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ISA Ventures’ Chief of Staff role is unique on our small team. It’s right in the middle of all of the action - sourcing deals, evaluating investment opportunities, drafting and editing documents and keeping everything organized. You’ll help us communicate with all of our audiences: founders, investors, community leaders. You’ll see and be a part of the venture capital experience from start to finish.
While the CoS will be right in the middle of all of these things, you’ll focus on helping the rest of the team manage them and accomplish the strategic objectives we’re driving toward, helping us integrate all of the work and improving the process end-to-end.
Qualifications
Specifically, we’re looking for someone who:
Is very organized, detail-oriented, methodical, and thorough.
Has exceptional communication skills, since you’ll be drafting, editing, simplifying, and clarifying communications of all types for all of our audiences - deal memos, blog posts, investor communications, etc.
Is assertive and outgoing enough to pick up the phone or email anyone, anywhere, to try to get something done.
Can assist other team members in any way they need, to help them get done whatever priority is at the top of the list.
Has some experience working on a similar type of process, e.g. something with complex documentation, communication, and detail.
Can manage and organize complex documents and information in databases, spreadsheets, etc. This means you’ll have really strong computer skills and software experience - you’re not intimidated by Excel formulas or 10,000 documents that need to be organized and sorted through.
Facilitates meetings and retrospectives with our team.
Preparing our team and stakeholders for events and specific meetings - coaching calls with founders, investment committee meetings, our investor annual meetings, etc. You’ll be helping to execute these events, too.
To be clear - we aren’t seeking an administrative assistant who sends calendar invites and checks executive emails. We’re looking for someone with exceptional critical thinking skills - someone who will help us take very complex and abstract information and distill it down to its essence. We need someone who will challenge us to be better, and improve how we work every day.
Our dream candidate would also have some or all of the following:
1-3 years of experience working with entrepreneurs, businesses, finance / investing, or business law, but we can train that if you don’t have that experience already.
Even better: if you’ve founded or co-founded a business yourself, and walked in the shoes of entrepreneurs already.
Experience facilitating meetings and complex conversations
Experience working as a ScrumMaster or working in or with agile teams
Some other things you should know about the Chief of Staff role:
We envision this role as full-time - there is plenty to do! - but would consider part-time (20+ hours/week) for the right candidate.
This role has a flexible start date; it is more important to us to find the right person than to find a candidate quickly.
You’ll be part of a small team. While the role requires a lot of independent work and initiative, most of it will be done collaboratively with other team members.
Compensation
Base salary plus bonus.
About ISA Ventures
ISA Ventures is Iowa’s first multi-stage venture capital studio, working closely with founders to build Iowa-based companies through their growth and evolution. We focus on companies in biotechnology, healthcare, and medical tech; education tech; engineering and automation tech; agriculture, food & bio-processing tech; insurance & finance tech; and transportation & logistics technologies. The Fund is new — formed in 2020 — but based on six years of investing in early stage companies through Iowa Startup Accelerator. Therefore, this team is new, too. We’re looking for the right team members to create something unique to Iowa but still competitive on a global stage.
Remote-friendly
We have a sweet office building in Cedar Rapids to work from, yet remote work is expected now, during COVID-19, and indefinitely. All team members are expected to be Iowa residents, but can be located anywhere in the state, working remotely, so long as they can make it to Cedar Rapids on a regular basis, several times a month, for in-person meetings.
Benefits
ISA Ventures offers a competitive benefits package, including:
Health & dental insurance
A 401k retirement plan with match
An extremely flexible Open Paid Time Off policy
To apply
Send a résumé and cover letter to hello@isaventures.com.
For extra consideration, write a 1-3 page original writing sample on any business topic that interests you that represents a point-of-view.
Feel free to include anything else that you think helps tell us why you’re the best candidate for this role.