Director of Founder Strategy and Operations

Company Overview 

Curie.Bio is a founder-focused seed-stage venture firm combined with an industry-grade therapeutics accelerator focused on one thing: helping entrepreneurial founders launch viable therapeutics companies. Curie.Bio does this by giving founders access to a team of the world’s best drug hunters and drug makers, seed capital, and best-of-breed services - everything a founder needs to get from concept to a compelling dataset that enables an awesome Series A financing. In a nutshell, we want founders in control of their own company and focused on their area of expertise and creativity, while we help make the rest happen smoothly.

Curie.Bio was designed by founders for founders. Our founding team of Zach Weinberg, Christoph Lengauer and Alexis Borisy, has collectively helped start numerous therapeutics companies and been intimately involved with the Series A financing of many more. We have witnessed first hand the difficulty of going from a seed stage concept to generating the data package necessary for a successful Series A raise; targets need to be properly selected, experiment plans designed, vendors selected and contracted, experiments need to be run, people need to be hired - all with a few million dollars. These perennial challenges are what led to the creation of Curie.Bio. If we want to dramatically increase the number of viable drug companies created every year - we’re going to have to reduce the complexity of getting to a compelling POC data package required for a Series A. Reducing this complexity requires us to provide real support to these new companies - support that is both strategic (think target selection, unique access to strategic partnerships, early introductions to top Series A investors) and operational (experiment execution, vendor management, back office support). 

As an early employee joining us on this mission, you will see firsthand what it takes to successfully bring a company from concept at the seed stage to compelling wet-lab derived POC data with an industry-grade progressible drug (candidate) that enables a Series A financing. You will work alongside the world’s best drug hunters and industry veterans whose experience spans all facets of drug discovery and preclinical drug development - from disease biology to medicinal chemistry, to recruiting, to business development, and more. 

In order for Curie.Bio to achieve its mission, we need the best people. Companies are nothing more than a group of people working together on a shared objective. Great companies are when those individuals come together to form something larger than the sum of its parts. 


The Role

We are looking to hire a Director of Founder Strategy and Operations to play a critical role in shaping the way Curie.Bio connects with the outside world and gets access to the most exciting seed-stage therapeutics companies. Day to day, you will work directly with founders, investors, scientific luminaries and Curie.Bio leadership to drive sourcing initiatives, optimize internal processes for scaling our organization and educate the ecosystem on why Curie.Bio is the best place to start a therapeutics company. We are looking for someone who is deeply familiar with biotech entrepreneurship and can effectively communicate the complexities of building a successful therapeutic company. Our ideal candidate is a strategic thinker who is detail-oriented, thinks systematically, and most of all - is excited to build an unparalleled network of the best and brightest talent in the biotech ecosystem.


Responsibilities

Deal sourcing
• End-to-end ownership of deal sourcing from mapping and prioritizing of sources through cold outreach through in-person or Zoom sourcing calls
• Discovering new pools of founder talent and catalyzing new company formation through seeding the ecosystem with best practices and resources
• Data tracking, analytics, and quality monitoring of sourcing channels

Founder interface and engagement 
• Owning the founder relationship from first contact through investment check
• Setting and managing founder expectations of the Curie.Bio model and investment process through documentation and live meetings
• Ensuring completeness of materials during deal intake to enable diligence by the scientific leadership
• Enabling high-quality interactions with all founders to generate high founder net promoter score - i.e. turning all founders into potential referral sources, even the ones we don’t invest in

Content creation and management
• Optimizing Curie.Bio’s messaging to attract founders and guide internal processes
• External: Website content, case studies, newsletters
• Internal: Training of the Curie.Bio team on founder engagement and processes

Investor relations & LP education
• Enabling high-quality interactions between the Curie.Bio team and its investors, both current and future

Driving internal process improvements
• Coordinating the integration of people, processes, and software infrastructure to enable Curie.Bio to have high-quality interactions with founders from first contact to investment decision


Our Ideal Candidate

Background
• More than 5 years of professional experience in biotech 
• Preferred candidate has a combination of experience in biotech investing, management consulting, and/or operating inside of a venture-backed or public biotech company
• Masters or PhD degree in biology, biochemistry or related discipline 
• Hands-on entrepreneurial or drug discovery experience

Skills
• Does not ever drop the ball 
• Extraordinary interpersonal skills - i.e. high EQ
• High internal bar for quality 
• Intrinsically motivated to seek pursue continuous improvement
• Ability to juggle and make independent progress on many disparate workstreams simultaneously
• Mastery of the ability to tailor complex content and approach to varying audiences - both written and verbal 
• Thinks systematically about trade-offs related to process design