About Scroobious

Hello there potential Scroobious Data Scientist! Before we get into the job, let me tell you about our company and its origin story. I’m Allison Byers, Founder & CEO. I spent about five years building and leading a medical device startup and raised nearly $10M going from a friends and family round through an A1 before it was acquired. During that time I was floored by how inefficient and stressful the process of fundraising was, and caught off guard by the gender bias I experienced despite a career full of being the only woman in the room. When I did some research and found out that women and minorities receive only 2% or less (yes, that’s real!) of VC funding, I felt compelled to help in some way.

I founded Scroobious in January 2020 to increase diversity in the startup ecosystem by teaching diverse founders how to create investable pitch material through a scalable online platform and making it easy for investors to discover them through data-driven curation. With our Pitch it Plan™ (PiP), entrepreneurs access online education, community, and personalized feedback from a human who understands the investor mindset to create compelling material in an approachable and affordable way. For investors, our platform clarifies overlooked opportunities by highlighting both the founder’s human qualities and the business information with personal recommendations based on proprietary variables and their own behavior so they can intentionally invest in diverse entrepreneurs.

We launched our PiP MVP in February 2021 and have worked with over 300 founders and dozens of diversity-focused accelerators and organizations to help diverse entrepreneurs raise millions and get into prestigious accelerators. We have raised a pre-seed round from angel investors and select institutions who are passionate about our mission and have an incredible hands-on advisory board. In a short period of time, our brand is already recognized as a mission-driven authentic voice with a truly valuable product.

The Role

The PiP MVP was built on a low-code platform for rapid deployment and we have successfully demonstrated market validation. In these early days when we are running lean and capital efficient, our fantastic technical advisor, Dan Caddigan, served as lead architect and built our custom web app, which we launched in April 2022! This includes both PiP and an investor-facing discovery portal. We have a BIG vision for our platform that will utilize proprietary data and machine learning to give founders who identify as underrepresented a fair shot at capitalizing their companies and our economy access to $4T in lost value. We are building Scroobious to be a scalable, venture-backable company.

Speaking of data science, a core element of our investor portal includes building a recommendation engine to suggest pitches an investor might like based on that investor’s engagement on our platform. This will include identifying proprietary variables about pitch material (static from pdf decks and dynamic from videos and speech) to combine with traditional elements of fundraising (stage, location, amount, etc.) and engagement behavior to create predictive models.

What You Bring

I’m not going to list a bunch of requirements, and while you don’t need to have mastery of recommendation engines, you do need enough experience and ambition that you can hit the ground running and get up to speed quickly. You…

are a hands-on machine learning person who understands how to manipulate data.
are naturally curious about data and predictive analytics and find yourself looking at how companies use recommendations and the content driving their models.
understand what machine learning products exist today and how to use them.
can take an off-the-shelf product and utilize it to create an early model while we strategize future approaches.
are excited to turn unstructured data into quantified variables.
have an active GitHub account (or equivalent) where you are building adhoc models based on your own curiosity.
care about diversity efforts and know how to check that a model isn’t inadvertently creating bias.
enjoy working independently and are a stickler for documentation.
like sarcasm and laugh a lot.

The Position

This position will start as a contract for either compensation or value exchange. In the case of value exchange, we are open to discussions with students or those in a career transition to provide access to our platform and investor community in exchange for helping us build our early recommendation engine. There is the potential for joining as a founding team member.

You will be reporting directly to me, with ongoing support and mentorship from our incredible advisors and investors. This is an amazing opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a mission-based startup and work closely with business and technical wizards who are also good human beings.

How to Apply

If you’re interested in joining our small yet mighty team as a core player with direct influence over the company's product, please click the button below to email your resume and a cover letter. Please, please don’t forget the cover letter including why you’re a good fit for the position, why we should be excited to have you join us, and how you learned about the role.

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