Learning curve vs. doing curve

Jan here, Co-Founder and COO of Buena (€60m Funding by Google Ventures).

I don’t believe in preemptive learning.

What you’ve learned so far doesn’t really matter. No one will ask you about it. How many amazing things did you learn in your second semester of university? Or in 11th-grade math class? It’s all quickly forgotten.

I believe in doing.

What have you done?

Because what you will do at Buena is something no one can ever take away from you.

Learning is downstream from doing.

You’ll be able to say that you brought a company with 10 employees from a 5% margin to 40% while increasing revenue.

You won’t need to say that you learned to understand financial data, manage employees, or sell services. It'll be implicitly clear.

What you'll do here

I don’t care what you’ve learned before or what you want to learn here.

I leave that to the academic world. What matters to us is that you’ll do A LOT here:

People management, including recruiting : Motivate your portcos (portfolio companies), help them achieve their goals, and decide with the team lead who gets hired and when.
Creating and improving operations and processes : Each property management company has unique characteristics that you’ll need to represent in professional and scalable processes.
Product development : New features are constantly built to handle more property management tasks even more effectively in our software. You can lead such a feature from idea to deployment, its first use in a portfolio company, and finally its rollout across Buena.
Property management : Here, you’ll work hands-on with the largest asset class in the world—and gain insights into what to consider when purchasing your own real estate. Not the most useless knowledge to acquire.

The above example is the main action for 2025. Once you have successfully integrated your set of 5-8 portcos, the playbook for integrations will be so good, we'll be able to have interns do this job.

You will then move on to the next stage: increasing revenue per unit. There are a bunch of industries within residential real estate that are adjacent to property management and could be interesting.

One example is insurance.

Instead of having every property manager get their own deals with insurers via external insurance brokers, you could negotiate one - much better - deal for all our units directly with Allianz CEO Oliver Bäte at the Champions League final against Chelsea.

Once you have a deal you'll test it with your PortCos, integrate it into the product, and finally roll it out.

Next step: US Expansion.

Work directly with the Leadership Team

Anyone joining us as a Head of Operations for a Zone will work directly with the Leadership Team. One could say that you’ll learn a lot from this, but as mentioned above, that’s secondary.

Primarily, working with the Leadership Team means two things:

You can do a lot : Your direct supervisor has the autonomy to approve everything and empower you to act quickly. To get a better understanding for what that means exactly ask the other Head of Operations you’ll meet in our recruiting process about how budgets work here.
You can grow with the company : In a few years, I'll need senior execs responsible for areas like Banking, Insurance, Brokerage, etc. I want to prepare you for this development so that—even when Buena reaches €100 million or €10 billion in revenue—you continue to report directly to the Leadership Team. Or secure their angel investment for your own startup. #PaypalMafia

Hard Requirements

Hard requirements

Fluent German (C2 level).
Move near the office in Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin.
Real world Entrepreneurial Experience: You've generated thousands of Euros of revenue on your own / with a Co-Founder OR have a couple of years of work experience in an Operational Role.

Application process

Brief Call with Jan (COO) or Christian (Head of People)
Case Study
Case Debrief & Conversation with Jan (Co-Founder COO) & our Head of Operations East (Linus) or West (Lars)
Work Trial in Office
Meeting with Din (CEO)

These steps can be completed in 4 days.

Contact

Send your application to

#J-18808-Ljbffr

Buena GmbH

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