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Belief in being the best keeps Blackbird soaring

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“We want Blackbird to be the best place to work in Australia & New Zealand,” say the managers of the technology company, which has won the award for the Best Employee Experience at this year’s AFR BOSS Best Places To Work awards.

Blackbird Ventures ensures that staff have the support, skills and flexibility to do their best work. 

“Nothing will have a greater impact on our business than the people we hire; the key value at Blackbird is belief and we back our team like we back our founders, attracting the best people and then ensuring they have the support, skills and flexibility to do their life’s work.

“To attract the best, we need to create more equitable opportunities within our industry. In the venture capital industry, women average just 10 per cent of leadership positions - we wanted to do a lot better than that.

“Through using the hiring platform Applied, we have removed multiple biases from our hiring process, helping us build a team that was 20 per cent women at the end of 2019 to 60 per cent women today.

“We’ve organised training for all women employees at Blackbird to maximise their authority and amplify their presence, increased paid parental leave, returning-to-work benefits and flexible work arrangements, and have developed a public venture capital Code of Conduct to drive more accountability in the industry.

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“To supercharge our team’s success, we encourage each Blackbird’s development through a yearly learning and development budget to spend on whatever they’d like to learn, and we hold semi-annual conversations between each team member and their manager to help them identify and pursue their goals.

“These conversations ensure that learning and development is part of a formal review cycle and that Blackbirds self-assess what parts of their role they’d like to deepen skills in, suggest additional training or share their growth goals beyond their day-to-day responsibilities.

“We believe in being open and transparent at Blackbird. All team members (even those outside the investments function) can join and provide input to our investment decision meetings, we hold regular town halls covering topics requested by the team, and AMAs are a regular feature of our offsites.

“Finally, we recognise that each team member contributes to Blackbird’s success and believe everyone should share in that success.

“With the announcement of our fourth fund in August 2020, all Blackbird employees have become owners of our management company, in addition to receiving carried interest (known as carry) in the funds.

“This practice creates significant long-term wealth opportunities for our team but more importantly, incentivising all of us to act as an owner of the business and share in its success.”

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