Schmidt Futures is a philanthropic initiative, founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt, that bets early on exceptional people making the world better. We knit talent into networks, bet on the most promising ideas through diverse forms of competition and support, and equip people to scale through partners and modern tools. To realize this vision, Schmidt Futures uses a broad set of tools — including gifts, grants, investments, and startup activity — for charitable, educational, and commercial efforts with a public purpose. Our initiative brings together the efforts of various charitable and non-charitable entities to improve our potential impact by making diverse types of capital available to the efforts we support.
The Role
As an Associate with Schmidt Futures you will have the opportunity to do meaningful work with the potential for broad impact. In this visible role, you’ll navigate ambiguity and analyze real world problems using exceptional quantitative skills and judgment to produce well formulated insights and ideas. You will work alongside leadership that has experience across many sectors. Your efforts will help scale the impact of our work and ensure that we can help others better overtime.
Associates are often hired as part of a cohort and rotate across different areas of the organization with the intention that we increase your professional development. This is not only to make you even more effective inside Schmidt Futures but also to help you grow your leadership ability for roles serving others inside and out. If you are someone that loves a fast pace, working on lean teams and using your project management and analytical skill sets to solve critical problems, this role has the potential to be a great match.
Associates work directly with other members of the Schmidt Futures team to help manage, and perform research and analysis relevant to:
- Development of new programs or individual gifts, grants, or investments.
- Monitoring and evaluation of existing programs and individual gifts, grants, or investments either underway or completed.
- Development of Schmidt Futures’ planning efforts for strategy, budget, organizational design, and talent management.
Key Responsibilities:
Program and Gift/Grant/Investment Development
- Conduct research and analysis designed to outline potential opportunities for impact, understand relative effectiveness of alternative models, and quantify likely results of programs overall and/or individual gifts, grants, or investments.
- Perform landscape analyses to identify potential opportunities for partnership as well as lessons learned from existing efforts in the field.
- Lead knowledge management efforts for research and analysis performed – communicating results to team members and codifying results for future use and/or revision.
Monitoring and Evaluation
- Working closely with others on the team, perform independent research to help verify outcomes of Schmidt Futures’ programs and/or individual gifts, grants, or investments.
- Identify opportunities to improve the work based on an understanding of current trends and/or lessons learned from others’ work.
- Recommend approaches to make data collection on outcome easier and better so as to facilitate more productive monitoring and evaluation.
Strategic and Operational Planning Support
- Conduct benchmarking and other analyses (either directly or by review of third-party work) to facilitate more effective planning for Schmidt Futures’ strategy, budget, talent management, and organizational development.
- Identify important issues to be resolved through organizational planning processes, and propose alternatives based on research of potential scale and scope on criteria to be defined.
- Prepare relevant communications for organizational leadership and/or outside partners.
Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities
- Demonstrated analytical skills, including quantitative modeling.
- Project management skills, including entrepreneurial drive to develop and execute self-designed initiatives.
- Ability to coordinate efforts across multiple stakeholders.
- Demonstrated leadership ability and record of impact in high-intensity, team-based environments.
- Exceptional problem-solving skills, for both conceptual and analytical problems.
- Values-based, collaborative working style with demonstrated commitment to the highest standards of ethics and confidentiality.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, with reasonable ability to use common software tools for word processing, presentation, and spreadsheets (especially Google Docs and Sheets).
Requirements
- Have 4 or more years of experience in business, government, consulting, project management, philanthropy, graduate school, or the military.
- Have a Bachelor’s degree from an accredited university.
- Be based in the Schmidt Futures offices in New York and be able to support onsite operations in the office on a regular basis as needed following company policy and permitting circumstances.
At Schmidt Futures we are committed to fair, transparent pay and we strive to provide competitive, market-informed compensation. The target base salary range for this role is $110,000 to $150,000. Compensation for the successful candidate will be informed by the candidate’s particular combination of knowledge, skills, competencies and experience
Futures Action Network, LLC, which operates Schmidt Futures, is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer that proudly pursues and hires a diverse workforce. We do not make hiring or employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion or religious belief, ethnic or national origin, nationality, sex, gender, gender-identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, military or veteran status, or any other basis protected by applicable local, state, or federal laws or prohibited by Company policy. We strive for a healthy and safe workplace and strictly prohibit harassment of any kind.
