Associate

About Courtside Courtside Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm investing at the intersection of sports, entertainment, and consumer. We were founded in 2016 on a thesis most investors were missing: the real opportunity in sports wasn't the teams, leagues, or venues themselves, but the media, commerce, tech infrastructure, gaming, and health platforms built around them, serving fans who spend more on the category every year. A decade later, that thesis has produced a portfolio of 130 companies, including The Athletic (acquired by The New York Times), StockX (exited), Draftea, Rythm Health, and Beam (acquired by Microsoft), and has returned real capital to our LPs. Today we manage $300M+ across our funds. We have kept the team deliberately small. That is a strategy, not a constraint: everyone here sees deals end to end, and the person in this seat will have more responsibility in year one than an associate at a large platform fund gets in three. This is a role with high agency, high expectations, and high upside. The Role We are hiring an Associate to work directly with the investment team across the full lifecycle of a deal - from the first cold outreach to a founder, through diligence and the investment committee, into portfolio support and follow-on decisions. This is a hands-on seat within a small team. You will own workstreams, not slides. You will be in front of founders immediately, and your name will be on the thinking that comes out of this firm. What You Will Do Sourcing. Build and run your own sourcing engine across sports, entertainment, and consumer - founder outreach, co-investor relationships, conferences, and scene-level presence in New York and other tech scenes. We see over 100 deals a week; your job is to make sure the right ones reach us first. Diligence. Lead primary research on live opportunities: customer and expert calls, market sizing, competitive mapping, financial and cohort analysis, and reference checks. Help write the memo and defend the recommendation to the investment committee. Thesis development. Pick categories, go deep, and form a view. Build market maps, size opportunities, and turn a thesis into an outbound sourcing plan - the way we found and won deals like Veo. Portfolio management. Support founders post-investment on hiring, go-to-market, introductions, and follow-on financings. Track KPIs, maintain company records, and flag what is working and what is not. Content and external voice. Write publicly for the firm - market pieces, category theses, "why we invested" posts, LP-facing content. Good writing is how a fund our size punches above its weight. Conferences and network. Represent Courtside at industry events, and systematically build a network of founders, operators, and co-investors that compounds for the firm. Fund management and operations. Contribute to LP reporting, portfolio and performance tracking, CRM hygiene, and the internal systems that keep a lean fund running well. What We Are Looking For Required: Prior venture capital (or similar) experience as an analyst or associate. This is not an entry-level seat - you should already know what a data room, a cap table, an IC memo look like and have deep relationships within the VC ecosystem. This is also not a senior-level role, but there is a strong opportunity to move up within the organization. Based in New York City or willing to split time in NYC (in office). Our categories are relationship businesses, and this one is run in person. Independence in your work. You prefer to operate autonomously and are comfortable handling your work streams without oversight or hand-holding. Working fluency with AI tools and workflows. We expect you to already be using AI to do the job - research, diligence synthesis, sourcing automation, writing - and to be able to show us what you have built. Expertise here is required, not a nice-to-have. You will be working with the Partners to refine our process. Genuine interest and fluency in sports, entertainment, and consumer. You should have opinions about where these categories are going and be able to defend them. Strong writing. Most of the work product of this job is prose. What actually separates candidates: You have sourced a deal that got done. You are genuinely part of a scene - a category, a community, a group chat - where things happen before they are obvious. Your sourcing channels are unique and actionable Day 1. You have independent thought/judgment and will say the uncomfortable thing in an IC meeting. You have built something: a company, a product, a newsletter, an internal tool, a following. Compensation & Benefits Base salary of $130,000 - $150,000, depending on experience. Participation in firm-wide carried interest pool Comprehensive benefits - medical, dental, and vision - fully paid for by Courtside. A market-leading 401(k) match program. Flexible PTO. In accordance with New York City law, the good-faith base salary range for this position is $130,000 to $150,000. Actual compensation will depend on experience and qualifications, and this range does not include bonus or carried interest. #J-18808-Ljbffr