Job vacancy: Principal - Ops and Finance

Overview of the role

As one of four people on the Form Ventures team, you'll be pivotal in building Form into a leading venture capital fund. We are unique in Europe - we invest in startups, then work with our portfolio companies to navigate through regulatory or policy related risks and opportunities. Our growing portfolio of 30+ startups contains some of the most exciting companies around, and we’re lucky to count among our LPs some of Europe’s most committed and active venture fund investors.

You will lead finance and operations across Form, quickly becoming a critical member of the team alongside the two partners and the investing principal. As we look ahead to our third fund, you will improve every aspect of what we do, designing and delivering an institutional-grade fund management business. This is a rare opportunity for an ambitious, high-integrity professional.

Role responsibilities

This is the ops and finance role at Form, so you will have a large degree of autonomy in how you deliver. The role will cover five main areas of activity:

1. Fund operations - ensuring the mechanics of our funds work with precision, including: capital calls and distributions; quarterly reporting; portfolio ops; deal execution; and the development and implementation of our ESG and impact approaches.
2. Fund finances - oversight of our third party fund accounting; planning and forecasting fund cashflows; overseeing the fund audit and tax return process.
3. Business operations - including: acting as point with our legal, accounting, fund admin and other suppliers; running future hiring processes (we’ll be adding to the team); leading on our FCA regulatory status via our Principal firm; cyber & IT systems; insurance.
4. Business finances - including: financial planning (and ideally book-keeping) for Form Ventures Limited, our management company; overseeing the annual accounting and tax return cycles.
5. Playing a key role in the fundraising for our next fund, Form Ventures III, from an operations and finance perspective.

Beyond this, the role will:

• In all cases above, combine “business as usual” with the identification and delivery of upgrades to how we operate, such as new systems, processes, suppliers.
• Be involved in representing the business externally: to founders, co-investors (i.e. other VCs, angels), our LPs, policymakers and the wider tech ecosystem.
• Contribute to Form’s research, thought leadership and events (see our substack here).
• Play a key role in team-wide planning, projects, strategy discussions, KPI setting and measurement, away days and the ongoing development of Form as a business.
• Get stuck into the less glamorous aspects of working in a small business: in areas like office management, secretarial / diaries, catering for guests, we don’t have teams of people on hand - we all chip in.

Experience and skills

We want to find the right person and welcome applicants from a diverse range of backgrounds - given we’re a small team, “fit” is hugely important to us and we don’t prejudge what that will look like. In particular, we prefer individuals who will add a new way of thinking to the team, rather than those who already think like existing team members.

Given the multifaceted nature of the role, we don’t have a prerequisite set of work experience for our ops and finance lead, but these are a set of competences we are looking for: