Role: Research Scholar
Team: Nucleus Intelligence
Reports to: Founder
Location: Remote, with SF or NYC ideal
Duration: Summer, with potential to extend
Part time and flexible. SF or NYC based is ideal, not required. If you want to skip the line, ping @alexklein0x or @reidschryer on X.
About Nucleus
Nucleus is the talent and intelligence layer for the next generation of investors. Anchored in data and community, we work with leading investment firms to find the people shaping the next decade. We also publish what we see along the way through Nucleus Intelligence, the NEXT Fellowship, Nucleus 100, The Rise, and LP1.
The Role
- You will be embedded in the Nucleus Intelligence team.
- Your job is to map the investing landscape and publish deep research on the firms and people shaping venture capital. You will work directly with the founder to help build the most comprehensive attribution intelligence system in the industry.
- This is a chance to build a public body of work, develop real expertise, and establish yourself as someone who understands how venture actually works.
- You will write firm and company deep dives for the Nucleus Intelligence Substack, with the rigor of what Contrary Research publishes.
What You’ll Do
- Map VC firms and company cap tables, including investing team rosters, seniority levels, focus areas, deal attribution, recent team changes, and movement patterns
- Write research briefs on the firms and companies you map for the Nucleus Intelligence Substack
- Conduct investor deep dives across attribution, background, public content, tenure, and founder references
- Flag outlier talent, especially young or emerging investors who should be in the Nucleus community
- Spot patterns across the venture ecosystem: firms winning or losing talent, team restructures, emerging stars, and sectors heating up
- Maintain clean research outputs with organized notes, accurate tagging, and consistent documentation
This role is about figuring it out, getting creative, and surfacing the people and signal needed to tell the full story of a firm or company.
What Great Looks Like
- Your research is hard to poke holes in
- You surface an investor Nucleus should know who is not already in the community
- You write a research brief that people in the industry actually share and reference
- You build a firm map so thorough it becomes the definitive resource on that team
- You spot a pattern before anyone else does
- You are curious, hungry, and care about the quality of what you put out
Tools You’ll Use
- Asana for project management
- Google Drive for research outputs and shared folders
- Crunchbase for company and firm mapping
- Slack for team communication
- Claude / ChatGPT / other AI tools for research acceleration
- Sacra as a supplement to Crunchbase and public research
We care about both speed and quality, but quality wins. The work should match the rigor a research-driven investment firm would bring to diligence.
Who You Are
- Genuinely curious about venture capital, startups, and the people who back them
- Detail-oriented and serious about getting things right
- A strong writer who can produce clean research briefs and concise candidate notes
- High-agency and comfortable working independently after ramp
- Comfortable navigating Crunchbase, LinkedIn, X, Claude / ChatGPT, and company databases
- Hungry to learn and willing to flag when something is unclear
- Positive, thoughtful, and good to work with