Description
Associates at Slow Ventures work directly with the partners primarily on sourcing, diligencing, and closing investments for our Fund. Additionally, expect to help with / exposure to our seed portfolio founders, our LPs, and firm management (though actually doing investments is the focus). Note: we are not currently hiring for new associates, but we are always open to meeting exceptional candidates and individuals who may be good fits when we re-open the hiring process. The following is an overview of the role + Slow Ventures:
The role is ideal for people coming out of an early career experience in banking, consulting, or tech — and looking to learn how to do seed investing well - and who want full bore exposure to how the sausage is actually made in early stage investing end-to-end…
In most cases expect that this is a 24-36 month role, after which point you move on to a bigger venture fund, portfolio company, or found something of your own.
Who We Are:
Slow Ventures is an early-stage focused Venture Capital firm based out of San Francisco, Boston, and New York. We are generalists and invest at the earliest stages and ideas. We believe - and have seen proven time and again - that great things frequently take time to inflect, and believe that our number-one job is to back great founders on their journey.
When we say we are generalists, we mean it. We have backed from the absolute earliest days companies like Venmo, Robinhood, Solana, Otter, Teamshares, Lightening Labs, Algorand, Allbirds, Casper, Ro, Airtable, Aleo, Airtable, Domino Data Labs, Pilpack, Embark Vet, Zipline, and many many more.
The General Partners are Sam Lessin (ex-VP product facebook, ex-founder drop.io (sold to FB), and fin). Kevin Colleran (ex-GC, ex-Sales Lead & first 10 employees facebook), Will Quist (ex-Industry Ventures). We are currently investing our 5th core seed fund ($195m), our 2nd opportunities fund ($130m), and our 1st creator focused fund ($50m).
What You Do:
Generally you are partnered with one of the 3 slow general partners (sam, kevin, or will) and support them and their dealflow. This includes activities like:
RESEARCH, SOURCING, ETC: learn about new industries, investigate new ideas, research a space, competitors, etc. Find companies and people that might be interesting.
COMMUNITY & CONTENT: Help write position pieces and decks to market new ideas, run mini-conferences and dinners on topics.
DEAL EXECUTION: Work with partners and founders on deal diligence, negotiating terms, deal closing process, finance function, etc.
SPECIAL PROJECTS: Inevitably we come up with a few ‘special projects’ every year – it could be building an app, launching a newsletter, etc. But we look for generalists who are excited to dig in and try a few special projects each year as they come up.
What We Look For:
We look for really smart people / over achievers, who are really driven, know a thing or two already about business generally and finance… you need to be super intellectually pliable and weirdly self-motivated.
The easiest people for us to hire: You got a 1600 on your SATs, and played sports seriously (++ for endurance athletes). You went to an ivy, studied economics or philosophy, or computer science – then they went to goldman, or morgan, or bain or mckinsey (or maybe meta or google) … at some point along that line you woke up and said ‘hey, I am kinda done with this career track thing / this isn’t all it is cracked up to be, I want to do something more interesting… and I am willing to apprentice myself for a few years to learn what is going on in the wild west’.
Even better, since then you started a blog or newsletter, or twitter, or tiktok (you kids) and have written some pretty interesting opinions about things. You have strong opinions loosely held, you are intellectually honest, open, funny, not an asshole… confident but humble. You show up for the game prepared, and ready to play and have fun…. Oh, and you have failed at something - for real… and know what resilience and grit means.
Do you need to be all those things? Any of those things – nah… but we are looking for people who fit that vibe because that is what we think it takes to crush it at this.
Role Pros-Cons:
PROS:
People Pick Up The Phone for Us: You will meet everyone and learn everything fast. we like to think at this point, we know a thing or two about the real way to do the seed / early stage VC game and we know everyone. Slow is a great calling card and a super duper fast boot / education at the top of the early stage VC game.
We Aren’t Assholes: we are a lot of things… but we are good people. Turns out not everyone is, and the right people value that. You will have a good time on the team.
You Will Have a Ton of Latitude: The core responsibilities of checking the box on this job are real, but compared with banking / consulting pretty chill. Yes help with closing, yes there is some formal stuff to do - processes to run – and yes we will make sure you really set good goals for yourself that matter / deliver on them, etc.. but you are going to have time and freedom – to do stuff that is good for us AND advances your career….
Such as. the way to advance in VC is to find and do great deals – to be clear, that isn’t an explicit requirement of this job – we don’t expect associates to do this alone BUT if you want to get after it, we will support you and back you doing that and building a track record.
CONS:
Slow itself isn’t a career path by default. This is 24-36 month role. You almost certainly won’t get promoted from this role to principal… the only way from principal to parter at slow is making us all so much money our LPs would be super-pissed to lose you. This is an education, not a career.
We are pretty remote. We don’t have a strong in-person office culture… we are fun people and there are fun trips every once in a while, but we don’t do ‘5pm beers after work’. You have to be self starter and self motivated to get a lot out of this.
VC is a challenging place to have a career starting young. For some people it works… but for most (especially these days) VC isn’t really a great career path – it used to be working at slow was a great calling card to bigger funds that are always hiring – that is less the case now because the big funds aren’t hiring. So this is really an education about what startups are like / markets, how VCs think etc but you should be thinking about your next step probably as starting something or joining something you meet and love.
There are some thesis we have as a firm you won’t convince us otherwise on. I.e. we aren’t gonna do much AI investing– if you really want to do AI investing, please don’t apply, we think it is a shit deal for seed investors (except in the very very rare case it isn’t)
