Founder Community Lead
Founders Factory is a venture studio, accelerator, and investment platform that builds and funds early-stage startups. It supports founders with capital, operational expertise, corporate partnerships, and access to a global network.
About Founders Factory
Founders Factory partners with entrepreneurs and leading companies to co-found new ventures, accelerate startups, and invest in early-stage businesses. Its activities include venture building, cohort-based accelerator programs, sector-focused investment funds, operational support, and corporate innovation partnerships across fintech, health, industrials, deep tech, and climate. It serves ambitious founders, corporate partners, and early-stage technology startups.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will build and manage a high-quality bench of pre-vetted founders for new ventures. You will source and assess prospective founders, develop partnerships and referral routes, run founder events and office hours, maintain accurate founder data, and provide founder longlists for new ventures. You will keep founders engaged through updates, introductions, and early visibility of new themes, while reporting on pipeline quality and progress.
Requirements
- 3+ years of founder-facing experience in VC platform or scouting, an accelerator or founder programme, startup community building, or company founding.
- A network among founders and operators.
- Ability to assess founders during initial conversations and explain evaluations in writing.
- Experience running events with clear follow-up.
- Ability to communicate the venture-building offer to prospective founders.
- Strong CRM or tracker management across hundreds of relationships.
- Experience building diverse founder pipelines.
Responsibilities
- Build a steady pipeline of experienced founders, operators, and domain experts.
- Run initial conversations, write founder notes, and tag founders by archetype, sector, stage, and availability.
- Share standard founder deal terms with new bench members.
- Build referral routes with portfolio founders, investors, operator communities, and university spinout offices.
- Run sector founder drinks, open-studio office hours, partner events, and bench gatherings.
- Manage founder community communications through Slack, WhatsApp, or newsletters.
- Maintain accurate founder records in the tracker.
- Keep founders engaged through updates, introductions, and early visibility of new themes.
- Provide a longlist of five to eight founders for each new venture within its first two weeks.
- Report monthly on bench size, quality, diversity, trials, and selection outcomes.