We are a dedicated internal venture capital investment unit, established to build and manage a portfolio of technology investments that not only help accelerate BHP’s innovation activities today, but also seeds future growth options for the company to thrive for decades ahead.
We work closely with teams across BHP and with our outside partners to generate opportunities to support the company’s most important strategic priorities. Our success depends on our ability to engage as closely with our C-suite (Executive Leadership Team, or ELT) as we do with our start-ups and drive common outcomes.
Our portfolio is oriented around growth… securing the future growth of our current operations by accessing cutting-edge technologies and leading capabilities, growing our resource base in nickel, copper and other “future-facing” commodities by discovering and/or recovering resource first, growing our business into new verticals and horizontals, and seeding potential new business lines, such as carbon removal.
Our team is global, our portfolio is global, and our vision is big. If we are successful, our early-stage investment strategy will find and develop leading technologies and talent from across the world which, when combined with the power of BHP’s current capabilities, can together unlock significant value for our companies, partners and for BHP and its stakeholders.
Every day you show up at work, be that at home, in the office or anywhere else, you’ll demonstrate a commitment to BHP’s Values… that means an overriding commitment to health, safety, respect, integrity, environmental responsibility and sustainable development and an obligation to comply with Our Charter Values.
Your key roles will include early-stage company assessment and support, including:
You will also be pivotal to ensuring world class corporate venture operations, including by:
By sitting within our broader Portfolio Strategy & Development function, which is accountable for BHP’s corporate strategy and its growth agenda, you may also have the opportunity to rotate to other teams critical in developing and delivering BHP’s most important strategic priorities.
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 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… BHP 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.