Corporate Development, Mass Timber Factory

Who are we?

Sidewalk Labs is an urban innovation company working to make cities more sustainable and affordable for all. We create products, invest in new companies, and help plan innovative places around the world. Since our founding in 2015, we’ve grown into an organization of over 100 employees based primarily in New York City. Our cross-disciplinary team consists of experts from real estate, urban planning, government, investments, technology, and engineering, among other backgrounds.

We’ve launched innovative companies addressing urban mobility, next-generation infrastructure, and community-based healthcare, and invested in startups working on everything from robotic furniture to digital electricity. We continue to work internally on projects such as factory-made mass timber construction that can improve housing affordability and sustainability, a digital master-planning tool designed to help developers and communities achieve shared objectives, and a new approach to all-electric neighborhoods.

With the potential to catalyze and scale new models for sustainable and affordable growth, our work is both exciting and complex. We are working to achieve something unprecedented — help us build it!

To date, we've incubated and invested in multiple companies focused on solving urban problems.  

We are now building a high-growth, offsite, digital construction company delivering high-quality mass timber buildings for more sustainable living and working. The company's end-to-end approach will combine craft design and advanced manufacturing to produce customizable buildings with speed and certainty. It will be based in the Pacific Northwest. We have a unique opportunity to transform the way our urban environment is built, and build a successful venture in doing so. This company’s efforts will include:

• Working with developers and architects to create a high-quality, beautiful timber building design that is optimized for production in our factory.
• Producing four basic building parts (floor cassettes, structural members, facade panels, and walls) that come in many variations, allowing for design versatility across asset classes, geographies, and design goals.
• Purchasing and integrating additional modular items (such as bathroom pods, kitchen pods, and elevators) for the building to further improve the design and delivery schedule.
• Shipping flat-packed, ready-to-assemble building parts to a customer’s development site, once the site is prepared for vertical construction.
• Tailoring on-site construction services to individual customer needs, delivering buildings that are completed at least through the basic fit-out stage.
• Investing in and scaling multiple business lines beyond the first factory, including digital design products, new material technologies, and digital factory solutions.

What is the role?

The Associate Director, Corporate Development will be a dynamic, exciting, and foundational role working directly with the CEO and President to continue to refine and execute upon a risk-mitigated go-to-market strategy, as well as lay the groundwork for achieving sustainable growth in enterprise value for a diversified digital manufacturing company with ambitious growth targets.  

Primary responsibilities include:

• Strategy Definition: Make actionable recommendations for near- and longer-term business opportunities that support organic growth or accretive external investments or partnerships; support with robust thesis-driven industry and market research, competitive and financial analyses, and buy, partner, build strategy evaluation. 
• Strategic Planning: Support business planning, target setting, and decision-making around capital allocation, project pipeline, and new product development, by owning the corporate financial model, scenarios, financial analysis, and industry benchmarking. 
• Performance Management: Define the financial and other metrics to use to measure, benchmark, and report performance, projections, and company value; identify optimization opportunities, including for pricing strategy, strategic contracts, and factory operations; and manage investor relations. 
• Risk Management: Assess company, industry, supply chain, real estate market, and macro risks; work across teams to put in place cost-effective tools to mitigate project-level risks for the company (for design, construction, manufacturing) and its customers, and limit company financial exposure, including insurance, bonding, warranties, procurement contracts, etc.
• Commercial partnerships, external investments: Identify, due diligence, model, structure, execute on potential investments or commercial partnerships in connection with product or materials co-development, real estate pipeline, or digital tools and platforms.

As an essential member of our startup team, you will also be part of shaping the company’s growth trajectory, including, over time, strategically and opportunistically evaluating different potential paths for future capital raising / spinout scenarios, and, if pursued, driving execution.

Over time, as you and the business grow, this role will evolve with you and present new opportunities for shaping our strategic partnership and investment agenda and the launch of new business lines.

What We Expect

• You have strong experience and expertise that enables you to operate independently, take ownership over financial and industry analysis, structure and execute on partnerships and transactions, and develop a range of commercial viewpoints to support the company from early stage to growth stage: 7 to 10+ years of experience across Management Consulting, Venture Capital, Investment Banking / Private Equity, and/or other roles at the intersection of investing and strategy with sector-specific focus on either digital manufacturing, industrials, robotics, building component manufacturing, or another relevant field to the business we are building.
• An MBA is a plus. Operational, entrepreneurial, engineering, and / or legal experience is also a plus.
• You are an expert in go-to-market strategy, organic growth, fundraising, deal structuring and negotiation, and investor relations.
• You have excellent analytical, corporate modeling and valuation skills in order to perform financial analyses for the purpose of assisting in the exploration of strategic options, the development of creative solutions to complex issues, and to support decision-making.
• You have strong data-driven problem-solving, market research, and strategic thinking skills.
• You are highly independent, self-motivated and approach internal strategy development proactively. 
• You work extremely well with others, across all organizational levels, functions, and diverse technical teams (spanning construction, design, fabrication, industrial engineering, software, robotics). Synthesize technical insights to develop and evaluate commercialization or investment cases for proprietary technology. 
• You have the ability to build collaborative relationships quickly, listen deeply, and communicate your point of view succinctly.
• You are a true “start-up” athlete with the ability to set strategy with the senior management as well as build your own models, do your own research, and create your own communication tools.

What You Will Accomplish

Success in this role means:

After 3 months, you will have:

• Built a strong network inside of the factory team as well as across Sidewalk Labs
• Developed a global view of the factory business, understand how each internal team (Product Design, Delivery, Fabrication, Digital) drives value for the business, mitigates risk, and works together to execute on projects.
• Taken ownership of the corporate financial model and understand projected financials and underlying assumptions.
• Begun working with the Director of Digital on strategy and commercialization opportunities.
• Established collaborative ways of working across teams to efficiently and accurately price, evaluate profitability and strategic value, and assess risk for pipeline projects.

After 6 months you will have:

• Identified and begun to execute upon potential opportunities for strategic partnerships and/or commercial arrangements across supply chain and key business terms.
• Evaluated commercialization potential, and begun to build out roadmap / resourcing in connection with the company’s investments to-date in proprietary factory technology, software, building materials, or building components. 
• Begun to refine and continue to build out the corporate financial model to support valuation, planning, risk assessment, and decision-making with regard to capital allocation and Go-to-Market. 
• Worked with industrial engineering, fabrication, digital, and construction teams to agree ownership of assumptions, hand-offs, and shared models for project cost modeling, scheduling, and overall factory capacity and cashflow planning. 

After 12 months you will have:

• Created, evaluated, and recommended the frameworks, criteria, financial metrics, and processes by which to evaluate and make business and investment decisions to be applied across the business.
• Built out investment case for digital products and execution strategies and timeline, working closely with Director of Digital. 
• Made recommendations, created roadmap, and begun execution of prioritized commercial partnerships and/or investments. 

We are very excited to hear from you.

The community of the future is a place for everyone, and Sidewalk Labs is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We encourage individuals from underrepresented groups to apply. All employment is based on merit and business needs.