Founders Associate

Be the first call. Earn it every day.

This is a job about output. The deck that goes to a family office, the numbers that say whether an asset is worth pursuing, the research that settles an argument. Most of what you make gets seen by someone deciding whether to work with us again.

Two Managing Directors, a real estate private equity portfolio, live M&A mandates, and founder advisory across three continents. No middle management and more work than there are people to do it, so you will be handed things above your level, given the context, and expected to ask when you are stuck.

Most analysts spend their first few years producing work that feeds someone else's version before it ever reaches a decision. Here the deck you build is the deck the client's committee reads. The model you fix is the model capital moves on. There is no senior version standing between your output and the outcome, which means the good work is genuinely yours to point to, and so are the mistakes.

What you own

• The deck. Fundraise materials, advisory proposals, investment memos, market maps. You take a model output and a rough brief and turn it into something that goes out. Early on it comes back marked up. After a few rounds it stops coming back, and that is how the standard gets transferred.

• Research and assessments. Operator and counterparty reviews, investor longlists, market sizing, tool comparisons. Structured, scored, and delivered with a recommendation rather than a summary. Having an opinion is part of the work.

• Capital raising execution. Investor pipeline, outreach lists, and the follow-up after every investor conversation. This work sits close to whether capital actually gets raised, which is unusual this early in a career.

• The system behind how we handle people. How we segment everyone we deal with, the scoring behind it, the health index and the inputs you can actually calculate, and the CRM architecture underneath. Ten relationships fit in someone's head. A hundred need a machine, and you are building it. You will not have done this before, and that is fine.

• Project management and follow-through. You will run several work streams at once and own the state of each: what is due, who owes what, what has slipped, and who needs telling before it becomes a problem. Every meeting you sit in gets taken to closure, with actions, owners and dates. We run this in Linear and expect it to be current without anyone having to ask.

• Deal administration. Data rooms, document coordination, CRM hygiene, scheduling around transactions. Unglamorous, and it is how deals stay clean.

You will not be parked in one vertical. Advisory, real estate and M&A, with the mix moving as deals move.

Where you are coming from

We are weighting finance here. The strongest fit has spent two or three years in or near corporate finance: M&A, private equity, real estate, transaction services, valuation, deals advisory, audit, a fund, a developer, or a finance function that touched transactions. Big Four counts. We are not fussy about which and we are not looking for a specialist.

You also need to be comfortable with people, because you will be in front of investors and clients earlier than almost anywhere else. You do not need to have owned senior relationships before. You do need to want to be in those rooms.

Coming from somewhere else entirely is a harder case to make, not an impossible one. Show us why we should trust that you can make it.

What you need on day one

• Two or more years somewhere you were held to a standard on analytical and written output

• Slides or documents you are willing to walk us through. Redacted is fine

• You can work inside a financial model, not just look at one. Read the statements, follow the logic, find the error

• Structured thinking. If you call something a seven, your instinct is to show the arithmetic. This is the one thing we cannot teach quickly

• Fluent English (IELTS >6.5 equivalent), and patience for three time zones

What helps

• You live comfortably in software. We run on Linear, Google Workspace, a CRM, automation tooling and AI. This is one of the clearest predictors of who does well in this seat

• You have built something structured from scratch before, at work or otherwise

What we teach you

Financial modelling, properly. Whatever level you arrive at, you will leave here genuinely good at it. Building it, breaking it, and knowing which number actually moves the decision.

Alongside that: our method for segmentation, scoring and health indices. Our slide standard, and how to write the page rather than just read the model. How we run work in Linear. How to use AI here properly, which is mostly knowing what to verify rather than what to prompt. How private equity, M&A and advisory work actually make money, learned by being in the room while it happens.

Working here

The most capable people in the room are usually the ones you have never heard of, and that is who we hire. In the room, this work takes preparation and memory far more than confidence or polish. Being properly ready. Remembering what someone told you last time. Quiet and thorough does very well here. Loud does not particularly.

Small team, so nothing you do goes unnoticed and nothing gets lost in a layer of management. Feedback is direct and frequent, which takes some getting used to and means you will never be guessing where you stand. When you are handed something above your level you get the context and a person to ask.

Where this goes

You will not stay boxed into the scope above. Both Managing Directors work across real estate, M&A and founder advisory, and you will be alongside them for most of it, not only the models and materials that are formally yours. Sit in on the negotiation, the investor call, the thing that never had a job description written for it, and do good work there, and it becomes yours to run. Nobody is going to stop you from being useful somewhere this document never mentioned.

Beyond that, it is up to you, honestly. We are not going to promise you a title or a date, because that would be a guess dressed up as a plan. What we will do is hand you more as you show you can carry it. Get properly good at one part of this and the next part follows quickly, inside this role or outside it. The pace is set by how fast you become the person we stop checking on, not by a review calendar.

What you get

• Competitive compensation above market rates

• Medical coverage fully funded by the firm

• A personal coach for mental wellness and a Celebrity Fitness membership including a personal trainer

• Learning and development budget plus weekly cross-role learning sessions

• 12 days annual leave rising to 24 with service, and a season parking pass

• Genuinely flexible hybrid. We are flexible on location and on hours, and judge people on what gets delivered rather than desk time

• Direct access to two Managing Directors, and a seat at conversations most people at your level hear about second hand

• Quarterly goal setting, two-way feedback, team lunches, dinners, team building activies and an annual offsite

Our mission

Be the first call. Earn it every day.

Our mission is to be the first call. That means earning the trust. When a founder hits a wall, when an owner faces a tough decision, when an investor needs something handled and handled now, the first number they dial is ours. We work in small teams, side by side with the people we serve, and the most capable people in the room are usually the ones you have never heard of. That is exactly who we intend to be: known quietly, in the circles that matter, for the fact that whatever we take on gets done. Trust like that is never owned. It is earned one job at a time, and every piece of work that leaves our hands either earns the next call or loses it.

How to apply

Send a CV and a few lines on which part of this role you would be strongest at and which part you would need the most help with. We read the second answer more carefully than the first.

The first round is a short written exercise in your own time rather than an interview, so you can show us your thinking rather than perform it. We pay for your time on it.