Founder Community Lead

About the role

We're hiring a Founder Community Lead to build and run the top of our founder funnel. You'll make sure that every new venture we start has strong prospective founders already engaged before it needs one.

Founders Factory builds companies with corporate partners. Next year, we're aiming for 25 approved ventures in the next 12 months, and each venture needs a founder who pitches at the investment committee alongside our venture design team.

You'll own our Founder Bench: a small, high-quality community of pre-vetted founders, matched to the sectors and founder profiles our ventures need. You'll fill it through sourcing and partnerships, and keep it active through four events a quarter. You'll sit in the talent team to help matching founders to ventures.

What you'll do:

Pipeline building:

• Build a steady flow of experienced founders, operators and domain experts in our partners' focus areas.

• Run first conversations, write short founder notes, and tag each person by founder archetype, sector, stage and availability.

• Share our standard founder deal with each person when they join the bench, so terms are clear before anyone commits time.

• Build referral routes with our portfolio founders, investors, operator communities and university spinout offices.

Events:

1. Sector founder drinks: 12–15 founders and operators around a theme from our partner's focus areas.

2. Weekly Open studio office hours: a look at the problems we're working on, so prospective founders can see what building with us is like.

3. Partner event: co-hosted with a feeder programme with a select group of universities

4. Bench gathering: for founders already on the bench, to keep them engaged between ventures with managing a Slack or Whatsapp community or newsletters

Engagement:

• Keep the founder data accurate, with every founder's archetype, sector, availability and last contact up to date in our tracker.

• Keep founders engaged with regular updates, intros and early sight of new themes, so they're ready when a venture starts.

• Give the talent team a ready longlist of 5–8 founders for each new venture within its first two weeks.

• Report monthly on bench size, quality, diversity and how bench founders move through to trials and selection.

Who you are:

• 3+ years in founder-facing work: VC platform or scouting, an accelerator or founder programme, startup community building, or founding a company yourself.

• A network among founders and operators that you can open up quickly, and the instinct to grow it.

• Good judgement on founders: you can tell a strong operator from a good storyteller in a first conversation, and explain why in writing.

• A track record of running events that lead somewhere, from 15-person dinners to larger community nights, with clear follow-up.

• The ability to sell an unusual offer: building a venture we've designed with a corporate partner, rather than your own idea.

• Disciplined pipeline habits, keeping a CRM or tracker accurate across hundreds of relationships.

• A real commitment to building diverse founder pipelines, and experience doing it.

Nice to have

• Knowledge of, or a network in, healthcare, deep tech or B2B sectors.

• Experience working with corporate partners or in corporate venturing.

• Familiarity with Airtable or similar tools.