Manager Of New Ventures (Incubations)

Planet 9 Studio is looking for an analytical and passionate Manager of New Ventures (Incubations) to join us in our West Village office in Manhattan to be a part of our startup studio’s core team and help us bring our vision to life: to trailblaze the path for neurodiverse children, teens & young adults (“young humans”) to become the best that they can (& want) to be and enjoy the thriving life journeys they deserve.

About Planet 9 Studio

We created Planet 9 to reimagine the path of neurodiverse, young-humans to unleash their potential, achieve their goals in life, and enjoy the thriving & fulfilling life journeys that they deserve. Planet 9’s differentiated strategy and approach are uniquely set to create innovative solutions at a scale that is orders-of-magnitude larger than anything seen before, and to deliver an industry-&-life-changing impact on the lives of neurodiverse young-humans and the entire ecosystem surrounding them.

We will do so by leveraging the sizable funding round we’ve recently secured to build companies that harvest the power of technology & AI to deliver innovative solutions (products, services, tools & more) to neurodiverse young humans, their families, and other key influencers in their lives across a variety of life-dimensions, including health, social wellness, education & employment.

Why a Startup-Studio?

The reason we created a startup studio and not just one startup company is two fold. The first is simple - the consumer pain points in the categories we’re tackling are vast and unfathomable but the solutions to address them are few and far between. We have a treasure-trove of strategies & ideas to solve these vast industry gaps that will most effectively come to life by building multiple companies, not just one.

The second reason we chose to build a startup studio is to avoid the very high failure rate (+90%) of young startups. As a startup studio, we can reduce these high failure rates. We act in essence like a womb by providing for all the essential needs of the “unborn” seed-ideas; nurturing them from day one to a successful launch & post launch growth support. We are mastering the startup-creation process and scaling it. We have a strong bench of in-house experienced entrepreneurs and hands-on “all-star” teams to support our startups. Our investors are “built-in” investors that provide frictionless access to funding.

About the Role

This role provides a unique opportunity to be part of a team that brings to life disruptive new ideas & builds new startups from the ground up. The Manager of New Ventures will be directly involved in founding innovative new businesses that will have an undeniable impact on the lives of neurodiverse humans. This role would help us identify, ideate and validate game changing ideas & opportunities by taking them through our opportunity funnel all the way from idea stage to launch.

What you will do

• Help drive the team’s effort to continuously develop our agile Planet 9 Platform to efficiently and scalably support the creation, launch and growth phases of new startups via a relevant set of key frameworks, know-how, best practices, codified learnings & tools.
• Conduct market, consumer and competitive research with an eye towards the “so what” - identifying, testing & validating innovative ideas for new solutions (product, services) via primary and secondary sources (e.g. desktop research, customer/expert interviews, surveys, etc.).
• Work closely with your cross-functional “opportunity squad” (engineer, designer, GM & others) to build concept prototypes, conduct user testing and other market tests to validate viability.
• Track industry & consumer trends, dynamics and opportunities and synthesize into actionable insights.
• Build compelling financial models & business plans for new startup launches.
• Contribute to the studio’s idea pipeline working closely with the studio’s GM and other team members.
• Develop a strong understanding of our customer base and market landscape, understand user needs and use this knowledge as the basis for all your work.
• Synthesize data into insights and go/no-go recommendations for moving opportunities forward through the idea funnel.

About you

• You always keep your customer at the top of mind - whether it is an end consumer, another market stakeholder, or internal and external partners.
• No task is too small for you to take on with excitement: you are willing to roll up sleeves and get into the weeds if that is needed to get stuff done.
• You are a fast learner, have a track record of being self-taught and gaining relevant, practical expertise fast.
• You thrive in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment, and like to juggle many priorities at the same time.
• You have an agile mindset, and you like to learn via testing and iteration to maximize efficient outcomes.
• You are an effective communicator with both executive leaders and junior team members, and you can present new insights with confidence.
• You are highly analytical: able to collect and analyze large sets of data. You are able to extrapolate and pave your way to insightful recommendations and “so what's” even when data is missing or far from perfect.
• You can go deep and be detail oriented, without losing the big-picture and ability to deliver key insights.
• You have an innate drive and need to learn new things, and have done so in the past.

You should have

• Experience conducting primary and secondary consumer research - writing interview guides, moderating interviews with customers and experts, running quantitative surveys, etc.
• 3+ years of experience at a top management consulting firm, private equity, or VC with a focus on evaluating disruptive/growth consumer businesses.
• Experience building detailed “new-business” financial models and business plans, sensitivity models, and leveraging inputs such as CAC, CPA, LTV, unit economics, retention, pricing and costs.

OPEN TO REMOTELY BASED EMPLOYEES.

Occasional travel to New York City.