Venture Designer (London)

About Founders Factory

Founders Factory is a venture studio and accelerator backed by some of the world's leading corporations. We combine capital investment with deep operational expertise to build and scale tech companies from scratch. With a portfolio of over 300 companies and $900M+ in follow-on funding, we offer a unique opportunity to shape the future of tech and entrepreneurship - working at the intersection of corporate innovation and startup building.

About the Role

Venture Design at Founders Factory is how we create new venture concepts on demand, not by chance. Working closely with our corporate partners, you'll take high-level investment themes and turn them into validated, venture-backable concepts through a structured three-month sprint.

This is the earliest and most exploratory stage of our venture building process. You'll dig into markets, uncover gaps, conceptualise solutions, and pressure-test them with real users - all before a founder is ever hired. The concepts you validate and present to our Investment Committee become the ventures we go on to build. It's high-impact, high-autonomy work that directly shapes our portfolio.

What You'll Do

You'll own the end-to-end venture design sprint, working across research, strategy, prototyping, and validation. Specifically, you will:

• Take investment themes developed with our corporate partners and break them down into explorable problem spaces and opportunity areas.

• Conduct deep market research to understand where sectors are heading, identify structural gaps, and map the competitive landscape.

• Generate multiple potential venture concepts from each theme, applying human-centred design principles to conceptualise solutions that address real user needs.

• Design and run rapid experiments — including A/B testing, prototype testing, and user interviews — to validate or kill concepts quickly.

• Synthesise research and testing into clear, evidence-backed recommendations, narrowing from many ideas to a shortlist of the strongest concepts.

• Present validated concepts to the Investment Committee (comprising decision-makers from our corporate backers and the Founders Factory CEO), making a compelling case for which ventures to greenlight.

• Collaborate across the studio — working with other Venture Designers, Venture Builders, investors, and functional specialists — to sharpen your thinking and leverage collective expertise.

• Stay close to emerging technologies, tools, and market shifts so you're always bringing fresh thinking to each sprint.

What We're Looking For

• Proven experience in 0→1 concept development, venture design, or similar roles where you've taken ideas from fuzzy opportunity spaces through to validated propositions — ideally across multiple industries or verticals.

• Strong strategic thinking combined with a bias for action. You can zoom out to see the big picture and zoom in to run a scrappy experiment in the same afternoon.

• Deep comfort with market research and competitive analysis. You know how to find signal in noise and develop a point of view on where a market is going.

• Experience designing and running rapid experiments (A/B tests, landing page tests, concierge MVPs, user interviews) to validate assumptions with real users.

• Excellent communication and storytelling skills. You'll need to present complex findings and recommendations clearly to senior stakeholders with diverse backgrounds.

• A curious, creative mind that also brings discipline — you generate lots of ideas but know how to prioritise ruthlessly based on evidence.

• Comfort with ambiguity and pace. The sprint format means things move fast and the brief is often wide open. That excites you, not intimidates you.

Nice to Have

• Fluency in German language

• Background in innovation or a venture studio/builder environment.

• Experience working with or alongside corporate partners and navigating stakeholder dynamics.

• Familiarity with rapid prototyping tools (Figma, no-code/low-code platforms) to bring concepts to life quickly.

• Understanding of business model design and unit economics at the concept stage.

• Experience across multiple sectors (fintech, healthtech, sustainability, consumer, etc.).

What We Offer

• The chance to shape ventures from the very beginning — the concepts you validate become real companies.

• A collaborative, high-energy studio environment surrounded by builders, investors, and operators.

• Exposure to a diverse range of industries and corporate partners.

• Desk space in our London office with a fully-serviced workspace.

• Support across marketing, legal, finance, fundraising, growth, and recruitment.

• Competitive salary and benefits package.