Venture VP (Product Innovation Lead)

The Venture VP is one of the most challenging and exciting roles within the Entangled Group, and will be critical for both the validation and early success of our incubated ventures. Reporting to the Entangled Group COO, you will be primarily responsible for accelerating the development of new ventures as a key employee of our .Ventures Division. While working closely with our CEO and president, you will serve as a pre-seed founder and product manager applying our venture validation process to 2 to 4 business theses at a time.

The ideal candidate should be able to operate gracefully under pressure to accomplish challenging goals, and should be comfortable hitting the ground running with proven business and product instincts, exceptional writing, sales, storytelling and qualitative research capabilities to eventually pitch promising ventures to our internal Investment Committee. You will also be on the lookout for reasons a venture won’t work in its current form, and will rapidly iterate on necessary changes to enable success.

To succeed in this role, you’ll need to be in the top 5% of professionals for learning velocity, endurance and hard work. Additionally, you’ll combine an aggressive sense of urgency and “Get Stuff Done” mindset with a natural curiosity and active listening skills. Plus, you’ll possess enough social and emotional intelligence to get along well on a diverse team. Finally, you’ll be highly numerate, analytical and oriented towards metrics.

This role will be a well-compensated (both founder equity and cash) ideal training ground for anyone who want to be a founder in education technology and who is motivated by setting and accomplishing audacious goals with considerable autonomy. The successful VP can expect to eventually transition to a leadership role at one of the ventures they themselves validated, providing you with the opportunity to take ownership of a product you’re passionate about.

Responsibilities

• Implement the Entangled Venture Validation Process, which includes:
  • Engaging with Entangled Group’s professional services businesses to garner venture insights
  • Articulating the target customers, users, and the problem(s) the venture is solving
  • Performing competitive landscape analyses and other forms of market research
  • Cold-calling potential customers, conducting customer discovery interviews, and performing user research
  • Establishing product vision and roadmaps with engineers
  • Creating simple MVP websites
  • Contributing to business model design
  • Creating persuasive sales and fundraising pitch decks
  • Ultimately, establishing strong rationale for why a venture is (or is not) viable
• Set up sales meetings and close sales with early customers
• Write basic contracts
• Run ad campaigns to test hypotheses
• Recruit early team members, including full-time CEOs

Requirements

• 5-12 years experience in product management, marketing, and engineering-related roles
• Ideally, part of your experience comes from early-stage tech product companies
• Experience as a presenter and slide deck builder, with the ability to gain buy-in through effective communication
• Experience with qualitative research, interviewing, financial modeling, and market analysis
• Tech savvy, fluent in web-based tools such as Jira, CRMs, databases, with the ability to tinker with new tech and make the most of it
• Strong analytical skills, oriented towards metrics

Benefits

• Competitive compensation commensurate with experience
• Founders equity in validated ventures
• Generous health/dental/vision benefits (100% for employees)
• Unlimited paid time off
• 401K plan
• Work from home 2-3 days per week if desired
• Continuing education reimbursement
• Gym membership

About Entangled Group

Both the economy and the labor market have transitioned from industrially-based to knowledge-based, but education and training have not kept pace. The Entangled Group is on a mission to guide the education ecosystem to better serve the rapidly changing needs of our society and economy. Through professional services firms, venture incubation, investing, and start-up services, we aggressively pursue new, scaled learning solutions that support all learners to acquire and signal the skills and capabilities that they need to flourish. This effort requires an ecosystem approach, leveraging the abilities and expertise of entrepreneurs, universities, foundations, companies and government.

Our venture approach is unlike traditional venture capital, professional services firms or accelerators. We operate as a company builder, where vetted ideas get activated. We develop insights based on our professional services activities, assemble teams to rapidly prototype concepts and test them in the market through trusted relationships, generating feedback early and often. We then continue to provide ongoing support and capital through multiple stages of growth.

We also run professional services firms that support the education ecosystem to navigate these turbulent times.

Our professional service firms include:

1. Entangled.solutions - Strategy consulting
2. Entangled.velocity - Marketing and sales infrastructure and support
3. Entangled.labs - MVP development
4. Entangled.studios - Non-profit organization creation as a service for foundations

Exits & Current Ventures:

1. Practice - sold to INST in Nov 2017
2. ReUp - Re-enrolling college stopouts and support services through graduation
3. PathStream - Technology, curriculum and services for learning platform-centric skills
4. Embark - Coworking spaces managed on university campuses