Head of Finance

About Primer

Fixing our K-12 education system is a civilizationally-important problem. We believe that all of our problems — including the ones that dominate the headlines — are downstream of education.

We have a simple thesis on how to solve it: empower 1,000’s of educators to launch microschools in their communities.

We believe the historical tradeoff between price (tuition) and quality is a false dichotomy.

PrimerOS automates and eliminates much of the costs of traditional schools. Microschools have a structural advantage — asset-light real estate — which means much lower capex and opex. You put it together, and you get something that’s never existed before: a world-class education that’s accessible to normal American families and can rapidly scale.

What You’ll Do

We’re adding our first finance leader to our team. It’s admittedly a big role – you’ll partner with each of our functional leaders to be the voice of the numbers in all of our decisions.

You’ll need to excel (pun intended) at operating “high / low” – flexing between high level strategy and low-level details many times each day. If you’re looking to spend your day managing people or creating decks, this isn’t the role for you.

We’ll expect you to be an input in every key decision across the company, and we really mean that. You’ll need to develop an intuition around the physics of our operating model and be able provide the data-driven arguments for (and against!) each big decision.

You may spend your morning working with the product team on the unit economic impact of a new academic model pilot, your afternoons with the real estate team on ways to reduce our capex, and the evening with our CEO preparing for a fundraising meeting.

What we’re trying to do is extremely hard – there’s a reason it hasn’t been done before. There’s a good chance this role will be the hardest work of your life.  If you find that slightly-daunting-but-exciting, this might be the role for you.

Responsibilities

• Partner closely with our education, product, real estate and growth teams to make better financial-driven decisions across the company.

• Translate financial progress, decisions and data into language that the broader team (including Primer Leaders) can understand and action on.

• Manage third party accounting, audits and other financial services.

• Own our operating model end-to-end – it is (and should continue to be) our bible.

• Work closely with the CEO on fundraising processes and diligence.
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience on either side of the table in VC / PE fundraising processes.

• Have had several dreams within the last 12 months involving specific Excel formulas.

• Owned an operating / financial model end-to-end, ideally in an atoms (not just bits) business.

• Experience at an early / growth stage startup in a finance or operations capacity.

If this sounds like you, fill out the application below with a bit about yourself and we’ll take it from there! If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to email us at [email protected].