SUMMARY
Conservation X Labs seeks a passionate and innovative leader to serve as the Chief Commercial Officer to help us meet our ambitious goal of ending the Sixth Mass Extinction. This is a vital role at a crucial time in the history of Conservation X Labs (CXL) and for the field of biodiversity conservation itself.
We have ambitious goals, which include building a 100-million-dollar organization in ten years (10X our size) that has global impact, so we need someone with the skill set not only for today, but to create the foundation for the organization that we hope to become. Unlike many conservation organizations, CXL has a strong belief in the power of markets to scale impactful solutions and thus help achieve our audacious mission. This position will be responsible for building the commercial success that powers our growth and impact.
The ideal applicant will be a fast learner and early adopter, great with people, highly organized, and both process-oriented and strategic. They will be a self-starter, extremely detail oriented, strategic, and have extensive management and leadership experience. We seek someone to partner with CXL Leadership who can manage a large portfolio of responsibilities that will enhance and improve our organization’s commercialization strategy, investment portfolio, and sales approach for a wide array of CXL products, programs, and services. This is a new role to help us commercialize and scale existing technologies we have created, companies and innovators we fund and support through our open innovation programs, and future technologies and companies we will create. CXL believes strongly that philanthropy alone is insufficient for impact and that we will not achieve our aims if we do not bring our transformative tools to scale.
We seek applicants who thrive in a fast-paced constantly changing start-up culture and can work well both individually with little guidance, as well as part of a team. We want people who like finding solutions to hard problems. We are an optimistic, passionate, forward-looking, and mission-oriented organization set to transform the approaches to solving conservation problems. As such, possessing knowledge of conservation problems and technological solutions, in addition to stellar business acumen is a plus.

WHO WE ARE:
Conservation X Labs (CXL) is a technology and innovation company that creates and incentivizes innovative solutions to end the Sixth Mass Extinction. We create new products in our labs, lead open innovation competitions to harness planetary genius, and empower talented innovators across disciplines to collaborate and revolutionize the future of conservation. We are an optimistic, passionate, entrepreneurial, fun, and mission-oriented team working to radically improve the way we find and support solutions for conservation’s most wicked challenges.

WHO YOU ARE:
Are you great with people and love cultivating deep relationships, building coalitions, and partnerships?
Are you always asking what the monetary ROI is?
Are you passionate about what it takes to bring products to scale?
Do you obsess about how your company can maximize its opportunities through new revenue streams?
Do you have a passion for harnessing market tools, but for good (social entrepreneurship, venture impact, blended finance)?
Do you believe in scaling breakthrough solutions for protecting the planet through sales, growth, and commercialization?
Have you successfully brought new products from first sale to massive growth?
Do you love inspiring and teaching others on how to access sales and commercial opportunities?
Do you love to strategize new and better ways of achieving impact through market mechanisms?
Do you love nature, but feel it needs a radically more innovative marketing team?
Do you believe failure is only failure if you do not learn?
Do you love watching a finely tuned machine produce tremendous results?
Are you excited about the details that ensure a bold vision is being achieved?
Are you forward-thinking, creative, innovative?
Are you team oriented, and love to contribute to a well-run organization always in search of excellence?
Do you disdain orthodoxy for the sake of orthodoxy?
If yes, read on…

THE POSITION
This role thrusts you into the middle of one of the world’s most innovative technology companies driven by a bold mission to prevent the sixth mass extinction. You will be part of CXL’s leadership; work alongside our engineering, finance, development, and innovation leads; and collaborate with our entire talented and diverse team. You will be a key part of our leadership group, driving both CXL’s financial sustainability and its impact through a commercial strategy for our products, programs, and services, with a strong focus on successfully spinning-off vibrant and impactful companies by applying your unique skillset.
Specifically, this position would be crosscutting across our organization with a focus on commercialization (sales, marketing, product management and aligning strategy around executing a viable commercialization strategy). This knowledge is essential to creating self-sufficient, viable, and impactful companies. CXL’s work includes both creating new companies that spin out, supporting innovators on their entrepreneurial journey, and scaling our own programs – all of these goals must have strong commercial and revenue-generation strategies that will require this position to strategize, build, and grow our impact. The Chief Commercial Officer should be the internal strategist and external spokesperson for how the organization interfaces with investors, customers, and stakeholders to drive current and future growth, including leading efforts to use investment, revenue, and blended finance, to bring products to scale. They must be passionate about value proposition testing, finding product-market fit, and harnessing both the public and private sectors. They must be highly strategic.
The CCO at CXL will not only be focused on financial growth but will focus on a holistic approach that closely resembles the organizational goal of preventing the 6th Mass Extinction. Understanding and coordinating how the two of those goals interact will be essential to this position.
This position will report to the CEO and President and is expected to be located in our Washington, DC Headquarters, with occasional travel to our engineering hub in Seattle and our international offices. This is a brand-new position in CXL. We welcome applications from individuals who are excited to grow our unique conservation efforts that seek to leverage innovation, technology, entrepreneurship, and the talents of a broad community of innovators for conservation impact. We want people who seek the truth, because, sometimes, traditional conservation is blind to it.

