Venture Building Is a Capability, Not a Corporate Department.

Most companies treat venture building as a corporate department. It is a new capability, and it needs to be built differently from everything else they run.

You can learn a lot about how a company sees venture building from a single job advert.

I read one recently. A large, well-run industrial group was hiring a head of business development and go-to-market for its new innovation division. The ambition was real: new ventures in the energy transition, in digitizing industrial operations, in decarbonization. The board was involved. The money was there.

And yet, reading it line by line, I could see the venture arm being set up the way the company sets up everything else. As one more business unit, run by one more senior hire, measured by the same yardsticks as the rest.

This is the most common mistake I've seen and experienced repeatedly. Companies don't underestimate the opportunity. They underestimate what it takes to build something new.

What the advert gives away

To be fair, the advert got a lot right. It asked for someone to define venture theses, set validation milestones, and design governance and funding stages. Those are the right instincts. But three things told me the company was building a department, not a capability.

1. One person, every job. The role was to scout startups, generate venture ideas, incubate them, design the go-to-market, set prices, guide the sales teams, benchmark industry costs, build business cases, and work with the board on capital. That is not one job. It is the work of a whole team, and some of it, such as scouting startups to invest in and building ventures from scratch, needs very different skills.
2. Targets from the old world. The role would drive commercial plans "to achieve growth and revenue targets", and give direction to sales leaders. That is the language of a business unit with a product to sell. A venture in its first year has no product yet and it may not have one for awhile. What it needs is evidence: proof that a problem is real and that customers will pay to have it solved.
3. Seniority as the answer. Fifteen-plus years, an engineering degree, an MBA preferred. All useful. But the ad optimizes for experience in the industry as it is, when the job is to find what the industry will become. The best venture builders I have worked with were chosen for how fast they learn, not how long they have been learning.

None of this is a criticism of the people who wrote it. They wrote the advert the way their company has always hired, because that is what the company is built to do.

Everything in your company is built for today

Here is the principle underneath. Every part of an established company is designed to serve the business it already has. The processes, the governance, the incentives, the motivations, right down to job levels and reporting lines. They exist because they are the best way to run a known business well.

A discovery capability has a different job. It is not there to run a known business. It is there to find new growth, in areas next to the core or far from it. Its work is research, iteration and experiments. Most of what it tries should fail quickly and cheaply, and that is the system working, not breaking.

Put those two side by side and the gap becomes obvious.

When a company builds its venture arm using the left-hand column, it hasn't built a venture arm. It has built a small, under-funded business unit with no product.

What it really takes

Because the mandate is different, three things have to be designed differently from day one.

Hire a team, not a hero

No single person can scout, build, sell and govern at once. A discovery team needs a mix: someone who can find and frame problems, someone who can build a first version quickly, someone who can sell before the product exists, and a leader who can hold the board's trust while the answers are still uncertain.

Look for people who have lived through rapid iteration: founders, early employees of startups, builders from other studios. Hire for the speed at which they learn and let go, as much as for what they already know. And bring in the industry experts as partners on specific ventures, rather than asking them to lead discovery alone.

Incentivize discovery, not delivery

If the team is rewarded for revenue targets, it will chase the safest ideas and defend the ones it should drop. Reward the team for the quality and speed of its evidence: problems validated, experiments run, decisions made. Treat a well-evidenced "stop" as a result, not a failure. And when a venture does work, give the people who built it a real share in the upside, whether through equity, a carried interest or a meaningful bonus, so they behave like owners.

Job levels need the same thought. A venture lead may be several grades below the business-unit heads they need help from. If the title decides who gets heard, the venture loses every argument.

Govern by stages, not by the rulebook

The core business's governance exists to prevent mistakes. Discovery needs governance that keeps mistakes small. That means funding in stages, each released when the evidence arrives. It means a small committee, with outside venture experience, that can decide in days. And it means a pre-agreed path through procurement, hiring and legal, so the team isn't waiting months to buy software or sign a pilot.

This is not the absence of control. In my years, I learned that most rules exist for good reasons. The point is to agree in advance which rules apply in full, which can be met faster, and which simply weren't written for this kind of work.

How the team should operate

Getting the hiring, incentives and governance right is only half the job. The other half is how the team runs day to day. A discovery team should sit apart from the company's machinery, by design. It should be close enough to use the company's assets, and far enough away not to be slowed by its processes.

One champion with real authority

The team needs a single senior sponsor, usually the CEO or a board member, who has the authority to excuse it from company policies that weren't written for its work. Not a steering committee. Not a sponsor in each function. One person who can say, "This team doesn't need to go through that," and make it stick.

Without that champion, every exemption has to be negotiated separately, function by function, and the team spends its first year asking for permission instead of discovering. And you know what is the result of that: missed opportunities, disappointed stakeholders and loss of capital.

Insulated from the slow parts

Most of what slows a venture is not a bad decision. It is a good process applied to the wrong kind of work. Here is what the team should be protected from, and what it needs instead.

The controls that protect the company still apply: data protection, safety, anti-bribery, and financial reporting. Insulation is never a licence to break the rules that matter. It is permission to skip the steps that don't.

Set up to discover quickly

Insulation only clears the way. The team also needs the means to move:

• The tools to build and test on its own: software, data access, and budget for small experiments without approval each time.
• The right people, chosen for this work, not borrowed part-time from business units with a day job.
• The right incentives, tied to evidence and decisions, with a real share in what succeeds.
• The right KPIs: problems validated, experiments run, decisions taken, and time from idea to first customer test.

If you can't build a full studio yet

Many companies aren't ready for a separate studio, and choose to keep the team in-house. That can work, but only if you are explicit about one thing: exactly what the team is insulated from.

Write it down. Name the champion. List each process the team may skip or fast-track, the limits that apply, and the controls it must still follow. Agree it with finance, HR, legal and procurement before the team starts, not when the first request lands on someone's desk.

An in-house team without that list is a business unit with a new name. Within months, it will move at the speed of the company around it.

How I would rewrite the advert

If I were writing that advert again, I would keep the ambition and change five things.

1. Hire the first member of a team, not the whole team. Name the role as the leader of a small discovery team, and say the company will fund two or three more builders around them.
2. Replace revenue targets with evidence targets. For the first year: problems validated with real customers, experiments run, and ventures taken through each stage, or stopped with good reason.
3. Ask for proof of building, not just experience. Ventures they have started, tested or closed, and what they learned. Fewer years in the industry, more years making new things.
4. Describe the protection on offer. A named champion at CEO or board level, a staged budget, and a written list of the processes the team is excused from. The best candidates will ask about this first.
5. Show the upside. A share in the value of what they build. Without it, you attract people who want a senior job, not people who want to build a business.

A new capability, not a new department

The instinct to build the venture arm like everything else is natural. It is how the company has succeeded. But a business built for today cannot discover tomorrow's using today's rules.

The companies that get this right accept something uncomfortable: that the venture team will look, feel and work differently from the rest of the organization, on purpose. They hire for learning, reward evidence, and govern by stages. And they protect that difference long enough for it to produce results.

The question I'd like to leave you with: if you read your own venture team's job descriptions today, would they describe a business unit, or a discovery capability?

Best,

Hardy.