People Development Manager

Startups – People Development – Trusted Advisor

About PreSeed Ventures

For more than two decades, PreSeed Ventures (PSV) have scouted, mentored, and funded Danish success stories like Vivino, Trutpilot, Lunar, Seaborg Technologies, and Glycom. We have ventured into the future alongside more than 500 founders and supported their personal, collective, and professional growth in the earliest stages of their journey.

Today, PSV is a venture house specialised in commercialisation of technology, consisting of our first investment fund, PSV Tech01, currently raising our second investment fund, PSV DeepTech Impact, helping climatetech solutions into the world as part of GreenPact, and actively creating future founders through our own startup school, PSV Academy.

Building a company is hard work. We know from experience, that only the strongest teams succeed. That’s why we work with a targeted people strategy for our founders, where especially the development of the team’s human, professional and managerial resources are key factors. And that’s why we need you to help us in supporting our investment teams and founders in connecting the dots between business and people through the startup journey.

People Development Manager

As the new People Development Manager, you will design, develop, and deliver value-add people activities targeted the different stages of the early startup journey in PSVs portfolio – furthermore, you will:

• lead the team due diligence process of potential investments
• facilitate competency and personality assessment of founder teams
• shape founder teams’ competency composition at both Executive (CxO) and Board (BoD) level
• support startups in their people and recruitment strategies
• provide strategic support for the founder teams on their people related development journey
• build portfolios of BoD and CxO profiles of relevance to tech and deeptech startups
• make recommendations to organisational development ie. organisational structure, when to add which competencies to the leadership team and how to manage and drive a professional board
• be a trusted advisor on human related topics to guide decision-making and offer proactive solutions
• keep track of the team health and development across the PSV Portfolio

About you and your role within our PSV family

Team is everything. That’s what we tell every founder we ever talk to and of course the same rule applies to ourselves. Therefore, we’re looking for genuine, independent, and driven human beings with a pro-active and analytical mindset.

As People Development Manager, you’ll be part of PSVs specialist team and report to our “Head of People and Culture”. You will work closely together with and advice PSV’s different investment funds & teams working with their portfolio startups. We know there are various definitions of a ‘People Development Manager’ in the VC landscape. At PSV it’s a senior role with a large responsibility. You’re a team member, partaking in the responsibility of ensuring the backing of the most ambitious startups across the Nordics.

You distinguish yourself from others through your eagerness to learn and ability to stay cool under pressure and shine through professionalism. You have solid people skills, and you love building new trustful relationships with entrepreneurs, investors, and other stakeholders. You’re a strong senior advisor and have a naturally service mentality. Given the dynamic nature of our operations, you’re down to earth and a strong communicator. You’ll be part of a small, devoted team, where everybody has a healthy winner instinct. Further, it’s important that you will create, advocate for, and foster diversity, equity, and inclusion best practices in all aspects of selection, assessment, and hiring.

You most likely have a Commercial/Social Science/Human Resource educational background at master’s level and have subsequently had a commercially oriented career, where you have dealt with management, HR development and recruitment – preferably in the entrepreneurial environment. You are also well experienced with personality and team tests.

Candidates can come from all types of background – we always encourage a diverse range of applicants.

If all of this sounded interesting let us know. We can’t wait to meet you!