Heartland Ventures is Hiring!

When I joined the team at Heartland Ventures, we were a small but fast-growing firm. We’ve since added significant firepower with colleagues Mike Schmuhl and Bianca Caban and are now seeking a Platform Associate. Our model is unique in venture. Our investors are exclusively Midwest businesses and we seek to invest in tech only if it’s relevant to those firms. This then allows us to drive value back to our portfolio companies.

The Role

The Platform Associate will be responsible for driving value across the Heartland Platform to both our Limited Partners (LPs) and our portfolio companies. This requires, in part, maintaining and building upon existing Heartland relationships with senior executives and owners of middle market companies. It involves discovering pain points facing investors’ businesses and identifying ways in which they might be solved through new technologies or existing Heartland portfolio companies.

A successful Platform Associate will develop deep relationships with executives and business owners that are rooted in mutual respect and will be seen as a trusted resource on emerging tech. Through these relationships, a successful candidate will deliver value to LPs in the form of insights, connections, and access to tech. Through these same relationships, the Platform Associate must gain novel industry insights (a key element in shaping Heartland’s investment theses) and provide qualified customer introductions to portfolio companies. The ideal candidate is someone who enjoys regularly making introductions, and is able to manage many relationships with people at a high level within a given field but is also comfortable grabbing a beer with someone working on a manufacturing line. An intense curiosity and desire to learn is critical as much of this role involves learning from people that have dedicated their lives to an industry you know little about. Regular regional and occasional coastal travel is required.

Qualifications and Skills:

• Ability to establish credibility with C-suite personnel while asking thoughtful questions that will lead to actionable insights
• Ability to parse what’s relevant and identify patterns across many conversations with different LPs
• Strong presentation, writing, and communication skills sufficient to play a leadership role in programming and content creation
• Experience in building industry and market research reports
• 2–3 years of business experience along with a record of concrete achievement
• Investigative and critical mindset, such as one often associated with consulting, will serve the candidate well
• Domain expertise in manufacturing, construction and/or logistics a plus

If this role sounds interesting to you, please apply here.