Venture Lead

We are recruiting for a Venture Lead 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, builders and experienced studio operators and are looking for an exceptional venture lead with hands-on entrepreneurial experience to add to our team.

As a Venture Lead you will partner with founders to build scalable, high-impact businesses, from concept design and validation to early stage venture growth. You will have the start-up know-how and scrappiness combined with the coaching and leadership skills to work with founders to transform and scale ideas into thriving businesses.

Who You Are:

• Essential skills
• Entrepreneurial experience: You have worked for a minimum of 3+ years directly at or with early-stage startups (e.g. founder, early-stage hire, product manager, or venture studio designer/builder) and have helped progress startups through the messy 0 to 1 stage. You have a track record of launching and scaling startups or products, and continually implementing lessons learnt along the way.
• Design experience: You have experience in identifying and validating business opportunities, and designing business concepts around them - e.g. through customer research, surveying, ideation and market research.
• Product development: You are an expert in early-stage product management, defining roadmaps, prioritising features for early-stage ventures and user feedback / UX testing.
• Lean venture building experience: Building on the above, you have proven experience and deep understanding of Lean Startup and lean venture building methodologies, with a strong belief in hypothesis-driven experimentation, rapid MVP testing, and data-informed decision-making.
• Founder mentorship: Ideally, you have worked alongside founders before in a mentorship / strategic advisor style role, but not essential.

Core competencies

• Leadership through the 0-1 journey: You have hands‑on experience leading early‑stage teams and guiding others through the 0→1 journey. You set direction without ego, challenge assumptions constructively, and act as a trusted “critical friend” to help founders make better decisions.
• 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 and customer actions.
• 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’ll hit the ground running, working with multiple founders at once to lead the design, validation and building of venture concepts as skippily and speedily as possible, over a ~9 month venture build process:

• Early on, you will partner with founders who join pre concept, working together to identify and design a mission‑led business concept, and pitch to progress it into Build.
• During Build, you will share the load with the founder, supporting on product development and testing alongside the founder, whilst advising on best practices and ensuring the business gets to a strong ‘spinout’ position.

Throughout, you will:

• Usher founders through our process - the “how” we build ventures - ensuring they focus on testing riskiest assumptions and holding a high quality standard.
• Be a thought partner to founders. The founders are in the lead, you are there to help them challenge the status‑quo and design long‑term strategies, with the goal of maximizing impact and commercial potential.
• Embrace the start‑up spirit, iterating fast and learning faster, all while keeping our mission at the heart of everything you design.

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.
• Start Date: September 2026.

Who You'll Report To: Christiana Rosales

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.