Founder-in-Residence at Landing AI | Powderkeg

Location: United States

Employment Type: Contract

Team: AI Fund

Who We Are:

AI is the new electricity. Just as it transformed entire industries 100 years ago, AI is poised to do the same today. AI Fund is a venture studio that was formed to be at the forefront of this revolutionary wave. We harness artificial intelligence to create innovative solutions for the big challenges of today. With the collective aspirations of our co-founders, we build companies from inception to market launch. We innovate, ideate, and validate to address some of the most pressing issues in human capital, healthcare, wellness, and other traditional industries. Founded in 2017 by Dr. Andrew Ng, the $176 million-dollar funded venture studio is backed by top-tier VC firms and investors, along with the AI Fund teams’ combined experiences as AI pioneers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and operators.

Why Partner With AI Fund:

We’ve been there. We’ve founded and scaled successful companies ourselves, and we know that creating meaningful startups is really hard. Many entrepreneurs toil with ideas for years. Many spend time building something without the foresight of limiting factors that could have been easily dismissed upfront. Accomplished execs often teeter between a desire to start a company and creating something great versus taking a job that is less fulfilling. If only someone could help with taking the risk out of turning an idea into reality and accelerate the company building process, more people would be inspired to start a company. Coming up with great ideas, sussing them out, assembling great teams, and helping raise capital is what we do. We shorten a process that can take years down to months. We make sure you are going after the right market, are fully validated, and are surrounded by great teammates. Lastly, we make sure you see the world through the lens of a data scientist and machine learning expert, which is the perspective any meaningful company in the future must have. But we also know that the process is not about us. It’s about great Founders and empowering them to do great things.

What We Seek:

We are looking for passionate entrepreneurs with first-hand knowledge of the problem they have encountered or entrepreneurs that might match to a problem or idea we already have. It’s not a mandate, but ideally, we want people with experience solving business problems and have a keen eye for anticipating business risks. We are looking for a sound business leader who has built a company from 0 to 1 or a product manager running a product or built a product line from scratch before. We desire entrepreneurs who can hire great people, get others excited about their vision, raise capital, and make it all happen.

About the Idea:

There are many scenarios in which marketers may solicit 100s or 1000s of pieces of freetext responses from users, such as:

- Market research to shape the definition of new products.

- Reducing customer churn by reaching out proactively to specific customers to solicit feedback.

- Soliciting user feedback on current products.

Long-form multiple choice surveys have a low response rate. We have developed a new capability for marketers that enables them to synthesize user insights out of a collection of thousands or tens of thousands pieces of unstructured text written by users/customers/potential customers. In that synthesizing process, be able to predict customer desires, pain points and potential churn.

What You Will be Doing:

  • Determine the launch product. The technology we have developed addresses multiple potential use cases. You will be responsible for evaluating these ideas or developing additional ideas yourself, and selecting a specific product direction to go to market.
  • Build initial prototype and carry out validation. Working potentially with internal engineers and AI talents as well as design contractors, you will be responsible for developing an initial design of the product and collecting user feedback to validate the core business thesis.
  • Build business case. Including initial financial models, TAM/SAM/SOM analysis, estimate of margin, competitive analysis, etc. As part of this, we expect you to validate (or falsify) user demand and willingness to pay, and also develop the initial GTM.
  • Develop a request for funding as a final milestone during the 3 months FIR consulting engagement. At the conclusion of this 3 month plan, you and AI Fund will jointly make a decision on whether to fund and proceed with this as a business.

What You Must Bring:

  • Marketing experience.
  • Business or Product leadership background.
  • Startup experience, building companies from 0 to 1.

**The following are nice to haves: **

  • Previous experience leading fundraising from institutional investors is a huge plus
  • Previous founder, co-founder or startup CEO experience.
  • Enterprise B2B sales experience.

Characteristics:

  • Accountability: an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one's actions while doing so with the highest regard for integrity.
  • Leadership: able to influence others to follow you and lead the team to a brighter future.
  • Grit. able to stick with projects and work hard through good and bad times. High pain tolerance and can perform well under stress or pressure.
  • Scrappy: Takes initiative and proactively gets things done with low resources, but doing creative things, begging, borrowing, and whatever is needed in an ambiguous environment or situation.
  • Ownership orientation: Demonstrated orientation of extreme ownership over all aspects of the company and extremely results-driven in nature.

At AI Fund, we are committed to providing an environment of mutual respect where equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy (including childbirth, lactation and related medical conditions), national origin, age, physical and mental disability, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, genetic information (including characteristics and testing), military and veteran status, and any other characteristic protected by applicable law. AI Fund believes that diversity and inclusion among our employees is critical to our success as a company, and we seek to recruit, develop and retain the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool. Selection for employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need.

#LI-Remote

Job Summary
  • Job Title
    Founder-in-Residence
  • Company
    Landing AI
  • Location
    Palo Alto, CA
  • Employment Type
    Full time
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