Director, Partner Success & Founder Experience

LvlUp Ventures LLC; United States; On-site; USD 80,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

LvlUp Ventures seeks a Head of Partner Success & Founder Experience to ensure partnerships deliver maximum value, improve over time, and scale with the ecosystem. The role spans partner success, founder experience, program iteration, and ecosystem quality across corporate, venture, event, and distribution assets.

The ideal candidate will own ongoing partnership growth, define success plans, track engagement, and develop scalable processes.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience in partner success, partnerships, customer success, account management, business operations, venture platform, startup ecosystems, corporate innovation, strategy, or a related environment.
• Strong ability to manage and grow complex strategic relationships across different partner types.
• Experience working with corporate partners, sponsors, investors, startups, or ecosystem organizations is highly valuable.
• Highly analytical and comfortable using data to evaluate performance, identify problems, and guide decisions.
• Strong KPIs, conversion, utilization, engagement, retention, satisfaction metrics knowledge.
• Strong founder or customer empathy with an ability to identify friction and improve user experiences.

Responsibilities

• Managing the ongoing success of strategic partnerships after launch (post-launch management).
• Developing success plans and measurable objectives for key partnerships.
• Tracking partner engagement, participation, conversion, utilization, and outcomes.
• Identifying underperforming programs and determining why they are not working.
• Improving partnership structures, offerings, positioning, and execution.
• Developing new activations for existing partners.
• Increasing partner retention and long-term relationship value.
• Identifying opportunities to expand successful relationships.
• Improving communication and reporting to partners.
• Developing recurring partner reviews and feedback systems.
• Coordinating across LvlUp teams to ensure partnership commitments are executed effectively.
• Creating scalable processes for managing a growing partnership ecosystem.
• The Head of Partner Success & Founder Experience should approach partnerships as products that can be continuously improved.
• A partnership should not remain static simply because an agreement has been signed.
• The role will be expected to use data, feedback, founder behavior, partner feedback, and operational learnings to continuously redesign and improve offerings.
• Examples include changing founder benefit positioning, restructuring sponsorships, redesigning corporate programs, creating new activations, improving participation, changing communication cadence, or developing new programs.
• The role should be comfortable with experimentation and iteration.
• Founder experience improvements across portfolio, accelerators, programs, events, applications.
• Examine founder journey end-to-end and identify opportunities to improve true value, responsiveness, onboarding, access to resources, program experiences, introductions, feedback loops, and ease of navigation.
• The objective is to ensure founders interacting with LvlUp have a consistently strong, useful, professional, and differentiated experience.
• Work with partnerships, ecosystem, investment, marketing, events, community, and operations teams.

Skills

Partner success

Partnerships

Customer success

Account management

Business operations

Venture platform

Startup ecosystems

Strategy

Data analytics

Founder empathy

Product mindset

Tools

CRM systems

Analytics platforms

Surveys

Partner management systems

Job description

LvlUp Ventures is a global venture capital firm that invests in and accelerates both early-stage and late-stage startups across sectors. Ranked among the most active venture capital firms worldwide, LvlUp holds leading positions in overall investment activity as well as consumer goods and technology investing.

The firm’s opportunistic investment thesis centers on pairing capital with deep expertise, strategic partnerships, and an expansive global ecosystem to unlock outsized growth for founders. Beyond funding, LvlUp acts as an extended team to its portfolio, providing hands-on growth and fundraising support, strategic resources, and access to a powerful network of corporate, investment, and ecosystem partners.

A global network of more than 4,000 core and extended team members is united by a mission to help founders build enduring, category-defining companies.

Role Description

The Head of Partner Success & Founder Experience is responsible for ensuring that LvlUp’s partnerships and founder-facing offerings deliver maximum value, continue improving over time, and become stronger as the ecosystem scales.

This is a highly cross-functional, analytical, creative, and entrepreneurial role focused on partner success, partnership optimization, founder experience, program iteration, and ecosystem quality.

LvlUp works with many different types of partners, including:

• Corporate partners
• Investment and venture partners
• Event partners and sponsors
• Program partners and sponsors
• Technology and platform partners
• Founder benefit partners
• Corporate innovation partners
• Service and ecosystem partners
• Strategic distribution partners
• Other organizations supporting LvlUp founders and the broader ecosystem

The Head of Partner Success & Founder Experience will work across these relationships to ensure partnerships are performing well, partners are seeing meaningful value, founders are having strong experiences, issues are identified quickly, and successful programs continue to expand.

This role is not simply about relationship management.

The ideal candidate will constantly ask:

What is working? What is not working? Why? How can we make this substantially better?

A core responsibility will be owning the ongoing success and growth of LvlUp’s partnerships.

This includes developing a deep understanding of each partnership’s objectives, deliverables, engagement levels, economics, founder participation, outcomes, and opportunities for expansion.

The role will monitor partnership performance, surface problems early, and proactively develop solutions that improve results for both LvlUp and its partners.

