About Primary
Primary is a seed-stage venture capital firm dedicated to delivering exceptional support to the founders of transformational businesses. By pairing meaningful investment resources with the largest portfolio impact team of any seed investor, our portfolio companies have reached an industry-best seed-to-A graduation rate.
About the Role
We are looking for an Associate to work in lockstep with Principal, Zach Fredericks, who leads Primary's Industrial Evolution pod. You'll support Zach in finding, conducting diligence on, and winning great businesses. You'll also spend your time supporting Zach's efforts to incubate new businesses through our venture studio, Primary Labs. Here is a note from Zach about the opportunity:
We're living through the early innings of a generational re-industrialization. AI, reshoring, and the largest energy buildout in a century are reshaping how the physical economy gets made, moved, powered, and run. Almost every dollar of that capex creates new demand for software and services that the legacy world was never built to deliver. I back the architects of this industrial evolution and look for founders embedding intelligence directly into industrial operations and turning execution, coordination, and sustainability into durable advantages. I'm looking for my right hand to help me find and create the next generation of category-defining industrial technology businesses from day one.
You should be obsessed with the craft of venture and energized by methodically picking apart verticals that are about to be fundamentally rebuilt. I want someone curious enough to develop real expertise, courageous enough to be non-consensus, and pragmatic enough to know that venture is a services business where we go above and beyond for exceptional founders. If you want to operate at the frontier of what's possible in industrial AI, on a high-velocity, high-conviction team, this is the place to do it.
What You'll Do
- Deal Sourcing: Conduct market research and actively seek out promising investment opportunities through various channels. Represent the firm to conduct an initial screen of prospects. Outbound potential founders. Hunt for deals while also being able to separate the signal from the noise.
- Due Diligence: Perform thorough due diligence on potential investments including financial analysis, market assessment, competitive landscape evaluation, and team assessment. Independently run diligence processes with assistance from Zach, effectively prioritizing diligence areas, synthesizing diligence work
- Financial Analysis: Own relevant analyses for potential opportunities including financial, market sizing, unit economics, and cap table modeling.
- Portfolio Support: Provide ongoing support to existing portfolio companies by coordinating with Zach and the broader Impact team.
- Incubations: Ride shotgun with Zach on his work with Primary Labs to incubate new businesses and provide ad-hoc support where needed. This includes things like building pipelines of design partners, hunting down experts in a given market, and tearing down breakout companies to identify key insights around what made them successful that could be applied to other verticals.
- Market Insights: Stay on top of industry trends, news, and regulatory developments. Surface regular market insights and lead research on thematic deep dives on new potential investment areas.
- Network Expansion: Cultivate and maintain relationships with key stakeholders including founders, industry experts, talented operators, and other investors.
- Thought Leadership: Represent the firm at industry events, conferences, and panels. Support and execute on strategic brand building and thought leadership initiatives.
- Firm Building: Support Partners with ongoing LP reporting and other firm building initiatives.
About You
- Must be available to work full-time in NYC
- 2-4 years of experience with at least 1-2 years of investing experience and a demonstrated interest in Industrials and early stage investing
- Entrepreneurial Spirit: You have an entrepreneur's intrinsic motivation and are capable of independently running with business ideas with substantial ambiguity. You are resourceful, passionate about ownership, and willing to hustle to win deals
- Deeply curious: You have a strong desire to become an expert in a certain industry or business model and are willing to put in the work to do so
- Analytical-thinker: You have a strong grasp of what makes a good business. You're comfortable with financial statements & models and concepts and can quickly assess the feasibility and scalability of a new venture idea
- Relationship-builder: You're comfortable developing relationships with industry leaders from the ground up and have a deep knowledge of technology investing as well as a strong understanding of the VC ecosystem
- Fast-learner: You're able to learn rapidly, develop a strong point of view, and communicate compelling narratives
- Strong communicator: Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to present complex ideas in a clear and concise manner