Ventures Associate

About Plug and Play
Plug and Play is a global innovation platform that connects startups, corporations, and
investors to create meaningful partnerships and accelerate technology adoption. Our mission is
making innovation accessible anywhere and building the world's leading innovation platform.

About the role
Plug and Play is hiring a highly structured, analytically rigorous, and entrepreneurial
operator to support startup sourcing, market intelligence, problem decomposition, and
innovation strategy in industrial technology domains. This role is designed for someone who
can take ambiguous corporate problem statements, break them into clear operational and
economic components, map relevant market solutions, and build decision frameworks that
help rank solutions for customer relevance, pilot readiness, and strategy.
The ideal candidate combines consulting-style problem solving, product thinking, market
research discipline, and strong communication skills. The person should be comfortable
moving between corporate stakeholder discovery, startup evaluation, market landscaping,
and recommendation development.

What This Person Will Own

• Translate broad corporate needs into structured problem statements by breaking
  workflows into jobs-to-be-done, bottlenecks, constraints, adoption friction, and value
  pools.
• Conduct customer and stakeholder discovery through interviews with enterprise
  operators, business leaders, and startup teams; synthesize findings into crisp insights
  and opportunity hypotheses.
• Develop evaluation frameworks to assess startups across technical maturity,
  deployment complexity, ROI potential, strategic fit, defensibility, and scale potential.
• Produce high-quality deliverables including startup briefs, market landscapes, executive
  summaries, recommendation memos, and workshop materials..
• Create scoring models and ranking methodologies that support startup shortlisting,
  customer recommendations, and internal prioritization.
• Coordinate across startups, corporate partners, and internal Plug and Play teams to
  keep multiple workstreams moving with clear ownership and timelines.

Core Capabilities

Structured Problem Solving

• Ability to synthesize ambiguous corporate challenges into structured analytical
  frameworks.
• Comfort using first-principles thinking to separate root causes from symptoms.
• Ability to turn messy qualitative information into usable taxonomies, models, and
  decision criteria.
  

Analytical & Strategic Skills

• Ability to scan and synthesize information from funding databases, startup materials,
  industry reports, CRM systems, and operator interviews.
• Experience building market maps, competitive landscapes, technology taxonomies, and
  emerging trend analyses.
• Strong judgment on how to convert market signals into actionable recommendations for
  enterprise customers.

Solution Evaluation

• Ability to evaluate companies across technical, commercial, and strategic dimensions.
• Comfort assessing technical differentiation, product readiness, integration burden,
  customer traction, deployment risks, and potential pilot outcomes.
• Experience using scoring methodologies or evaluation rubrics to compare startups in a
  repeatable and defensible way.

Product and Execution Orientation

• Familiarity with corporate innovation, experimentation, pilot design, and iterative
  learning.
• Ability to manage cross-functional workstreams across external and internal
  stakeholders.
• Strong organizational skills with the ability to handle multiple parallel projects in fast-
  moving environments.
  

Technical and Data Fluency

• Working understanding of data platforms, APIs, dashboards, and how enterprise data
  moves through systems.
• Strong Excel or Google Sheets skills ; comfort with structured data analysis and
  business case modeling.
• Ability to learn new technical concepts and major industry developments specifically
  related to AI & robotics quickly and explain them clearly to non-technical audiences.

Communication and Stakeholder Management

• Strong written communication for executive updates, startup proles, market briefs, and
  recommendation memos. 
• Comfort presenting findings to enterprise stakeholders and facilitating discussions
  between startup teams and corporate operators.
  

Preferred Background

• An engineering degree (Industrial, Mechanical, Electrical, Systems, Computer Science,
  or related field) is preferred but not required; candidates with strong analytical,
  operational, consulting experience and the ability to quickly understand technical
  concepts are encouraged to apply.
• 1 – 3 years of experience in management consulting, corporate innovation, startup
  operations, product strategy, venture capital, or a related analytical role.
• Exposure to industrial technology, supply chain, robotics, manufacturing, automation,
  enterprise software, or adjacent sectors.
• Demonstrated interest in startups, enterprise innovation, and venture investing.
• Experience working in ambiguous, high-ownership environments.
• Familiarity with AI-enabled research tools and workflow automation is a plus.

* Attendance policy: 4 days at the at the Bentonville office. We're relentless about execution. In-person collaboration fuels our teams.