Head of Venture Success & Strategic Partnerships

ABOUT THE STUDIO The Studio is an AI-native venture builder for the Global South, purpose-built to transform high-barrier problems into scalable, investable companies. Partnering with domain experts & high-agency founders from concept to Series A, it both builds new ventures and re-engineers existing ones for AI-driven growth. Powered by UTOPIA OS — a modular, adaptive stack tailored to each venture — it compresses the path from concept to Series A to under 24 months. ABOUT THE ROLE We're looking for a Head of Venture Success & Strategic Partnerships to make sure every founder and venture working with Utopia has an exceptional experience and makes real, measurable progress. You’ll be the operational bridge between our Entrepreneurs-in-Residence (EIRs), portfolio companies, and the Studio team — ensuring founders get what they need to build faster and smarter. You’ll work closely with the Studio Directors, Founder’s Associate, Marketing, Product, Design, and Talent teams to operationalize modular programs, track outcomes, and ensure every venture moves from insight to proof of value efficiently. You’ll mentor and guide the Founder’s Associate to ensure venture operations and founder support are aligned with portfolio outcomes. That makes the leadership relationship explicit You’ll also lead how Utopia connects with its broader ecosystem — translating partnerships, market access, and capital relationships into tangible venture outcomes. Reports to: Studio Directors Growth path: Chief Commercial Officer / Chief Revenue Officer RESPONSIBILITIES FOUNDER ENABLEMENT & VENTURE SUCCESS - Partner with the Studio Directors to deliver the end-to-end journey for EIRs - from Fellowship onboarding and POD matching through to spin-out. - Build and maintain a strong founder pipeline across the GCC, Africa, and Southeast Asia — through partnerships, scouting programs, and regional events that attract and engage high-agency talent. - Operate the support modules that help founders accelerate (go-to-market, capital readiness, technical integration, pilot design). - Ensure every founder has a clear success plan with milestones, progress tracking, and measurable outcomes. - Run workshops, sprints, and mentoring sessions that translate our playbooks into real venture traction. - Design and refine founder capability-building programs — from entrepreneurial readiness to go-to-market execution — ensuring consistent, scalable founder development across cohorts. - Capture and translate founder feedback into improvements in program design, venture playbooks, and Utopia OS workflows. PORTFOLIO SUPPORT & GROWTH - Work with leadership to ensure ventures hit key KPIs — concepts developed, proofs-of-concept launched, spin-outs secured. - Monitor venture performance and proactively identify risks or bottlenecks — coordinating with product, design, and capital teams to course-correct early. - Coordinate with our technical and design teams so ventures actually leverage Utopia OS effectively. - Help ventures refine their business models, pilot strategies, and go-to-market plans - Connect founders with strategic partners, customers, and investors across the GCC, Africa, and Southeast Asia. - Facilitate and track venture introductions — ensuring they lead to real outcomes such as pilots, commercial contracts, or funding opportunities. - Collaborate with leadership to convert promising pilots into scalable partnerships and spin-out success stories. ECOSYSTEM & PARTNERSHIP MANAGEMENT - Identify, formalize, and manage strategic partnerships with corporates, universities, government programs, and investor networks that can accelerate venture validation, pilot design, and market access. - Track and report how we deliver value across Middle East and non-Middle East ventures, surfacing learnings and partnership opportunities to Studio leadership. - Coordinate between the Studio and our funds (A-typical Ventures and The Radical Fund) to ensure founders get aligned capital and support. - Keep things aligned with Qatar Development Bank's strategic priorities and ecosystem goals. - Represent The Studio at regional innovation forums, conferences, and ecosystem events to showcase venture outcomes and strengthen Utopia’s regional presence. OPERATIONS & REPORTING - Build and maintain a live, AI-enhanced venture dashboard tracking founder progress, POD milestones, and portfolio KPIs in real time. - Integrate automated data flows between Utopia OS, venture pods, and Studio systems to generate live insights on traction, risk, and capital readiness. - Use AI models to surface venture health signals, predict timeline slippage, and identify where intervention or support is most needed. - Create narrative and data-driven reports — venture success stories, quarterly updates, and board materials — that combine human context with AI-generated insight summaries. - Partner with the ops and platform teams to embed predictive analytics and natural language reporting into Studio and Fund dashboards — ensuring leadership has continuous visibility into performance across ventures. - Champion a data culture where every founder interaction, milestone, and learning is captured, structured, and made actionable through the Utopia OS system. EXPERIENCE & SKILLS - 7–10+ years in venture building, startup operations, or portfolio management (ideally in a studio, accelerator, or VC context) - You've designed and delivered founder-facing programs, workshops, or playbooks before - Strong understanding of early-stage company building — from idea validation to pilot to scale - Experience managing cross-functional teams and getting stakeholders aligned around venture outcomes - Excellent at communication and relationship-building