Venture Studio Analyst Opportunity
Welcome
Thank you for agreeing to explore working with me as a Venture Studio Analyst.
I am building a Venture Studio focused on identifying problems worth solving and turning promising ideas into ventures, products, services and other value-producing assets. The studio provides a space to research, test, build and learn quickly.
The experience
What this experience is for
This experience is designed to give you practical exposure to how ventures move from an early idea to something that can be tested in the real world. It will also give you the opportunity to explore how AI can support venture research, analysis and decision-making.
What is the Venture Studio?
A central place for developing and assessing ventures
Rather than starting with the assumption that every idea should become a business, we ask questions that make better decisions before committing significant time or money.
- Is there a genuine problem worth solving?
- Who experiences the problem?
- How significant is it?
- What alternatives already exist?
- What could we create that provides meaningful value?
- Who would pay for it?
- What evidence do we have?
- What assumptions are we making?
- What is the smallest useful experiment we could run?
- Should we build, test, maintain, hold or stop?
The aim
Make better decisions before committing significant time or money. We replace assumptions with evidence, and noise with clarity.
The role
The Venture Studio Analyst Role
Your role will be to help turn ideas, information and evidence into clearer decisions. You may work across several areas.
Venture Research
Investigating markets, sectors, trends, customer groups and emerging opportunities. This could include identifying market needs, changes in customer behaviour, new technologies, emerging business models, gaps in existing products or services, and potential partners or customers.
Opportunity Analysis
Taking an idea and assessing whether it represents a credible venture opportunity. The purpose is not simply to prove that an idea is good. Sometimes the most useful analysis will tell us that an idea should not be pursued.
Problem → Customer → Existing alternatives → Proposed solution → Value → Market → Business model → Evidence → Risks → Next experiment
Venture Validation
We want to replace assumptions with evidence. You may help design small tests that answer questions such as: "Will people actually want this?", "Will somebody pay for it?", "Can we reach the customer?", "Can this become financially sustainable?", and "What would have to be true for this venture to work?"
Tests might involve customer interviews, competitor research, landing pages, surveys, prototype testing or small pilots.
Competitive and Market Intelligence
Investigate organisations working on similar problems. Rather than simply producing competitor lists, we want to understand what they offer, who they serve, how they make money, how they position themselves, what customers appear to value, and where gaps may exist.
Value Analysis
A major part of the studio's work is understanding value. For each venture we want to answer: Who are we creating value for? What value are we creating? Why does that value matter? How can we demonstrate it? How should we communicate it? How might we capture some of that value commercially?
AI as part of the role
AI in the Venture Studio
AI will be an important part of how the Venture Studio operates. I am particularly interested in exploring how AI can act as part of the studio's operating system rather than simply being used to write documents.
Areas you may experiment with
A question to explore
“What should an AI-enabled Venture Studio Analyst be able to do?”
We will also explore creating reusable AI skills and workflows that allow the Venture Studio to become smarter as it completes more work.
Current portfolio
Current Venture Portfolio
The studio currently contains ventures at different stages of development. You may work across several ventures rather than being assigned permanently to one, allowing you to compare different markets, business models and stages of development.
FIIT Learning
An AI-supported learning environment for young people who struggle to access conventional education, including learners experiencing severe absence, EBSA and SEND.
Black Girl Maxxing
A personal growth platform designed specifically for Black women, supporting intentional personal development across different areas of life.
28 Days Her
A structured 28-day personal development experience that can be offered through organisations, communities, accelerators and programmes.
Soca Bingo
An entertainment and events concept combining Caribbean culture, music, community and live experiences.
One Link Up
A social coordination concept designed to make it easier for friendship groups and communities to organise shared plans and experiences.
What you could produce
Work that becomes a reusable asset
Rather than completing work simply for the sake of completing tasks, I would like your work to create assets that the Venture Studio can continue to use. Where appropriate, these could also become examples of work that demonstrate the experience and skills you have developed.
What you gain
What I Hope You Gain
By the end of the experience, I would like you to have developed practical experience across a range of skills. Most importantly, I want you to develop the ability to move from:
How we will work
Practical, exploratory, curious
This will be practical and exploratory. You will be encouraged to ask questions, challenge assumptions and suggest better approaches. I don't expect you to know everything. I do expect curiosity, evidence-based thinking and a willingness to experiment.
There will also be opportunities for us to develop new methods, frameworks and AI tools as we learn what works. The goal is not just output, but a repeatable way of discovering opportunities and deciding where to invest our time.
Our first meeting
What we'll cover
During our first working session, we will discuss the following. Before we meet, have a think about the three questions at the end.
- 1Your interests and career goals
- 2Your existing skills and experience
- 3Your experience using AI
- 4Areas you would like to develop
- 5The Venture Studio and current portfolio
- 6What you could take ownership of
- 7What a successful experience would look like
- 8Your first Venture Studio Analyst assignment
Before we meet
Three questions to think about
- Which part of venture building are you most interested in learning about?
- How have you used AI so far in your studies, research or work?
- If you could build an AI tool to make a venture analyst better at their job, what would you want it to do?
There are no right answers. They will give us a useful starting point for designing the experience around both the needs of the Venture Studio and the skills you want to develop.
Where this could lead
In time, our own fund
There is a longer-term possibility worth naming now: the studio does not have to stop at building ventures. If we can show that our way of finding and testing opportunities produces better decisions, the natural next step is to invest behind those decisions — creating our own fund.
This is an ambition rather than a commitment. It is deliberately treated the same way as every other idea in the studio: as something to be evidenced, not assumed.
What it means for you
Analyst work is how a fund thesis gets written. The research, scorecards and validation you produce are the same artefacts an investment committee would rely on — so you would be learning to think like an investor, not just an analyst.
Prove the method
First we show that the studio can repeatedly find, test and judge opportunities. A track record of decisions — including the ideas we chose not to pursue — is the foundation any fund would be built on.
Build an investable pipeline
The Venture Opportunity Briefs, scorecards and experiment reports you produce become deal flow. Over time that becomes a documented pipeline of ventures ready for capital rather than a list of ideas.
Design the investment thesis
A fund needs a clear view of what it backs and why: sectors, stage, cheque size, the kind of founder and the kind of value we believe is underpriced. We would draft and stress-test that thesis together.
Raise and deploy patient capital
In time, that could mean a small studio fund, a syndicate or a co-investment vehicle that backs our own ventures and others we have researched — with the same evidence-first discipline we use internally.
The bigger idea
More than ventures
The Venture Studio itself is also an experiment. We are not only building ventures. We are developing a repeatable way of discovering opportunities, assessing them, creating value, testing ideas and deciding where to invest our time.
Your role gives you the opportunity to contribute to building that system while learning how venture decisions are made in practice.