Cohort Spotlight: Venture Architecture
Meet the world-class business leaders taking strategy and operations to new heights in bringing new businesses to market
Building innovative ventures with the world’s leading companies takes a wide spectrum of skills, along with a spirit of collaboration and experimentation. At BCG Digital Ventures we cover all bases of venture building, from the initial idea to testing and validation to building the product, finding users, and launching it into the world.
This takes experts from all fields. In this series, we’re introducing you to each of our 8 venture-building cohorts, showcasing their approach, the role they play in building a venture, how they work together, and the skills that are required to succeed as we build businesses with groundbreaking impact. For this edition of the cohort series, we’re looking at Venture Architecture.
At BCG Digital Ventures, we are dedicated to building digital businesses that lead the next wave of innovation; this requires our teams to be very creative and push the envelope for our corporate partners. Our Venture Architects carry the tall order of defining the field of opportunity and scope of our ventures. This cohort is uniquely designed to enhance the way our ventures work, from incubation to ideation and from corporate strategy and going to market. In practice, this means that Venture Architects are responsible for managing the business side of the project as it evolves.
“We are in charge of everything that’s related to the business build,” says Kanika Chandaria, Senior Venture Architect at BCG Digital Ventures in London. “In the early stages of ideation, we’re pressure-testing the viability to understand whether there is actually a potential business behind the concept that we’re thinking about, looking at things like market size and the external landscape, to understand where potential competitors are playing and new startup entrants are popping up.”
While many organizations separate strategy and operations, at BCGDV the VA cohort contributes to both. Jessica Schwartz, Lead Venture Architect at BCGDV in New York says: “We need to know how to define a strategy for a new business and then be able to implement the strategy and stand up a new business as well.” A VA asks big, strategic questions, but will also be involved in seeing through the operations to make it happen. “How do we monetize a business, but then actually go out and help acquire those customers? As a Venture Architect, you really are doing both,” she says.
This often means that the VA is a bit like a “Swiss Army Knife”, Kanika explains, stepping in to help in the areas where the venture requires it. Jessica notes that it’s often once the venture grows past the incubation stage that the VA role becomes particularly diverse: “The reality is, it can really vary on the venture. I’ve done everything from serving as the head of HR at a company, responsible for hiring and onboarding talent, to operating in a sales role, reaching out to customers and clients, developing strategic partnerships, and so much more.”
With a focus on the big picture as well as the day-to-day operations, VAs are often the general managers of the ventures they work on — and often even transition to running these new businesses in the market. “We’re often compared to CEOs of startups — super driven and very organized because so much of the work we do requires coordination and collaboration with so many different people and stakeholders,” says Kanika.
Bridging the gap between product and business means communicating in a way that makes sense to different stakeholders. “We know how to talk to our corporate partners who oftentimes are coming from very traditional backgrounds,” says Kanika. “But we also understand how to work well with all the different disciplines, as we have a deep appreciation for design, product and engineering.”
This combination of skills is evident in the career paths that VAs typically tend to take — with an even split between those who have worked in entrepreneurial and startup roles before BCGDV, and those who have been in venture capital or consulting. As Jessica explains, VAs tend to be “people who speak both languages and understand the nuances of each experience to bring that to the table.”
On one venture Jessica recalls in particular, she played a key part in setting up an internal organization including, hiring team members and ensuring their success beyond the corporate partnership with BCGDV. “Being part of the process of seeing this group of clients come together and become sort of a ‘mini BCGDV’ within their organization, while learning to operate on their own and launch new businesses was really eye-opening and exciting,” she explains.
For Kanika, her work with BCG Green Ventures, a new offering with a dedicated (and growing) team focused on partnering with corporates to invest in, co-build, and scale sustainable businesses, has been very rewarding. “What we’re trying to do is create new methodologies that allow us to really focus on scaling up promising climate tech solutions,” she explains. “Which means those solutions and innovations that are actually going to make a dent in decarbonizing the world and getting us to net zero by 2050. This is particularly rewarding as we are taking our learnings from digital and applying them to sustainability & climate”
Kanika joined BCGDV as an intern at the beginning of her career, and playing an integral role in the creation and launch of BCG Green Ventures has been a personal career milestone. “All of the skills and confidence that I’ve learned over the years enabled me to channel my passion and open the right doors within the organization, both within BCG and BCGDV,” she explains.
Both Jessica and Kanika highlight their coworkers as a major part of why they love their roles at BCGDV — whether they’re reaching out to other Venture Architects for advice on challenges outside their areas of expertise, or connecting with team members in other cohorts. “At BCGDV, you get to work with a very diverse pool of people — from product managers and engineers, to designers — all sorts of people that you collaborate with and exchange perspectives with in your ventures,” says Kanika.
At BCGDV, the most important thing is to be working together, and valuing what each team — and team member — can bring to the table. “The way we approach ventures and our methodology is very much about collaborating across our cohorts and making sure that we’re bouncing ideas off of each other,” says Jessica. As she puts it: “The special sauce of BCGDV is the people.”
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