Principal, New Ventures

About the role

You'll own creating hatches (our terminology for potential new companies) end to end: spotting the gap in the market, writing the business case, making the pitch for why we should invest, and recruiting the founding team.

Responsibilities

• Generate and validate new hatch ideas. Read widely, talk to operators, mine the defy network, and bring a steady flow of crypto native concepts into the pipeline. We need volume but also signal.
• Write the docs that move ideas forward. Business cases, investment memos, founder pitch decks. Clear prose, sharp framing, honest about where the idea could die.
• Pitch defy's investment committee. Defend your hatches same as an outside Founder looking for funding.
• Build MVPs. For hatches where it makes sense, use AI coding tools to ship a working prototype before the founder is hired. Compressing our timeline is key.
• Recruit founders. Partner with recruiters and your own network to land CEOs and CTOs who'll quit their jobs for the idea.
• Advise post launch. Stay close to the founders you placed. No board seat, no operational ownership. Just be the person they call.
• Kill your darlings. Recommend shutting hatches down when the thesis breaks. We'd rather waste a one pager than a year.

Requirements

• Startup experience. You've been early at a company (founder, founding team member, or first PM type role).
• Crypto experience. You've worked on a crypto product, invested in the space, or built something on chain. You know the difference between a thesis and a meme.
• Product management instincts. You can scope an MVP, identify the riskiest assumption, and write a spec that an engineer can ship from.
• Technical literacy. You can read code, prompt your way through Cursor or Claude Code, and ship a working prototype without waiting for an engineer.

Skills

• Sharp written communication. Your docs don't need heavy editing.
• Comfort with ambiguity and a high kill rate. Most hatches will die. That's the job.

Qualifications

• Prior founder experience (any outcome).
• Built or shipped something with AI coding tools recently.
• Existing network of crypto operators and engineers you could recruit from.