We are recruiting for a Venture Builder to join Nesta’s Mission Studio

Want to join our Founders as a co-founder in residence?

🚀 Mission Studio is creating the future of mission-driven tech startups. We're tackling the UK's toughest social challenges - from net zero to obesity - by building commercially successful businesses. We have a great team of ex-founders, venture designers, builders and experienced studio operators and are looking for an exceptional venture builder to come build ventures with us.

As a Venture Builder, you will work shoulder-to-shoulder with our founders as a hands-on co-builder—not as an advisor or consultant, but as someone who rolls up their sleeves to build, test, and launch ventures alongside them. You'll turn ideas into MVPs with first customers, leveraging your own repeatable 0-1 experience.

You will build scalable, high-impact businesses, from concept to validation and early stage growth. You will have the start-up know how, scrappiness and technical skills to systematically transform and scale ideas into thriving businesses.These are essential to the role and to complementing our team’s existing abilities.

🌟 Who You Are:

Essential skills

• Lean venture building experience: You have proven experience and deep understanding of Lean Startup and lean venture building methodologies, with a strong belief in hypothesis-driven design and experimentation, rapid MVP testing, sprint structures and data-informed decision-making.

• Repeatable 0-1 venture building experience: You've built multiple ventures from 0-1 as either a venture builder or EiR (not as a consultant or advisor) via a repeatable process, ideally in a venture studio / incubator style environment. You have hands-on operational experience launching startups—writing code, acquiring customers, building teams, shipping products. You’ve demonstrated a track record of launching and scaling startups or products and continually implementing lessons learnt along the way. You've held direct accountability for outcomes, not guided others from the sidelines.

• Founder backing and studio stakeholder alignment: Experienced balancing founder autonomy with the accountability structures that keep studio ventures on track. Adept at building trust with founders and acting as a credible thought partner throughout the venture-building process, while managing competing priorities and maintaining alignment across internal studio stakeholders.  

• Growth: Experienced in driving business growth and customer acquisition, ideally through experience in a combination of the following:

  • Performance marketing: Running ads on Google, Meta, etc., optimising campaigns and modeling attribution

  • B2B marketing: testing B2B demand via lead generation 

  • Experimentation and growth hacking: e.g. A/B testing, rapid experimentation frameworks, virality tactics, lifecycle marketing, etc.

  • Data & analytics: Tracking and analysis of data on user behaviour and experiments to understand user journeys and retention

• Hands-on experimentation and prototyping experience: Proven ability to rapidly build and test MVPs, run acquisition experiments, and iterate across product and growth, comfortable getting into the weeds across code, no-code, and marketing tooling to move fast with scrappy experiments

Core competencies

• Comfortable with ambiguity: You thrive in grey areas, look at ambiguity as an opportunity, and possess plenty of entrepreneurial grit which manifests via initiative in identifying problems and implementing solutions.

• Agile & adaptable: Familiarity with rapid experimentation, A/B testing, and data-driven decision-making. You are able to iterate and pivot quickly, based on real-world learnings and customer actions.

• Clear communicator: You have exceptional communication and interpersonal skills, and are able to work closely with founders, designers, and engineers to bring concepts to life and reconcile conflicting views.

• Mission-driven: You're not just looking for a job; you're on a mission to make a difference, to challenge the status quo and to innovate for social good.

This role is NOT for:

• Startup advisors, mentors, or consultants who coach founders

• Accelerator managers or innovation lab facilitators

• Strategy consultants without hands-on building experience

• People who've worked "with" startups but haven't been founding builders themselves

🛠 What You'll Do:

• You will be able to hit the ground running, working across multiple concepts and with multiple founders at once to co-lead the testing, validation and building of venture concepts as scrappily and speedily as possible

• Partner with the founders who join for the 6 month Build process working together to get the business to a strong ‘spinout’ position and ready for scale. 

• Be a building partner and sparring partner for founders—challenging assumptions through action and experimentation, not just strategy discussions. You'll implement alongside them, sharing lessons from your own 0-1 journey.

• Lead product development, implementing the founder’s strategy whilst advising on best practices. 

• Embrace the start-up spirit, iterating fast and learning faster, all while keeping our mission at the heart of everything you design.

• This is your canvas. Paint big. Be the builder behind our next-gen startups, producing solutions that are not just viable, but vital.

👩‍💻 What we offer:

• Location: At least 2 days a week at our Thames-side, Blackfriars office in London with the freedom to work remotely on other days.

• Time Commitment: Ideally full-time but open to discussing part-time options

• Compensation: Competitive day rate commensurate with experience

  • Rate: £5,400–£6,250 per month (outside IR35)

• Start Date and role duration: 8 months, start ASAP

• Who You'll Report To: Christiana Rosales

Apply now and let's build something extraordinary together.

Making an application

To apply for this role, please submit your application before 11pm on 15th March.

We will be conducting interviews on a rolling basis and looking to onboard someone asap, so please don't wait until the deadline to apply!

About Nesta

We are Nesta, the UK’s innovation agency for social good. We design, test and scale solutions to society’s biggest problems. Our three missions are to give every child a fair start, help people live healthy lives, and create a sustainable future where the economy works for both people and the planet.

For over 20 years, we have worked to support, encourage and inspire innovation. We work in three roles: as an innovation partner working with frontline organisations to design and test new solutions, as a venture builder supporting new and early stage businesses, and as a system shaper creating the conditions for innovation.

Harnessing the rigour of science and the creativity of design, we work relentlessly to change millions of lives for the better. Find out more at nesta.org.uk.

At Nesta, we believe that a diverse workforce leads to an organisation that is more innovative, more creative and gets better results.

We want our workforce to represent the diversity of the people and communities we serve. We also want our workplace to be one where different experiences, expertise and perspectives are valued, and where everyone is encouraged to grow and develop.

This means that when we are recruiting, we actively seek to reach a diverse pool of candidates. It also means that we are happy to consider any reasonable adjustments that potential employees may need to in order to be successful.

We recognise the importance of a good balance between work and home life, so we do everything we can to accommodate flexible working, including working from home, compressed or part-time hours, job shares and other arrangements.

Please just let us know in your application or at any stage throughout the process (and beyond) if these are options you’d like to explore.