West Coast Business Development Lead

Who are we?

Sidewalk Labs is an urban innovation company working to make cities more sustainable and affordable for all. We create products, invest in new companies, and help plan innovative places around the world. Since our founding in 2015, we've grown into an organization of over 100 employees based primarily in New York City. Our cross-disciplinary team consists of experts from real estate, urban planning, government, finance, technology, and engineering, among other backgrounds.

We've launched innovative companies addressing urban mobility, next-generation infrastructure, and community-based healthcare, and invested in startups working on everything from robotic furniture to digital electricity. We continue to work internally on projects such as factory-made mass timber construction that can improve housing affordability and sustainability, a digital master-planning tool designed to help developers and communities achieve shared objectives, and a new approach to all-electric neighborhoods.

With the potential to catalyze and scale new models for sustainable and affordable growth, our work is both exciting and complex. We are working to achieve something unprecedented — help us build it!

To date, we've incubated and invested in multiple companies focused on solving urban problems.

We now seek to create an offsite construction company delivering high-quality mass timber buildings for more sustainable living and working. The company's end-to-end approach will combine craft design and advanced manufacturing to produce customizable buildings with speed and certainty. It will be based in the Pacific Northwest. This company's efforts will include:

• Working with developers and architects to create a high-quality building design that is optimized for production in our factory.
• Producing four basic building parts (floor cassettes, structural members, facade panels, and walls) that come in many variations, allowing for design versatility.
• Purchasing and integrating additional key items (such as bathroom pods, kitchen pods, and elevators) for the building.
• Shipping its flat-packed, ready-to-assemble building parts to a customer's development site, once the site is prepared for vertical construction.
• Tailoring on-site construction services to individual customer needs, delivering buildings that are completed at least through the basic fit-out stage.

With the potential to catalyze and scale new models for inclusive growth, our work is both highly exciting and complex. We are working to achieve something unprecedented — help us build it!

What is the role?

The Associate Director, Business Development will be a foundational role connecting future real estate developer clients with our building product. You will be building our customer and buildings pipeline in the Pacific Northwest . As an essential member of our startup team, you have an opportunity to shape the way we engage with developers, and be on the forefront of bringing a new, better building typology into the market. This is a new role we are excited to add to our growing team.

Primary responsibilities include:

• Generating, assessing, prioritizing, and executing on leads to build out a pipeline of ground-up real estate development projects to deliver in the West Coast region (U.S. and Canada). These projects can span early smaller projects through to mid- to high-rise projects to be delivered in the medium term. Our role in these projects begins early in design through to factory fabrication of the components of a building all the way to onsite installation.
• Being the first point of contact with developers, your role will play an important role in familiarizing them (as well as others across the AEC industry) on our capabilities and product. Given that our role on projects begins early in design and preconstruction, it will be incumbent upon you to facilitate a sales process that is as efficient as possible for both parties and ensures our customers' unique objectives are met.
• Working with our Design and Project Delivery teams to advance projects through the funnel, while advancing projects through feasibility, scope definition, and early project design work, while at the same time, structuring and negotiating commercial terms and agreements for project delivery.

As an essential member of our startup team, you will also have the opportunity to shape the way we take our product to market and build out our local business development function. This includes proactive customer targeting and outreach, articulation of the value proposition of our buildings and approach, through to defining the sales funnel and structuring project contracts to include longer-term partnership agreements that solve for our customers' and our objectives. Your vantage point with developers will also allow you to collect and disseminate valuable feedback to leadership and product design and delivery teams, to inform business decisions and strategies.

You will also be part of seeding and building long-term relationships with strategic partners, including developers and others across AEC, which will support a robust future customer pipeline on the West Coast and across North America.

Over time, as you and the business grow, this role will evolve with you and present new opportunities for shaping our business development and product strategies.

What We Expect

We believe the following is essential:

Extensive hands-on practical experience developing and underwriting ground-up commercial real estate projects

• Commercial real estate development and/or acquisitions, including urban mixed use, multi-family, office assets (mid and high-rise, up to at least 400K sqft). Experience must include ground-up development projects that resulted in completed buildings.
• Strong familiarity with the entire development process from the perspective of the developer and investor, including sourcing, feasibility, entitlements, design, underwriting, financing, and construction, plus an understanding of key roles and responsibilities within project teams (capital, development, project management, design and engineering, pre-construction, construction management, etc.).

You are known as an experienced leader in real estate development and/or investment across Pacific Northwest and West Coast markets

• Practical understanding of local real estate market dynamics and trends, project economics, and relevant regulatory and political environments that will allow you to form a nuanced understanding of the problems our solution may solve, in addition to potential challenges to adoption we may face.
• Ability to call on a robust network in commercial real estate development and AEC across key markets in the region, with access to key decision-makers.

Entrepreneurial and effective in building something new

• Desire to translate your real estate development / underwriting skillset and experience into success in a customer-facing, business development role, by leveraging your deep understanding of our customer base to effectively sell a tailored solution. Strong analytical skillset and communication skills are critical.
• Ability to work effectively across cross-functional teams (and potentially competing priorities).

What You Will Accomplish

Success in this role means securing a near and medium-term pipeline of committed projects under contract; working collaboratively with multiple internal and external design, development, fabrication, and construction teams; and seeding / building relationships to support a robust, continuous, and strategic pipeline in the long-term.

After 3 months, you will have:

• Gained a strong understanding of and an ability to clearly explain and sell our building product and how to work with us, including articulation of our points of differentiation and value proposition vs business-as-usual.
• Worked closely with internal product, fabrication, and delivery teams to establish an efficient, real-time feedback loop for incorporating customer feedback and assessing project feasibility.
• Supported internal delivery team's advancement of strategic partnerships with construction management and install partners.

After 6 months you will have:

• Taken 10+ projects through feasibility and advanced at least half of those projects through to the design phase
• Secured commercial agreements for projects meeting delivery targets for the next two years and handed these projects off to internal execution teams.

After 12 months you will have:

• Secured additional contracts required to meet revenue and delivery targets through mid-2024
• Built out a robust future sales funnel.
• Established detailed awareness of the business and established lines of communication across all medium to large AEC firms and development companies located in the Pacific Northwest

We are very excited to hear from you.

The community of the future is a place for everyone, and Sidewalk Labs is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We encourage individuals from underrepresented groups to apply. All employment is based on merit and business needs.