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
Core Commercial Strategy and Responsibilities
Develop and implement a sales and marketing strategy around existing and future products, technologies, or services.
Develop a theory of change for CXL as an organization, CXL’s technologies, and CXL’s programs that directly connects sales and marketing activities to conservation impacts.
Harness our existing programs outside of technology development, such as our open innovation programs (prizes and challenges), to look for and identify investment ready enterprises with a focus on potential customers and markets.
Identify and implement ways of commercializing our programs, including open innovation, that increase our impact and achieve our mission.
Develop hybrid funding programs at CXL that bring together both grants and investments, including both ideation and performance testing, to bring sustainable innovations to scale.
Potentially help develop new investment vehicles.
Work closely with the Foundry Director to ensure commercialization is a focus for the new ventures we build within CXL’s new Open Foundry, including extension of these models to the most biodiverse places on the planet.
Work with and provide input to our open innovation team to develop prizes and challenges that will lead to more investment-ready and customer-focused innovations and enterprises.
Work with directed innovation teams to align product development with commercialization and marketing strategies and priorities.
Lead and plan launches of CXL developed products when required. Establish and oversee implementation of enterprise-wide systems for tracking sales, customer retention and success, and operating costs for CXL products. Work with CXL Leadership and program teams to improve margins and revenue.
Provide leadership and direction to ensure revenue growth of existing technologies and new technologies into new and existing markets.
Work with teams to develop pricing models for our products with a data driven approach that drives revenue.
Obtain new customer networks around our products and strengthen existing customer networks.
In partnership with our COO, co-manage our existing CRM system to organization contacts around sales and customers.
Oversee and train staff in the broader organization to assist with implementing commercialization strategy.
In partnership with our COO, coordinate and assist in ancillary efforts such as general CXL marketing branding and social media to bring it in line with commercial goals.
Leadership Team
Work closely with the CEO and President and wider leadership team to maintain consistency around the organizational vision in the context of the business strategy.
In partnership with the CEO and President, manage interactions with corporate partners, government institutions (like the DOE loan office and the Development Finance Corporation), multilateral institutions like the IFC, venture funds, impact funds, investment arms of philanthropic organizations.
Organize and prioritize critical issues and required information for the leadership team to facilitate efficient decision making.
Strategically integrate our finance team around pricing and revenue generation models.
Collaborate with the executive team and specific teams preparing to go to market to determine and prioritize business strategies.
Strategic Planning
Present quarterly performance reports and metrics around sales, customers, and revenue generation.
Research and provide valuable input on potential new innovations and ventures from the context of customers, competitors, and markets.
Scout new markets for conservation technologies and present potential income opportunities to CXL
leadership.

QUALIFICATIONS
Required
Passion: Passionate about building a conservation company with outsized real-world impact, including leveraging both public and private approaches to achieving impact.
Communication: Superior verbal and written communication skills.
Leadership: Demonstrated history of leading in an effective and trustworthy way.
Excellence: Tremendous problem-solving skills matched to an ability to continuously improve
programs, teams, and outcomes.
Financial: Experience with developing, managing, and reporting on budgets
Education: Bachelor’s degree and a love and demonstrated knowledge of conservation, science, technology, and innovation.
Experience: 10+ years in a business or executive management role focused on commercialization.
Preferred:
Master’s degree in a related field (operations, finance, MBA, etc.)
Consulting experience with demonstrated impact on companies’ growth and success

APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS
Please send a cover letter that explains why you fit what we are looking for, and resume to daremightythings@conservationxlabs.org with “Chief Commercial Officer – [Your Last Name]” in the Subject Line of the email. Relevant examples from your work history are very welcome.