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.