Commercial Venture Founder

Do you want to build a startup in partnership with one of the region's largest and most influential companies? A startup that is substantially de-risked and well funded from Day One? A startup that achieves greatly accelerated growth by unlocking the huge potential of our corporate partners’ scale-strengths and assets? A startup with rapidly increasing enterprise value from which you directly benefit?

We are excited to have a highly promising venture emerging from our Venture Studio and ready to be taken to the next level. This is in partnership with a top MNC as a digital platform build. The role will suit someone who is energised by the chance to change hearts & minds whilst being deeply respectful of tradition and culture across the SEA and APAC region.

The industry sits in Grief Tech, otherwise known as Memorial Tech, Deathcare, Death Tech or Digital Memories. The important thing isn't the title of the industry, but the potential this space has for truly shaping the way we honour and remember our loved ones. This is a route to help people going through the hardest of times better navigate the loss of a loved one through a SaaS, digital solution.

If you have experience of working with large corporates and being a founder of your own startup, a passion for creating new ventures and can lead & inspire a fast-growing and fast-scaling venture team, this could be for you...

**About Rainmaking APAC Venture Studio**:
We are a Venture Build Studio with more than a decade's experience of working with some of the world’s largest and most influential companies. We’ve built and launched over 60 ventures and worked with 80 of the Fortune 500.

We combine the best of entrepreneurial capability and corporate assets to build high-impact and fast-scaling new ventures in APAC. Together with market-leading corporate partners and entrepreneurial founding teams, we build, launch and scale impactful new ventures.

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**Who are we looking for?**:
You will join the venture at seed investment stage, following the validation work undertaken by our Venture Studio team. You will benefit from our Venture Studio team's support and infrastructure, and will leverage the relevant assets of our corporate partners as the venture rapidly grows.

You will have full responsibility for the direction, strategy, performance, team & company culture of this new entity, leading from the front to create outsized impact and to accelerate commercial success.

**Key Things**:

- You'll be interested in disrupting a laggard space, doing so thoughtfully and with sensitivity
- You'll bring awareness of new technology concepts (including interest in AI enabled experiences) carefully coupling enthusiasm with realism around how these are effectively applied
- You'll believe that there is potential for new technology-enabled experiences to create tangible real world impact, and have spent time getting clued up around this with an ability to bring others on this journey
- You'll be a true visionary, able to believe in something that does not yet exist and sell the concept to others in a tasteful, thoughtful way
- You'll bring a deep cultural understanding of the market in Asia, ideally across Singapore, Philippines, South Korea and/or Japan

**What will you do?**:

- Execute on the roadmap for the MVP development and launch of the venture in market through commercial channels
- Build, grow and evolve the venture's value proposition and business model
- Gain commercial traction from the first few customers and prove preliminary market fit with a deep focus on partnership creation
- Guide the new organisation in the right direction based on customer development, market feedback and strategic imperatives
- Build the new organisation from the ground up, ensuring strong ties with the corporate partners’ strategic objectives
- Proactively develop and sell the concept to relevant stakeholders, co-invested parties, partners and customers
- Define and help to hire the wider founding team
- Define and establish the culture and positioning of the new venture
- Oversee the financial and operating performance of the business

**Requirements**:
**Commercial Founder profiles for our ventures typically have**:

- Deep industry knowledge and domain insights in a number of high-value sectors - if you've been part of a journey digitalising a more traditional industry, this would be advantageous
- Demonstrated experience building new corporate ventures / founding startups, with experience of both success and failure as an entrepreneur
- Experience leading startups from early stage to scale with expertise in raising significant funding rounds
- Practical understanding and experience of lean startup methodology, business model innovation, customer development, lean experiment design, rapid prototyping, venture structuring, governance and appraisal
- A strong appreciation of the need to embrace risk in order to achieve the breakthroughs that solve the biggest challenge