Rippleworks Foundation brings the practical support entrepreneurs need to scale faster and improve more lives.
Rippleworks leads short-term, high-impact projects where social ventures tackle their top operational challenges by working closely alongside leading startup executives from top Silicon Valley companies (including AirBnB, Netflix, Google). Since launching in 2015, Rippleworks has worked on 110+ projects with social ventures across 59 countries, empowering entrepreneurial teams that are improving the lives of 216+ million people.
Rippleworks also supports ventures with hard-to-find capital required for scale (grants and investments in the $1M-$3M range), and through its Insights program, which provides learning experiences for social ventures to bring them the frameworks, resources, tools they need to grow their business.
In 2020, Fast Company named Rippleworks one of the world’s Most Innovative Companies.
The Role
The Venture Development Associate Director/Director will play a pivotal role in identifying ways to uplevel the business performance of impactful social ventures. You will partner directly with the CEOs of the world’s most impactful social ventures to design highly impactful short-term projects by diagnosing business needs, scoping deliverables, and working with internal team members to identify the right executive-level experts and set the projects up for success.
This is an ideal role for anyone who loves partnering closely with entrepreneurs on their most difficult business challenges. You are a problem solver who can quickly diagnose, validate, and recommend a path forward.
Specifically, you will:
- Partner directly with social ventures to design high-impact projects: Our projects provide timely, game-changing operational support to fast-growing social ventures. You will work directly with CEOs and function-specific leadership to understand top organizational priorities, diagnose the challenges to achieve these priorities, and co-develop a scope of work to tackle these challenges through a Rippleworks project. You will grapple with the team to get to the root of business problems in order to define clear project objectives and connect how that project will help the social venture achieve their growth priorities.
- Be an ongoing resource to set projects up for success: You will serve as an ongoing partner to CEOs and their teams, helping them understand what to expect at every step of a Rippleworks engagement and how to receive maximum value for their business. You will partner closely with your Rippleworks teammates to set the projects up for success, working with our Head of Talent to identify and match the ideal expert for each engagement. You will work with our Venture Growth Managers, who run the projects, making sure they have the information and context they need to effectively take the baton and manage the project to success.
- Constantly improve our projects: You will leverage learnings from our 100+ projects and engage industry-leading experts to find better ways to diagnose business needs and design high-impact projects. You will partner with leading experts in sales, marketing, engineering, data science, product, and people operations to create frameworks and tools for diagnosing business needs and creating roadmaps to execute against.
- Play a role in influencing Rippleworks’ growth. You will identify, analyze, and recommend opportunities to drive impact as we always assess new ways to bring entrepreneur-centric support to social ventures. As a nimble, entrepreneurial organization, each team member is key to shaping our evolution and influencing our overall strategy and impact.
Requirements
About You
- You are driven by a fire to solve problems that matter. You are deeply passionate about social impact and helping improve people’s lives.
- You are an entrepreneur at heart, a self starter who can be successful with little direction under tight deadlines
- You thrive when working collaboratively to tackle difficult, messy challenges
- You have a growth mindset and an innate curiosity. You enjoy working on a diversity of projects, and you would get excited to learn about new sectors, regions, business topics.
- You love working on close-knit, collaborative teams that depend on each other to learn and do our best work
- You are known to pull pranks every once in a while (or all the time)
Specifically, you have the following experience & skills
- 10+ years business experience in an entrepreneurial environment, demonstrating deep operational experience at a fast-growth startup
- A founder/CEO or reported directly to the CEO at an early-stage company
- Track record of volunteering for or working in social impact
- Demonstrated ability to diagnose business needs and collaboratively design solutions
- Strong verbal and written communication skills, including experience interacting with executives
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent
- Authorized to work in the USA
Note: You might not be a fit for this role if your background is primarily in venture capital firms or financial services, unless you’ve built out a team’s capability.
Benefits
What We Offer
- Don’t take a pay cut to do good in the world! We offer a competitive salary and bonus commensurate with experience, with competitive benefits: Medical, dental, vision, life, and short term + long term disability insurance, 401K + employer match, parking & commuter allowance, unlimited PTO, wellness/self-care stipends, Spotify premium accounts, and more
- Be inspired by meaningful work: You will see and feel the tangible impact of your work on a daily basis
- Travel the world: Everyone at Rippleworks has the opportunity for at least one international working trip a year to see our impact in the field. Our Study Abroad program funds personal learning experiences abroad for employees to better understand the different geographies, cultures, and sectors that we support. And we know travel can be tiring! Our No Place Like Home policy encourages employees to take a day off after Rippleworks-related travel to catch up on sleep, do some laundry, or spend some extra time with your family.
- Kickstart your lifelong journey of giving back: Through our Community Grants program, employees have the opportunity to give $50K grants to local community nonprofits doing meaningful work in an area that the employee is passionate about. We also provide $2,500 charitable donation match for financial and volunteer hour contributions
- A culture that values professional & personal growth: We provide an external professional coach for every team member who wants one and a learning budget to put towards professional development. We also hold monthly Lunch & Learns, weekly team lunches, monthly team-building offsites, regular team celebrations (birthdays, milestones, anniversaries, holidays). We also eat a lot of popsicles (find out why!).
- A diverse and inclusive workplace that actively seeks and attracts people from different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives
- A team of friends: We are a highly collaborative team that values local adventures, good jokes, and debating where to go to lunch
IF interested, please apply here.
