Associate Director, Center for Entrepreneurship

About the role

The Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University seeks a dynamic and innovative Associate Director within the Center for Entrepreneurship. This position is crucial in fostering a vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem for Vanderbilt founders. The ideal candidate will have operational and strategic experience inside startups.

The Owen Graduate School of Management (OGSM) is a professional school at Vanderbilt University, located in Nashville, Tennessee, focused on graduate-level business education. OGSM’s mission is to create opportunities for its faculty, staff, and students to discover, grow, and thrive in business and beyond. OGSM recognizes discovery in traditional forms, such as scholarly research, intellectual curiosity, and curricular learning, as well as the art of becoming through connections, meaningful work, and creating something new.

Responsibilities

• Engage and Support Vanderbilt Founders:
  • Use research, marketing, and other techniques to grow demand for services from Vanderbilt founders.
  • Design workflows to efficiently intake founders into the C4E ecosystem, including digital and human intake processes that assess startup status and prescribe C4E resources.
  • Lead C4E workshops and speaker series, including redesigning content, designing new exercises, recruiting speakers, driving attendance, teaching or moderating sessions, and gathering feedback.
  • Provide 1:1 mentoring to startup founders as appropriate.
• Grow the Alumni Mentor Program:
  • Build processes to attract, categorize, and onboard Alumni mentors within the Center’s CRM tool.
  • Prepare founders for mentorship and create mechanisms to match them with mentors.
  • Build systems to gather feedback from both mentors and founders to improve the matching program and achieve a net promoter score of 70.
• Drive the Vanderbilt Venture Scout Program:
  • Coordinate with alumni advisors and student leaders to enhance marketing, intake, and investment memo development capabilities to support 20 founders annually, with 50% receiving funding.
  • Work with student leaders to develop more sophisticated processes for marketing, interview, selection, onboarding, training, and evaluation of Venture Scout students.
• Execute Grant Competitions:
  • Strategize and execute marketing to drive 120+ student-led startup applications annually for the Firestarter, Chancellor’s Launch Grants, and Summer Enterprise Development Grant competitions.
  • Refine selection criteria, feedback mechanisms, and evaluation processes to select the most deserving Vanderbilt startups as winners.
  • Oversee programmatic aspects for grant competition winners, including coordination of payments, access to in-kind products and services, matching with mentors, access to special lectures and events, and progress check-ins.
• Other duties as assigned.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree required.
• Minimum of 3-5 years of experience inside venture-backed startups or portfolio operations of a venture capital fund.
• Demonstrated history of taking initiative and working autonomously to solve problems with a proven ability to deliver against organizational key performance indicators.
• Strong interpersonal, communication, and organizational skills.
• Knowledge of the startup landscape and resources available for entrepreneurs.
• Familiarity with the Vanderbilt University environment and culture.
• Relationships with noteworthy entrepreneurial figures and/or entities who can provide meaningful resources to Vanderbilt founders.
• Passion for entrepreneurship and supporting student innovation.

Supervisory Relationships

This position does not currently have supervisory responsibility; it reports administratively and functionally to the Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship.