Senior Venture Builder at Niajiri Platform

Supporting Founders-in-Residence

• You lead the cohort-based studio process in terms of content, design sprints, training and business mentoring, all geared to increasing portfolio company success rates.
•  Facilitate the company’s venture studio cycles: founder selection, food systems analysis, problem validation, prototype design sprints, market testing, and investment preparation.
• Translate the company’s playbook (2-year venture-building framework) into on-the-ground execution rooted in Tanzania’s context, adapting tools and ensuring discipline.
•  Run weekly founder stand-ups, KPI tracking rituals, investment readiness check-ins, and reviews to ensure every build action is traceable, accountable, and tied to a milestone.

– Hold founders accountable to their timelines and learning loops — with honesty, intensity and care — to ensure key deliverables are met, which includes travel for on-site visits.

• Build venture support rails: tools, templates, investor packs, pitch coaching systems, lean testing frameworks.
• Interface between the company’s (Uganda, The Netherlands) and Agriedo Hub’s Tanzanian execution environment, ensuring alignment and momentum.
• Document and surface insights from the field to shape Tanzania-specific strategy, uncover gaps and recommend pivots proactively.
• Immersion with startup teams to stress-test ideas, drive traction, and build momentum.

Originating & Building In-House Ventures

• When no founder exists yet but the opportunity is high-potential, the Venture Builder begins the build anyway.
• Scouting systemic gaps in the food system to generate a venture thesis internally.
• Creating Internal Venture Briefs: opportunity, model hypothesis, and early validation plan.
• Prototyping, customer validation, testing early feasibility, and stakeholder alignment — just like a pre-founder MVP cycle.
• Running venture design sprints and piloting to reach (a clear pathway to) product-market fit, and until external co-founders and operators are onboarded.
• Business diagnostics. You will be expected to support the development of tools necessary for business diagnostics to identify, predict and manage business needs.
• Assist in all things necessary to make the company in Tanzania a success and an attractive studio for potential founders. We are a small entrepreneurial team that steps up when there is work to be done. At times, you’ll be expected to work outside of just your role to contribute to our team’s overall efforts.

Ideal Profile

• Built one or more companies successfully from scratch OR played a senior execution role in early-stage startups.
• Natural founder energy, fast, structured, not afraid to push.
• Strong ability to go from idea → customer → model → pipeline quickly.
• Hunger to join a startup engine rather than another business development facilitation program.
• Comfort engaging with farmers, informal value chains *and* investors in the same week.
• Clear previous alignment, curiosity about regenerative food systems, and/or willingness to go deep and align fully with the purpose of the company.

Venture Builder Acumen

•  Ability to understand how a business operates and becomes profitable.
• Ability to proactively anticipate, navigate and leverage trends impacting a business.
• Ability to manage and facilitate the venture-building process.
• Experienced in building a business from scratch, you are a solid sparring partner for founders and able to provide hands-on advice.
• You love to work in and make strategic decisions in a fast-paced and dynamic start-up environment – from discovery to conception, and from launch to achieving product-market fit.
•  You are able to quickly diagnose entrepreneurs’ needs, understand the key drivers in their business and the key challenges they face.
• You have demonstrated experience in coaching and matching entrepreneurs’ needs to experts.
•  You are comfortable in leading the early stages of the venture building process (the first 12-18 months) — ideally, with a human-centred design or lean startup approach:
• Problem validation and discovery
• Ideation and prototyping
• Developing a minimum viable product
• Onboarding first paying users/customers
• Developing a business model (canvas), pitch and business plan
• Early start-up team definition
• Launching the business formally and setting up operations
• Defining a clear pathway towards break-even

Strategic do-er

• The ability to think and execute, generating and applying unique business insights to create a competitive advantage, towards achieving a set of strategic goals.
• Ability to see the bigger picture and break any challenge down into smaller steps and execute on them.
• Creative problem solving
• You have developed and managed a project from scratch. Experience with programme planning, resource and stakeholder management.

Building relationships

• Ability to quickly build rapport and engagement with people.
• Comfortable and confident to engage with people of all calibre, from CEO’s to young professionals. You are an extroverted people person and love working with, coaching and getting to know people. You are outstanding at the following traits:
• Empathetic, active listener, curious and inquisitive
• Negotiation, influencing and conflict resolution skills
• Good oral and written communication