General Application

boisei labs - Venture Studio

Location: State College, PA (most of our roles are State College-based; hybrid, remote, and relocation are considered depending on the role)

DON'T SEE THE RIGHT ROLE?

We are always glad to hear from talented people who care about "tech for good." If none of our current openings is quite the right fit, this is the place to introduce yourself.

boisei labs is a venture studio, so the mix of skills we need shifts as ventures move through ideation, development, launch, and growth. The areas we come back to most often include software engineering and product development, design and user experience, venture and business development, go-to-market and commercialization, research and market analysis, and operations.

Tell us what you are exceptional at and the kind of problems you want to be working on. If there is a fit now, we will be in touch. If the fit is better suited to a venture that has not reached the right stage yet, we will keep your details on hand and reach out when it does.

HOW TO APPLY

Send a resume along with a short note covering what you would want to contribute to a tech for good venture studio, and whether you are in or open to relocating to the State College, PA area.

WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO WORK FOR BOISEI LABS?

boisei labs is a venture studio, meaning that we serially create for-profit companies. At any given time, our active ventures are spread across various stages of the ideation, development, launch, and growth phases. While we primarily develop software and applications, sometimes we pair technology that we develop with manufactured products to unlock major novel use cases.

Our defining scope is "tech for good" - particularly social good and green tech. We target spaces in which customers strongly benefit outright from our tech, with major environmental and/or societal benefits typically embedded as automatic byproducts rather than being the products or value propositions themselves. We are one of only a few venture studios worldwide with a tech for good focus, and we are a registered Pennsylvania Benefit Corporation.

Employees of boisei labs develop expertise across many different business sectors at a given time, with a steady cadence of new and exciting projects. Our working environment is dynamic, and all employees participate in creative processes and are empowered to help our ventures be impactful.

OUR ADVANTAGES

• Capital in hand. We do not need to raise early-stage funding for our venture companies, and we have no outside investors who may otherwise expect timely returns. This permits us to focus solely on execution and affords us flexibility in how ambitious our projects are and how expansively we pursue them.
• Shared incentive models. We have a distinct vision for, and collective deep experience with, shared incentive models for the customer-contributors of the tech products we build.
• Penn State adjacency. We are the only venture studio with physical adjacency to Penn State University. We are not dependent on Penn State in any way, but we see major win-win benefits in a strong relationship with such a research powerhouse. We are developing an IP licensing pipeline with Penn State's Office of Technology Transfer and the University's faculty and student inventors.
• Location. State College is a lovely small city highly regarded for its livability, with a healthy and expanding startup culture and multiple highly-active incubators. boisei labs aims to contribute to this ecosystem, including via an event space in an eventual new downtown State College office that we will make available to tech for good startups and organizations. We also benefit from connections in nearby Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and New York City.



CAREER ADVANCEMENT

For employees who thrive in our culture and consistently make strong contributions across our ventures, we have two internal paths: we aggressively increase pay to maintain strong (well above market) salary compensation, alongside increasing autonomy in how to continue contributing to our fast-moving, challenging, and impact-motivated work; or a skill-matched employee could opt to matriculate into a full-time executive role in one of boisei labs' fledgling venture companies - with compensation then partly based on equity incentives in that company. The venture executive would likely continue on with that company if and when boisei labs' majority equity position is sold.

Though we aim to make working for boisei labs as attractive and fulfilling as possible, we recognize that specific career aspirations and other factors may sometimes lead employees to consider different opportunities. We support this reality. We encourage ongoing discussions regarding career goals, and we pledge to facilitate connections in those directions and to serve as positive references for strong-performing employees.

OUR VERSION OF "STARTUP MENTALITY"

As a venture studio, boisei labs is effectively a startup of startups. There are certain, otherwise relatively common, aspects of startup culture that we strongly reject - specifically those that promote toxicity, demand overwork leading to burnout, and sacrifice ethics and quality for speed and growth.

There are three main aspects of startup culture that we do like: flexibility and willingness among all employees to dynamically contribute across a wide spectrum of venture building needs (compounded at boisei since we work on multiple venture companies simultaneously); proactive ambitiousness from each employee in terms of what they complete individually; and all of us working in sync so that our collective whole is greater than the sum of its parts, leading to rapid inward and customer-facing launch cycles.

We expect each boisei employee to exhibit a strong hunger for rapid, agile ideation, research, design, and development - as a natural state of being, not something requiring pushing, reminders, or micromanaged timeline tracking.

We want boisei labs to be a healthy environment for intrinsically strong-performing employees who are treated well and strongly rewarded for their excellence with above-market compensation and other incentives. And we want our approach to be sustainable, given that we aim to achieve a steady cadence of ambitious, high-impact tech releases, and for this cadence to continue for many years.