Labs Fellowship EOI at Koko Networks

Introduction

• The Fellowship Program at KOKO Labs is for high caliber individuals seeking to experience and pivot into a career towards building impactful ventures for emerging markets. Fellows work closely with Labs’ global team of Researchers, Designers, Hardware & Software Engineers, and Business Analysts, and gain first-hand exposure to frontier market venture development through a fast-paced and iterative venture development process.
• The Program (previously called the CleanStar Ventures Fellowship Program) has been managed by KOKO’s co-founders across various emerging markets since 2007, and has successfully supported over 50 Fellows. Past KOKO Fellows have progressed to management roles within the KOKO group or other startups and VCs they met during the Fellowship, or taken the plunge and started their own ventures.
• Labs Fellowship Program for 2023

Candidate Profile
The ideal candidate will fit into one or more of the following archetypes:

The Entrepreneur

• You have spent years building new ventures from scratch - identifying and capitalising on a compelling gap in the market, building and leading teams to achieve a common vision, and leveraging opportunities and advantages that others seem to miss. You know how to operate in resource constrained settings and lead your team through uncertainty to achieve ambitious goals. You may have already have an idea for an impact venture that you want to bring to KOKO, or you may simply want to work on the things we're already working on. Either way, you are looking to apply the skills and experience you have picked up over the years to create sustainable impact at a global scale.

The Product Veteran

• You have considerable experience building products and services from scratch - identifying and understanding the pain points of users, systematically prototyping and testing new concepts, and managing a variety of stakeholders to get to product-market fit and beyond. You have that rare ability to balance order and chaos - bringing clarity and structure through processes as you continue to explore the nebulous spaces of consumer desires and behaviors. You are looking to apply the skills and experience you have picked up over the years to build high impact products and services for low income households across the world’s fastest growing cities.

The Strategy Consultant

•  You have had the good fortune of working across a wide range of industries to find winning solutions to a variety of pressing problems. You are able to efficiently organize and process large amounts of information,  identify key gaps and ask the right questions, build and analyze quantitative models, and ultimately craft winning strategies across multiple functional areas - operations, marketing, sales, technology, etc. In addition, you have the experience of managing change within organizations, to drive the execution and ensure results. You are looking to apply these skills and experiences to help new high impact ventures maximize their chance of success as they prepare for scale up.

In addition, successful Fellowship candidates tend to:

• Be comfortable operating in a fast-paced, unstructured environment,
• Be independent thinkers with unbounded intellectual curiosity,
• Have strong interpersonal skills and enjoy connecting across cultures,
• Have an excellent track record of academic, professional, and personal achievement.
• Have at least 5 years of work experience