Venture Head of Business & Growth

Job Description:

Our Business Operations & Growth teams are world-class business leaders, corporate strategists, with strong experience partnering with product teams. They carry the tall order of defining the field of opportunity and scope of our ventures and must wear many hats to develop the marketing, pricing, and operational structures needed to commercialize new products and businesses. As project leaders, they manage ventures from beginning to end, and may even transition to running these new businesses in the market.

In this role you will:

Innovation

• Work collaboratively with a cross-functional team of senior professionals to build and launch new ventures, products and services on behalf of clients, adhering to strict deadlines and integrating all perspectives into a strong product brief. This includes working closely with our product, engineering, and design teams
• Analyze start-up deal flow to understand imminent disruptions and identify tech acceleration opportunities
• Establish key performance indicators for venture outcomes while also defining the business model and case for new ventures, products and services
• Define the business model options and case for new ventures, products and services
• Develop the economic model and business plan for new ventures, products and services
• Test and validate assumptions while creating a sensitivity analysis for key drivers
• Assess internal capabilities and capacities to develop a sourcing strategy
• Quantify business value and funding models
• Define the commercial launch and go-to-market strategy
• Create the framing report (an overview and explanation of the project scope, objective and hypothesis) for new initiatives
• Collaborate with our Product Development leads, as well as our corporate partners, to define a minimum viable business build (or product/service)

Incubation

• Plan and deliver new ventures, products and services
• Mobilize new venture models by defining the target state, commercial partnership construct and success criteria
• Adopt a lean start-up approach to building a minimum viable business and go-to-market strategy
• Outline key team roles and responsibilities across work streams
• Identify required partners for regulatory requirements or support needs
• Define the investment business case and outline key performance, measurement and reporting frameworks
• Explore and define commercial partnership options with the corporate partner considering alternative fee arrangements as appropriate

Commercialization

• Facilitate the build and testing of operational processes, systems and reporting capabilities
• Implement an early feedback loop to enable continuous feedback, learning and iteration for ventures, products and services
• Monitor and report key business and customer success measures to clients, including regulatory reporting, celebrating successes and balancing opportunities for improvement
• Review service-level outcomes across support partners, ensuring accountability and providing feedback for change where required
• Mobilize follow-on release plans with consideration to both the run and change aspects of the venture, balancing value creation with quality of product and service
• Foster an environment of innovation and customer centricity, institutionalizing agile innovation practices and a customer insight to action culture

Business Development and IP Creation

• Contribute to business development ahead of, as well as throughout, client engagements, including contract negotiations
• Create intellectual property, points of view and industry/ topic platforms
• Contribute to the development of thought leadership across a range of emerging business, technology and design topics

You should have:

• 6-10+ years of experience with strategy development, business planning and future visioning, as well as quantitative and economic/financial modeling (preferred)
• Design or product development expertise or exposure
• Background in product prototyping and testing
• Master’s degree (postgraduate, MBA) or equivalent experience preferred
• Experience in a high-pressure start-up environment with exposure to multidisciplinary teams and/or involvement with a top-tier consulting firm

What You’ll Get

• At Up.Labs you will get competitive compensation (base + equity) and great benefits (unlimited PTO, medical, dental, vision, 401K). You’ll also have the chance to connect with our network of professionals spanning across our portfolio of companies and the greater UP ecosystem
• As a venture team hire helping create our companies from the very early days, you will get early-stage equity in a portfolio of companies that are backed by leading corporate investors and our Venture Capital partners
• We will compensate you very well, invest deeply in your development, and do everything we can to make sure this is a job you love and want to keep!

UP.Labs Summary:

We build high-growth technology startups that enable faster, cleaner, and safer movement of people and goods. Our vision is to transform the moving world by pairing leading corporations and entrepreneurs with a proven methodology for launching and scaling software and hardware companies.

Our platform is unique in three ways:

1. Risk: We reward our entire team and ecosystem of partners with meaningful equity
2. Technology: We build and launch scalable technology products that form the basis for each venture
3. Industry Focus: We stay focused on the underlying fabric of society mobility and transportation

We work with corporate investors over a multi-year period to launch a portfolio of mobility-focused ventures. Our team is dedicated to the first year of a new venture’s life cycle: from ideation to minimum viable product build (and beyond) to recruiting and hiring the full-time team who will scale the business. We rapidly ideate concepts from scratch and vet them for early indicators of product-market fit.

Our team: 

We are a group of entrepreneurs, investors, engineers, designers, who live, eat and breathe mobility. We have all launched early-stage companies and been part of their growth and scale. Our office is located in an airplane hangar at the Santa Monica Airport in Los Angeles, where we ideate, prototype, and take an occasional flight (or flying lesson).

Opportunity Spaces:

While we focus on mobility holistically, there are several opportunity spaces that we believe will have a particularly transformative impact on our world. Below are some of the spaces that excite us the most.

• Sustainability
• Smart Cities
• Urban Air Mobility
• Supply Chain Management
• Automotive Software

Location: Los Angeles