with founders, corporates, and government partners - Tech-savvy and data-driven — comfortable with CRM, analytics, and workflow tools - Deep empathy for founders, combined with an operator's mindset and focus on execution - Familiarity with AI, digital transformation, or innovation ecosystems in the Global South is essential - Deep understanding of emerging market ecosystems — able to build trust and communicate effectively with founders and experts from emerging and frontier markets is essential - Proven ability to work across cultural and regional contexts, balancing empathy with results IMPACT & SUCCESS METRICS - Founders progress predictably from onboarding to proof-of-concept and spin-out - Support modules deliver measurable impact (faster GTM, stronger capital readiness, improved technical adoption) - Founder satisfaction and engagement scores improve quarter-over-quarter - Ecosystem partnerships lead to tangible outcomes (pilots, contracts, or funding) - Portfolio data and insights are consistently captured and used to improve future cohorts - Establish and scale a repeatable founder and partner engagement model across priority markets within the first 6–9 months MINDSET & VALUES - Founder-obsessed: You measure your success by how well founders succeed with your support. - Outcome-oriented: You care about progress toward product-market fit, revenue, and defensible advantages. - Collaborative: You work seamlessly across tech, product, and capital teams with clarity and empathy. - AI-native: You design, operate, and learn with AI as a core collaborator — using it to uncover insights, automate venture operations, and build compounding data advantages from day one. - Builder mentality: You thrive in ambiguity and get energized by building systems from scratch. WHY THIS ROLE EXISTS You'll be the operational heartbeat behind the success of founders and ventures launching from Doha. Your work ensures that every EIR and portfolio company that enters the Utopia platform — whether through our Studio Fellowship or our funds — leaves stronger, faster, and investor-ready. This is a rare chance to play a defining role in Qatar's growing innovation landscape, helping shape an integrated venture platform designed to export AI-native innovation from the Global South to the world. You’ll ensure that Utopia’s founders, ventures, and partners form a cohesive, high-performing ecosystem — one that compounds learning, capital, and talent across markets. WHO THIS ROLE ISN’T RIGHT FOR If you prefer structured corporate environments, steady-state operations, or clear-cut playbooks, this won’t be the right fit. We move fast, build in public, and operate with a high degree of autonomy and ambiguity. If you’d rather manage existing programs than design and improve them, or if coordinating across product, capital, and ecosystem partners feels overwhelming, this role will frustrate you. If you’re uncomfortable engaging directly with founders, solving problems on the fly, or being accountable for measurable venture outcomes, this isn’t your environment. WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT - Meaningful Impact: Your work directly contributes to building the core infrastructure behind a new generation of ventures - enabling equitable, AI-native innovation across the Global South. - Collaborative Culture: We thrive on openness, curiosity, and collective intelligence. Everyone has a voice, and decisions are made transparently. - Growth Mindset: From AI learning and use budgets to mentorship, we invest in your development and help you grow beyond your comfort zone. - Competitive Rewards: Tax-free compensation, private health, travel insurance and flexible hybrid setup. - Work-Life Integration: Office lunches twice a week, great snacks, and team meetups that keep energy and connection high. - Global Exposure: Occasional travel across Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East for meaningful, on-ground collaboration with venture teams. - Inclusive by Design: We celebrate diversity and are committed to building an environment where everyone belongs. THE UTOPIA PLATFORM ADVANTAGE The Studio is part of Utopia Capital’s integrated venture platform designed to solve the biggest friction points in emerging market venture creation. Most founders face a broken journey: they struggle to build with limited resources, chase capital across disconnected investors, and lack the infrastructure to scale across regions. We've built a different system. The Studio co-builds ventures with domain experts using AI-native infrastructure, compressing the path from concept to product. The Radical Fund and A-typical Ventures provide fast, aligned capital from pre-seed through Series A, removing fundraising friction at every stage. And Utopia OS — our shared technical backbone — gives every venture access to the same tools, data systems, and regional networks that would normally take years and millions to build. This means founders can focus on solving real problems while we handle the build infrastructure, capital coordination, and cross-regional expansion. It's a compounding system: each venture we build makes the next one faster, smarter, and more capital-efficient. That's the platform advantage that you will be part of and contribute to, purpose-built for the complexity of the Global South. We believe innovation should be inclusive and globally distributed. Our team is built on openness, curiosity, and collaboration — with people from across the GCC, Africa, and Southeast Asia working together to build meaningful ventures. All roles are based in Doha, Qatar, with flexible hybrid options and global travel opportunities. We welcome talent from every background to join us in shaping the future of AI-native innovation.