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

🚀 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, and experienced studio operators and are looking for an exceptional venture builder with hands-on entrepreneurial experience to add to our team. 

As a Venture Builder you will partner with founders to build scalable, high-impact businesses, from idea to validation and early stage growth. You will have the hustle, commercial acumen, and technical skills to transform and scale ideas into thriving businesses. This recruitment round we are specifically looking for a venture builder with an entrepreneurial background and growth skills. These are essential to the role and to complementing our team’s existing abilities.

🌟 Who You Are:

Essential skills

• Entrepreneurial experience: You have worked 4+ years directly at or with early-stage startups (e.g. founder, product manager, or venture studio designer/builder) and delivered strategies to progress from 0 to 1, demonstrated by a track record of launching and scaling startups or products and continually implementing lessons learnt along the way. Experience working alongside founders in a mentor style role is a plus.

• Product development: You understand product at your core, with deep experience in product management, defining roadmaps, prioritizing features for early-stage ventures and user feedback / UX testing. Specific experience with AI products would be preferred.

• 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

• Technical skills: Proficiency in tools to support support building and testing MVPs (e.g., Python, JavaScript, no-code/low-code tools) and to support marketing and user acquisition (e.g. HubSpot, Customer.io, Braze, Google analytics / Mixpanel) 

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. 

• 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.

🛠 What You'll Do:

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

• Take ownership of our later stage Venture Design work: leading the validation and build process from concept to MVP, ensuring solutions are user-centric, scalable, impactful, and commercially viable.

• 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 sparring partner for founders and senior leadership team, to help them challenge the status-quo and design long-term strategies, with the goal of maximizing impact and commercial potential.

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

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

• Be a core member of our initial team, helping build and shape the studio and our approach to venture building overall.

• 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.

• Perks: Competitive salary, circa £65,000 depending on experience, and a benefits package that cares for you beyond the office. The benefits include private medical insurance, dental insurance, the ability to buy and sell annual leave, eyecare vouchers and more.

• Start Date: ASAP

• Who You'll Report To: Director, Mission Studio.

• Apply now and let's build something extraordinary together.

Making an application 

To apply for this role, please submit your application before 19:00 on Wednesday May 14th.

First round interviews will take place week commencing May 19th.

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.