Manager, Direct Investments

Titanium Birch is an investment firm started by Peter Burchhardt, co-founder of ExpressVPN.

What might I do in this job?

We're looking for someone to bring expertise in making direct early-stage equity investments, by which we mean the skill of assessing young companies and the people who run them and routing capital to them in productive ways. Not to "only do direct" or "be the only one who does direct", but rather to bring that expertise to the team, complementing the backgrounds of the existing people and work very collaboratively on a broad range of challenges across the firm.

You’ll lead us through the entire lifecycle of direct investments:

• Build our brand among entrepreneurs and other investors.
• Source investment opportunities.
• Lead team-based due diligence.
• Decide “no” any time.
• Decide “yes” and bring your cases to the investment committee to consider a veto.
• Negotiate terms.
• Watch over investments and triage where our firm can be useful, navigating special situations when they arise.
• Navigate exits.

Besides pure direct investing, you’ll also:

• Build our brand.
• Mentor colleagues.
• Oversee our portfolio of real estate properties. Think of your role as GM for that business line. You manage the arms-length firms and contractors who operate the portfolio. The skills you’ll need to do that well are general business management, not necessarily real estate specific. We’ll guide you into it. You’ll be accountable for the yield and risk levels.
• Help form opinions on specific companies, entrepreneurs, and asset managers. For example, to decide on whether to invest in an actively managed private-markets fund we’ll look closely at their portfolio companies and their investment team. Your expertise in assessing people and businesses will complement the team in those situations. Another example: sometimes we’d like to form an opinion on the price of a publicly traded stock. While we’ll probably bring in another colleague with expertise specifically in that domain, you’ll certainly be involved and we’ll do the research and form our opinions as a team.
• Apply yourself anywhere else in our firm. We work very collaboratively.

Our existing portfolio: We have a small number of direct equity positions created years ago (we haven’t done any direct investing in recent years as we want to hire you first and then do it well together). Most have sales on the horizon. You’ll guide those exits, though that’s a small part.

Types of deals we imagine going forward: probably from seed to series B, though we’re not yet confident in where our emphasis will be. Deal-source will often be co-investment with VC funds who are friends of the firm.

How much do we expect to invest? We don’t really know yet, and you joining us will be part of answering it well. In general, we’re open to having up to 10% of the total portfolio in direct early-stage equity.

What’s in it for me?

• You'll have exposure to a very broad range of challenges. That means lots of learning.
• You’ll have a big impact on a small team.
• You’ll have a high degree of autonomy.
• You’ll work closely with great colleagues with diverse backgrounds and areas of expertise. Each of us is delightfully weird!
• You’ll have reasonable work-life balance. We work in the office during typical office hours with the occasional phone call with people outside our timezone. 
• You'll be empowered to keep toil to reasonably low levels. We like experimenting with technology to make our work efficient. If something can be automated, you can bet we’ll get a robot to do it!

How do I know if Titanium Birch is right for me?

• You already live and breathe our cultural values .

• You’re comfortable with ambiguity. Maybe you even love it.

• You love jumping in and learning new things.

• You might be nerdy about processes and data-driven decision-making.

Requirements

We’re looking for candidates with this experience:

• At least 10 years of professional experience.
• You must at some point have worked at a real-economy company (ie: your career is not entirely in finance).
• You’ve gone through several term-sheet negotiations on direct equity investments in the $100k-$3M range. We have book-knowledge but little practical experience - we need you to bring that to the team.

In other words, we're open to candidates who don't have years upon years of investment experience.

Nice to have, if your career up to now hasn't been mostly in investments:

• You’ve seen several if not all stages of the life cycle of a direct equity investment (not necessarily all for the same firm or position; we realise few candidates have that). If you don't yet have this experience, don't worry. We'll learn together.
• You know how to use maths to understand a business model. You can zero in on key questions and quickly run numbers by yourself (i.e., without a team of analysts or vendors) to deliver useful insights for DD. If you have investment experience, this is a must-have!
• You're good at numbers. For example, we’ve seen investors overpay for subscription businesses because they use a single number for a churn-rate and then calculate LTV that’s wrong by 2x or more. We expect insightful maths that reflect the drivers of churn and show where we need to focus our DD. If you have investment experience, this is a must-have!
• Entrepreneurs of your portfolio companies found you generally “neutral or positive”. At appropriate times, and with your permission, we'll run reference checks on you with your founders. If you have previous investment experience, this is a must-have!

We’ll expect these core abilities:

• Very sharp logic.
• Excellent communication skills, both verbal and written, especially your ability to ask questions to uncover insights.
• Strong interpersonal skills. You build long-term positive relationships.

In your personality, we’ll look for:

• Ironclad ethics - entrepreneurs will trust us to respect confidential information.
• Humility and self-awareness - so you actively seek out feedback and try to improve yourself (and so we don’t fall into the trap of being the “arrogant investors who pretend to know what founders should do”)
• Independence - so you form your own views.
• Adaptability and comfort with ambiguity - our direct-investing strategy isn’t well-formed yet. What you do day-to-day is very likely to vary hugely both day-to-day and over the years. We hope to avoid candidates who’ll say “that’s not what I signed up for!” Joining TB means coming across a very broad range of situations and being happy to engage.
• General culture fit into Titanium Birch.

Administrative requirements:

• You must already be based in Singapore. This position is not open to relocation, but we can sponsor your EP if necessary.

• You must be willing to work primarily from our office in downtown Singapore.

• You must be willing to let us perform extensive reference checks at appropriate times. This is an integral part of our hiring process.

Benefits

For details about our approaches to performance and compensation management, learning and development, and benefits, please refer to our employee handbook .

To read more about our firm in general, please see our website .

How to apply

To apply, please fill out the form below. It might take 20 to 45 minutes to fill out. We understand that's a lot to ask. We're taking this approach because it helps us engage more meaningfully with each applicant.

In keeping with the  Titanium Birch ethos , please try to answer as candidly as possible.

We will respond to every application with a cover letter addressed to Titanium Birch.

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