Venture Lead – Roote

This is a unique opportunity to validate and develop social impact initiatives at Roote Projects, a nonprofit startup studio which catalyzes systems-level change across important areas like responsible tech, Web3, effective governance, and culture.

I. What is Roote?

Roote is an educational hub and for-public startup studio accelerating the personal and collective transformation necessary for humanity’s transition to the Wisdom Age.

1. Our educational hub runs the Roote Fellowship, a podcast, and a newsletter.
2. Our startup studio launches Roote Projects, ambitious projects which catalyze systems-level change for a wiser world. For example: Tweetscape and Web3 & Society.

II. Role Overview

This is a unique opportunity to validate and develop world-changing ventures at Roote.

This role embodies what the core team at a startup studio does:

1. Dream up potentially world-changing ventures
2. Do rapid R&D, MVP building, and validation to determine whether those ventures have enough potential to justify considerable further investment
3. Work independently or with a dedicated founder and/or venture creation team to develop and grow promising ventures

This position is extremely entrepreneurial, both in terms of working on early-stage ventures, and also shaping how Roote’s Startup Studio will validate and develop projects. If you’re interested in leading something new, uncertain, and exciting, please apply!

What You’ll Do

Find, validate, and scale ideas.

• Voraciously consume information about how things work, what people think, and what’s coming next across many industries and areas.
  • Keep tabs on the activities of organizations that are co-creating the Wisdom Age.
  • Conduct deep dives into specific areas of interest. Learn what would be necessary to make progress in a given space by researching that field and speaking with potential collaborators, funders, experts, and stakeholders.
  • You should be quick at 80-20’ing the idea maze to find high leverage interventions.
• Validate Roote Project concepts by testing demand from relevant audiences like funders and customers, and gauging venture feasibility by doing R&D and quickly building MVPs.
  • Create landing pages, run digital marketing campaigns, and conduct other pre-product validation measures to quickly validate applicable concepts.
  • Implement initial versions of ventures for validation purposes through a variety of interventions: code or no-code to build MVPs, running experiments and studies on MTurk, testing media content, or attempting to build community around a movement.
• Launch and scale Roote Projects by securing the human and financial capital necessary to scale the projects.
  • Identify and hire excellent folks to build these ventures.
  • Work with the founding Roote team to raise funds by applying to grants, networking with crypto whales, or raising venture funding.
  • Collaborate with the founding team to build the product and pursue growth marketing strategies to increase impact, visibility, and demand.

After 1 year, success looks like: we have gone from a list of 10–100 Roote concepts to 1–5 validated ventures, for which we’ve hired 1–5 dedicated founders and raised $1 million+ (in donations or venture capital) to take those projects forward.

After 3 years, success looks like: you’re leading a large Venture Studio. We’ve built a 10+ person team dedicated to validating and launching ventures—the team is financially sustainable from donations and income from successful Roote Projects, and has a repeatable process for launching impactful new ventures.

You May Be a Fit if You

• Have a strong bias toward concrete action. You should often ask: “Why can’t this be done sooner?”
• Have a strong bias towards ambition. You should often ask: “Is this the most ambitious plan we could come up with?”
• Have created apps, startups, or communities from scratch. (Or just want to do so!)
• Work iteratively and are comfortable with lean startup and design thinking.
• Have an appetite for learning new things, talking with new people, expanding your network, and working on many different projects.
• Thrive in uncertainty. You enjoy creating certainty from uncertainty.

Even if not all of these apply to you, we’d still love to consider your application, particularly if you’d like to learn more of these. Studies show that you can be considered for a role even if many of a job posting’s listed qualifications don’t apply to you. We evaluate all applications holistically.

Why You Might Be Excited About Us

• You get to be weird and creative. This is not a traditional VC firm, tech company, online school, or academic research hub.
• You want to work with us. Here is our team. And here are our How to Work With Me Manuals.
• We have a great network. You want to work with global leaders and ambitious frontier people.
• You are aligned with Roote’s guiding mission and values.
• We have an extremely flexible leave policy and provide benefits including full health, dental, and vision coverage.

To learn more about Roote, check out our website, which includes our report on Building The Wisdom Age and our illustrated piece on Marriage Counseling With Capitalism.

III. Logistics

Type: Full-time.

Time Expectation: Start as soon as possible.

Location: We are a hybrid org based in the SF Bay Area. If you’re here, we work in the office together a few days a week. If you’re not here, we have quarterly offsites.

Compensation: $70,000/year + upside if ventures spin out as various entities such as for-profits and DAOs. We expect to increase the salary as we grow.

(The listed salary is based on US rates. We adjust salaries to reflect regional costs of living.)