinker and is excited about creating more efficient workflows.

We’re asking for at least a 2 year commitment starting as soon as possible. If this sounds like an opportunity you would be a fit for please apply below!