Job Description
This role is for individuals who are ambitious, entrepreneurial, and have a strong desire to make an outsized impact — operators who think strategically, execute precisely, and want to build scalable, long-term businesses with real outcomes. You’ll play a core role in shaping and expanding both new platform initiatives and existing WAY companies, with a pathway to future business unit or company-level leadership.
This isn’t about launching something from scratch in a vacuum — it’s about working inside a disciplined company-building environment to validate opportunities, drive growth, and build durable systems that scale.
This is a build-and-learn role with real leadership upside. We expect you to grow into a CxO/ CEO-level operator within WAY’s ecosystem.
Responsibilities
- Business Building: Collaborate with the WAY team to ideate, validate, and refine a new business concept, with the ultimate goal of launching a business where you’ll take on a founding partner role.
- Customer Truth Conversations: Identify, find, and actively reach out to potential customers to conduct in-depth interviews. These conversations aim to uncover customer needs, validate business assumptions, and ensure that any solution developed aligns with real market demand.
- Portfolio Company Support: Leverage your skills to assist WAY’s portfolio companies, providing tactical and strategic support where needed—whether that’s market research, customer outreach, or internal operations.
- WAY Projects: Contribute to various WAY initiatives, bringing your unique insights and skills to support internal projects that align with your expertise and our company's growth objectives.
- Collaboration and Communication: Engage proactively with both internal teams and external stakeholders, ensuring clear communication, alignment, and timely updates on progress across all initiatives.
- Continuous Learning and Adaptation: Stay current on market trends and competitive landscapes, applying insights to refine your approach and strategy for both portfolio and new business initiatives.
Qualifications
Who You Are
Strategic Operator
You’ve worked in or are interested in working in fast-moving, operationally complex environments. You understand how to drive results across functions and are obsessed with leverage, repeatability, and clarity.
Execution-Focused
You’re not here to admire the problem. You turn strategy into action, frameworks into workflows, and ideas into results. You have a high bar for quality and a bias for completion.
Long-Term Builder
You’re not optimizing for the quick win. You want to build something that lasts — to help scale businesses with real economic impact.
Requirements
- 3+ years experience in operations, strategy, business development, or consulting (ideally with exposure to tech or tech-enabled businesses)
- Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional projects and drive measurable results
- Strong analytical and communication skills; able to distill complexity and influence stakeholders
- Native-level Japanese and business-level English
- A long-term mindset with a hunger to lead — not just manage — as your next chapter unfolds
About the Company
WAY is a company builder that partners with ambitious leaders to build tech businesses that deliver lasting impact for Japan. We build companies to go the distance, with an unwavering focus on future value creation, not short term IPOs. Our model is differentiated through WAY empowering and supporting teams as an owner, player, and coach.
We’re looking for Founding Partners who want to change the world. Together, we aim to build the future, one step at a time.
Why Join WAY
We are a platform for scaling technology companies that solve our customers’ toughest problems. Our company-building model blends capital, talent, governance, and systems to create compounding growth — not just once, but again and again. This role gives you access to that platform — and a front-row seat to how great companies are actually built in Japan.