Head of Venture Building

Highline Beta is hiring a Head of Venture Building. Your job will be to lead projects that we're working on in collaboration with corporates, family offices and other ecosystem partners. The goal of most projects is to go from an initial problem or problem space and validate a new venture that can be built. We strive to deliver the right strategic recommendation (i.e. build, buy, partner or spin-out) to our corporate partners, and if possible, go through the full venture building process to launch new businesses.

We are customer-obsessed doers driven by outcomes versus outputs. We're looking for someone who is as comfortable leading a meeting with corporate executives as they are being in the trenches working on and building businesses.

As Head of Venture Building, you will report to Highline Beta's Founders, Ben Yoskovitz and Marcus Daniels. You will be leading venture building initiatives with partners, which includes playing both strategic and execution-level roles.

This is not a people management role. We value a "bias to action". We are a flat organization of experienced, entrepreneurial team members. If you're primarily interested in managing a team and not executing the work itself, please do not apply.

Responsibilities

Client Management & Business Development: 30% of time

• Work directly with corporate executives to identify opportunities to build new ventures that are strategically aligned with their businesses
• Coach client innovation / venture studio teams through the process of creating new ventures, supporting them with training as needed
• Understand the challenges faced by corporate innovators, and design proposals and sales materials for how we can help
• Support business development activities by attending conferences, speaking at events, hosting webinars and showcasing your expertise in the field of growth innovation and corporate venture building

Venture Creation: 70% of time

• Identify where there is opportunity to build ventures given the corporate client's business objectives through a mixture of ideation and validation processes
• Use Lean Startup methodologies and Design Thinking to break those opportunities down into small, testable pieces - designing a rigorous testing system to do so
• Conduct qualitative and quantitative market research to rigorously validate business assumptions/opportunities
• Create business plans and models for new ventures, products and services - taking into account desirability, viability, and feasibility considerations
• Coach corporate teams who are in charge of validating some of these new venture concepts - providing tools and tips based on first hand experience
• Willing to get into the trenches with corporate teams, supporting on anything from product, design or development strategy (and knowing who to ask in the organization to fill in for these skills)

Qualifications

Required Skills / Experiences

• 5+ years experience consulting with client teams, ideally with some experience in innovation consulting specifically
• 7+ years of product design or product management experience, giving you expertise in a hypothesis-driven approach to product or service development
• Experience in a venture studio context is a plus
• Experience consulting corporate partners and others on how to design, build, launch and run a venture studio is a plus
• Ability to quickly understand a specific domain and identify the trends and opportunities in that space
• Experience applying Design Thinking and Lean Startup methodologies to products and services
• Travel when necessary

Desired Skills / Experiences

• Experience launching and building new businesses
• Experience in a high-pressure startup environment
• Proficient ability to do any of the following when required: market research, qualitative (user) research, quantitative research, foresight strategy, ideation, product management
• Technical or design skills are considered a plus

This is a great fit for candidates who:

• Love working on intellectually demanding global mandates that require both strategy & execution Is comfortable with a lot of entrepreneurial ambiguity & working fast with limited resources
• Value equity upside in a portfolio of venture backed startups

This isn't a good fit for candidates who:

• Want to manage teams over doing the work
• Only want to work remote (we aim for 2 days/week in the office)
• Won't travel to see corporate executives & founders in person where possible