Design & Product Lead

About Simple Ventures

We founded Simple Ventures (SV) with the mission of building great Canadian companies. Our thesis is simple: Canada is overlooked and under-appreciated. Most companies around the world ignore Canada because of perceived market size, regulation, language, and powerful oligopolies. As a result, Canadians miss out.

But we know better. Canada is a top 10 global economy with many of the same consumer and business pain points as other markets. This creates an opportunity to bring the best product ideas to Canada - to see what’s working around the world and be first to execute for Canadians.

We’re funded and supported by Canada’s top leaders including the founders and leaders of Wealthsimple, Shopify, Ada, MindBeacon, TD and many more. We are expanding our leadership team and looking for a leader that is excited to contribute to our mission!

Our Approach

We are experts in sourcing, vetting and launching new companies. Once we have conviction in a specific concept, we find the best fit CEO for the company and partner with them to accelerate and scale the venture. 

For CEOs, we significantly de-risk the prospect of starting a company. In particular, we help by: (a) vetting the idea, (b) funding the concept, (c) unlocking a distribution advantage, and (d) bringing an extensive support network of advisors for design, engineering, product, marketing, business development, and growth.

For LPs, we seek to drive returns on every investment. By de-risking product-market fit and focusing on capital efficiency, we can drive attractive returns at significantly lower exit valuations vs. traditional venture capital. Our approach is industry agnostic. Instead we focus on (a) market validation, (b) capital efficiency, (c) attractive unit economics, and (d) moats around the Canadian market.

The Opportunity

We’re looking for our founding team members to partner with us to source, vet and launch 10 new ventures in our first fund.

- Sourcing: we explore hundreds of ideas and identify the top concepts to test & launch. 

- Vetting: After identifying concepts that we believe have potential, we deep dive into the global players / industries to understand their operating model, unit economics, etc. Most of our ideas are killed in this stage.

- Launch: Once we have conviction in a given concept, we bring professional branding, product development, financing and back office support to launch each business.

By building multiple companies, we have efficiencies and preferred partners that drive winning outcomes.

To catalyze our ventures, we partner with our strategic LPs, harnessing their domain expertise and networks to unlock new ideas + distribution advantages for our start-ups. The companies that we explore are industry agnostic though all have signs of product market fit from other regions.

About You

You are energized by being an early team member of Simple Ventures. You’re intellectually curious and love working across industries, products and teams. You get vitamins from tinkering and shipping new products that customers love.

Our team is composed of generalists that are all passionate about bringing new ventures to market. The objective of this role is to relentlessly enable venture building from 0 to 1. Specifically, you’ll be focused on:

- Validation - testing new concepts in the market with landing pages

- Test & Launch - designing minimum viable brands and launching V1 of the product.

You’re a full stack engineer and have a spike in one or more of: UI/UX, Design and Front End Dev.

You have an entrepreneurial mindset and pride yourself on being an achiever with a relentless desire to win. You have a low ego and enjoy building things yourself and/or partnering with external contractors to get the job done.

Prior start-up experience is a huge asset.

Benefits & Perks:

- Compensation - As an early member of the team, receive equity in SimpleVentures and carry in the fund. 

- Recharge - Work hard, play hard with 4 weeks vacation and a week off over the holidays.

- Benefits - health& dental benefits including a HSA.

- Learning - Accelerate your career by learning from some of Canada’s most successful founder-operators.