Investment Lead, Intercept

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About Stripe

Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses. Millions of companies - from the world’s largest enterprises to the most ambitious startups - use Stripe to accept payments, grow their revenue, and accelerate new business opportunities. Our mission is to increase the GDP of the internet, and we have a staggering amount of work ahead. That means you have an unprecedented opportunity to put the global economy within everyone's reach while doing the most important work of your career.

This role is on the Intercept team, which is part of Stripe's broader collection of public goods initiatives, including Frontier.

Respiratory viruses kill 1 million people a year, cost us $600B annually, disrupt everyday life, and periodically threaten civilization. Recent breakthroughs may make it possible to develop and deploy broad-spectrum preventatives and air cleaning technologies that defend against common respiratory infections. Intercept is a 500M philanthropic initiative that aims to radically reduce the burden of respiratory infections, and eventually eliminate them altogether.

Learn more about Intercept via our launch post and our website

Intercept is looking for an experienced biotech/biohealth investor to join our team.

We’re working to make sure the portfolio of technologies needed to radically reduce the burden of respiratory viruses exists. We have two main focus areas: air-cleaning technologies (ACT’s) and broad-spectrum preventatives (BSPs). For BSPs, our goal is to advance 2+ products that meet our target product profile through Phase 2. We make both grants and investments, using the most capital-efficient tool to advance our target product profile.

Initially, this role will be focused on building internal investment processes, investment thesis, and supporting Intercept in establishing the investment function. Ultimately this role will focus on sourcing, diligencing, and executing on pipeline opportunities to make equity and/or grant investments in companies that have the most promising BSPs against our target product profile (TPP). In addition, the role will be responsible for portfolio management to make sure portfolio projects successfully advance their products by helping to remove bottlenecks and accelerate timelines.

To effectively accomplish this work, the Investment Lead will develop views on the most promising approaches, identify new cutting edge areas of science, understand key product development inflection points, including mapping key technical and clinical/regulatory bottlenecks and developing plans to de-risk / mitigate them.

We need someone who can go deep on scientific and development diligence while also zooming out to synthesize how findings impact our capital deployment plan and long-term goals. A successful candidate will be action-oriented and comfortable working independently (vs. waiting to be told what to do) and a great communicator who can translate complex science for diverse audiences.

Intercept is a small team; you'll work with the entire team, many partners, and wear many hats. You'll own specific outcomes end-to-end and have a chance to contribute to BSP strategy over time.

• Expand the pipeline of candidates. Proactively engage networks (researchers, investors, founders, funders, etc.) to source new ideas and technologies. Manage referral channels (open RFP, referrals, etc.) and screen investment and grant opportunities.
• Own projects through diligence and transaction execution. Advance companies through early and deep / technical diligence: evaluating science quality, development plans, team, and fit against our TPP. Drive the investment or grantmaking process, coordinating with internal and external legal and diligence consultants. Bring projects through internal approval processes and act as the internal owner/champion.
• Develop points of view on technologies. Contribute to publishing a POV for the 5-10 most promising approaches (i.e., siRNA, T-cell vaccine, innate immune stimulators) and identify the key 'gating data points' that would make us kill or double down on that approach and when…