Flybridge is growing and we’re hiring our first Head of Community 🦕
I’m not sure how many of you know the history of Flybridge but I wanted to share a little story about why Anna, Chip, Jeff, and I do what we do, together, at our firm. It’s been almost six years since I joined my partners and it’s been a blast. We’ve raised three new funds together (our latest set of seed and opportunity funds as well as a new Network Fund recently closed), have invested in over 200 companies, and have grown our team. Today we’re nine, very close, team members spread across two cities — Boston and New York — including Julia who joined us full-time six months ago after two years as an intern while earning her MBA at Wharton. The firm, however, has been around for two decades.
When Jeff and Chip started Flybridge they had come from two different sides of the venture ecosystem. Chip had been a partner at a firm called Greylock, one of the granddaddies of venture, and Jeff had been a multi-time, successful entrepreneur. They understood the founder journey from beginning to end and they set out to build a new, better, stronger, more helpful early-stage venture fund. Over the years check sizes have changed and themes have come and gone, but one thing has stayed true — Flybridge has always operated as a family and that family now extends to so many more people including our nearly 400 portfolio founders and our Network Fund partners of over 50 entrepreneurs and investors across XFactor Ventures, The Community Fund, and The Graduate Syndicate. That’s what we now call our community. That community uniquely helps us to source deals, compete to win, and most importantly, help the founders that we back from cradle to grave, as they say— or from seed to exit.
Today, we’ve found that WhatsApp, Slack, IRL and virtual experiences, and education are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to keeping our community connected while providing high value support. Every founder we back has a story and a lesson to share with the rest of the community and every time our team puts in the work to support one founder in their fundraise or recruiting efforts we’re creating templates, playbooks, and value that could be shared with everyone else in our community. We’ve been managing this community ourselves for two decades but it’s time to change that. We’ve worked with so many founders in our portfolio as they’ve grown wildly successful communities such as Commsor’s Community Club, Chief’s membership, MongoDB’s developer community, and Launch House’s founder and creator residencies, and we’ve learned that in order to have our community operate at 100% we need to invest, focus, and have someone on our team dedicated to this part of our ecosystem. Our team of nine is now growing to ten — we are hiring a Head of Community to oversee all of our efforts across hundreds of brilliant, driven entrepreneurs and operators who rely on us and our community for support and guidance as they grow their businesses.
Today we’re sharing this across our social channels, our community, and our extended network (thanks Community.club) in hopes of finding the perfect person to join our family. If it sounds like something you’d be interested in, please apply over on LinkedIn. It’s a role that we’d like to hire for immediately and one that is going to bring a massive amount of value to our community. I’m looking forward to meeting some amazing people during this process.
Role: Head of Community, Flybridge
Start: Immediate
Location: Preference New York or Remote
Mobility: Some travel is necessary for IRL events across the US
About Flybridge:
Flybridge Capital Partners is a seed-stage venture capital firm focused on supporting and investing behind ambitious founders, at the earliest stages of company building across a range of sectors who share our vision for leveraging the power of community as a source of competitive advantage.
While our core team operates from our offices in Boston, Massachusetts and New York, New York, we leverage a nationwide network of investment partners via our proprietary Network Funds to invest globally in the most attractive opportunities. Each of these funds is a separate pool of capital, anchored by Flybridge, with a distinct brand and a distributed team of Investment Partners that bring unique sector insights and deep connections into their respective communities. We currently operate four Network Funds: The Graduate Syndicate and LTV Operators (both focused on the Harvard community), XFactor Ventures (focused on female founders), and The Community Fund (focused on under-estimated and under-represented founders). Together, they have nearly 45 Investment Partners and have in total invested in over 230 new companies in the last five years.
With roughly $900m under management across six seed funds and seven pre-seed network funds, portfolio companies include BetterCloud, BitSight, Bowery, Chief, Codecademy, FalconX, Imperfect Foods, Infracommerce (B3: IFCM3), MadeiraMadeira, MongoDB (NASDAQ: MDB), Open English, Plastiq, and Splice.
Why is Community important to Flybridge?
Community is at the core of Flybridge’s thesis and how we operate the fund. 20 years ago, Flybridge focused on “the Flybridge family” and today that “family” has been expanded to include the Network Funds (e.g., XFactor Ventures, The Community Fund) and their partners. This group of 50 people plus our 100+ active founders in the Flybridge portfolio are what we refer to as the core Flybridge Community. Our extended community includes our alumni and the entire Network Fund portfolio of founders (over 250 people). Community is how we build meaningful relationships and generate people-driven network effects that strengthen our core business. By building, activating and nurturing our community we build and engage our Network Fund partners and our portfolio founders to create mutual value that strengthens our relationships and drives our access to new investment opportunities, insights into important trends, and surfaces opportunities for our portfolio companies.
About the role:
This role is fundamental in expanding Flybridge’s networks and community within the ecosystem. This role enables Flybridge to extend our reach and deepen valuable relationships both inside of our own portfolio and our Network Fund partners. You will focus on building relationships with our community as the investor, mentor, and partner of choice across the early-stage venture ecosystem.
You will work closely and collaboratively with all key functions inside of Flybridge, including our investment team and our back office team to help them to achieve their goals via our community initiatives. You will advise, design and implement intimate community-centric programs to extend Flybridge’s network, build our relationships within our Network Funds, and enhance our reputation within the early-stage venture ecosystem.
This role will be expected to design new community initiatives based on our firm’s goals and priorities. As Head of Community you will own strategy and be externally facing with our portfolio founders, our Network Fund partners, and our Network Fund portfolio company founders. You will build out and deliver key initiatives including online communities, in-person events, and online events, with support from other team members.
Responsibilities:
- Own Community strategy
- Develop and implement Flybridge’s community-led and community-driven initiatives
- Establish KPIs for the Flybridge Community and maintain a feedback loop with the investment team to ensure we are delivering excellent results and providing value to the core and extended community
- Serve as the day-to-day point of contact for members of the Flybridge Community, proactively looking for ways to surprise and delight
- Build and maintain our Community platforms including Slack, Welcome, WhatsApp, etc.
- Develop strong relationships within our Community across our portfolio founders, Network Fund partners, and our Network Fund portfolio company founders
- Lead our partnership initiatives with organizations such as MongoDB, Amazon, Google Cloud, etc.
Skills:
- You are a people person and love building relationships, getting to know all types of people, and you pride yourself on being a great listener.
- You are not afraid to roll up your sleeves and get into the weeds but you can also pull out and keep an eye on the bigger picture.
- You are a tech wizard and can piece together Low-Code and No-Code solutions to build intricate products.
- You have empathy for founders. You’ve either been a founder, know a lot of founders, or are overly-excited to work with founders.
- You over-communicate and can adapt to different types of strong-willed and strong-minded people.
Measuring Success:
We will work together to define success metrics and KPIs but our high-level focus will be to keep Flybridge as top-of-mind and valuable to our community as possible. We will track things like MAUs of our digital platforms, percentage of attendance to our IRL and online events, and referred deals from within our community while we adapt to the growing needs of our portfolio founders and Network Fund partners. Since venture is a long game, the community will only grow from here.
Compensation and Benefits:
- Competitive salary: $150,000-$200,000
- Comprehensive benefits including healthcare, 401k, etc
If this sounds like you, please apply over on LinkedIn.