Responsibilities may include:

• Managing the ongoing success of strategic partnerships after launch
• Developing success plans and measurable objectives for key partnerships
• Tracking partner engagement, participation, conversion, utilization, and outcomes
• Identifying underperforming programs and determining why they are not working
• Improving partnership structures, offerings, positioning, and execution
• Developing new activations for existing partners
• Increasing partner retention and long-term relationship value
• Identifying opportunities to expand successful relationships
• Improving communication and reporting to partners
• Developing recurring partner reviews and feedback systems
• Coordinating across LvlUp teams to ensure partnership commitments are executed effectively
• Creating scalable processes for managing a growing partnership ecosystem

The Head of Partner Success & Founder Experience should approach partnerships as products that can be continuously improved.

A partnership should not remain static simply because an agreement has been signed.

The role will be expected to use data, feedback, founder behavior, partner feedback, and operational learnings to continuously redesign and improve offerings.

For example, this may mean changing how a founder benefit is positioned, restructuring an event sponsorship, redesigning a corporate program, creating a new activation for an investment partner, improving participation in a partner offering, changing communication cadence, or developing an entirely new program that creates greater value for both sides.

The role should be highly comfortable with experimentation and iteration:

Another major priority will be LvlUp’s founder experience.

The Head of Partner Success & Founder Experience will work across the organization to ensure founders interacting with LvlUp have a consistently strong, useful, professional, and differentiated experience.

This includes founders across LvlUp’s portfolio, accelerators, programs, events, applications, community, and broader ecosystem.

The role will examine the founder journey end-to-end and identify opportunities to improve:

• True value delivered to founders
• Responsiveness & communication
• Onboarding
• Access to resources
• Program experiences
• Introductions and opportunities
• Follow-up
• Feedback loops
• Overall ease of navigating the LvlUp ecosystem

The objective is to ensure that LvlUp does not simply provide founders with access to resources, but creates an ecosystem that is easy to navigate, responsive, useful, and increasingly valuable as founders engage with it.

This person should be highly detail-oriented and willing to investigate friction wherever it appears.

That may include reviewing founder feedback, analyzing engagement patterns, speaking directly with founders and partners, identifying operational bottlenecks, examining conversion data, and determining where experiences can be improved.

The Head of Partner Success & Founder Experience will also help develop new strategies and offerings based on what they learn.

Patterns seen across founders or partners should translate into action.

If founders repeatedly need a certain resource, the role should identify how LvlUp can create or partner around it.

If a corporate partner’s offering is not generating enough engagement, the role should redesign the activation.

If an event format consistently performs well, the role should determine how to expand it.

If a partnership reveals an adjacent commercial opportunity, this person should help develop it.

The role will therefore work closely with LvlUp’s partnerships, ecosystem, investment, marketing, events, community, and operations teams.

It will also have a meaningful role in partnership development and new partnership strategy.

While the primary focus is ensuring the success and growth of existing relationships, this person will be expected to identify gaps in LvlUp’s ecosystem and recommend or help develop new partnerships where additional value can be created.

This may include identifying:

• New strategic corporate relationships
• New event or program sponsors
• New distribution relationships
• New corporate innovation opportunities
• New ecosystem partnerships

The strongest candidate will be able to move fluidly between relationship management, data analysis, product thinking, creative strategy, and execution.

One day may involve reviewing partnership performance data and redesigning an underperforming activation. Another may involve speaking with founders to understand a recurring pain point, presenting an expansion opportunity to a corporate partner, improving an onboarding workflow, or developing an entirely new partner offering.

The role is designed for someone who is comfortable taking ownership of broad problems rather than waiting for narrowly defined tasks.

Some of the most valuable improvements this person makes may come from noticing something that is not yet formally assigned to anyone.

We are looking for someone who will identify those opportunities and say:

"This should work better. I know how we can improve it, and I can own it."

Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience in partner success, partnerships, customer success, account management, business operations, venture platform, startup ecosystems, corporate innovation, strategy, or a related environment.
• Strong ability to manage and grow complex strategic relationships across different partner types.
• Experience working with corporate partners, sponsors, investors, startups, or ecosystem organizations is highly valuable.
• Highly analytical and comfortable using data to evaluate performance, identify problems, and guide decisions.
• Strong understanding of KPIs, conversion, utilization, engagement, retention, satisfaction, and other measures of partnership or program success.
• Demonstrated ability to identify problems quickly and develop practical, creative solutions.
• Strong product mindset and ability to continuously iterate programs, offerings, processes, and experiences based on feedback and data.
• Strong founder or customer empathy with an ability to identify friction and improve user experiences.
• Experience with CRM systems, analytics platforms, partner management systems, surveys, or other tools used to track engagement and outcomes.

Compensation

Base Compensation: $80,000-$130,000 annual, depending on experience and demonstrated ability.

Performance Upside: Meaningful performance-based bonus opportunities tied to areas including partner retention and expansion, partnership performance, founder satisfaction, program engagement, successful partnership iterations, operational improvements, and new growth opportunities.

The role is designed for someone who wants significant ownership over the quality and performance of LvlUp’s ecosystem, with substantial opportunity for responsibility, scope, and compensation to grow alongside their impact.