Win of the week: Samantha landed a role as the founding GTM lead at Agent Mail, a YC company because of the Next Play community. Would love to see more of that! Would encourage you to send some cold emails this week.

And also join our Slack! Takes a few seconds and you’ll get introduced to loads of like-minded people who can give you feedback on your job search and help you find your next thing. You can join here.

Join Friends of Next Play

Co-founders and people to jam with:

• Esteban is a software engineer who bootstrapped a startup to $1m in revenue and has 6 years of experience in the fintech industry. Open to ideas in fintech, ecommerce, and AI. Reach out: estebankramer@gmail.com.

• Inman was previously the CEO of an ai-attribution platform that does $25m in ARR. Before that, he founded a mobile tech platform that scaled to $100m in annual revenue. He’s looking for a co-founder to work on agentic dev tools for mobile app developers. Reach out: inman@finfo.com.

• Odell Beckham Jr., the professional football player, is hiring someone to help him build and scale a CPG brand to $100m in revenue. Apply here. (Remote)

Hiring? Email us (hi@nextplay.so), we’d love to share your role with the community.

Early teams:

• Emmanuel from Treat is hiring a founding community and growth lead. They are building a new system to solve disease, starting with pets. Apply here. (NYC)

• Daivik from Shor Pay is hiring a founding GTM / growth lead. They are building an international payroll platform. Apply here. (SF)

• Signal Core is hiring a founding business operations and commercial lead. They are building AI decision infrastructure for enterprises. Apply here. (SF)

• Casey from SuperMe is hiring a growth/GTM engineering/community person. They are building an AI-native professional network. Apply here. (SF)

• Jason from Parley is hiring a GTM person. They are building Parley, an app that helps AI tools developers understand how and why agents are using their products. Reach out: jason.novack@gmail.com. (Miami, Remote)

• Zach from Helium is hiring a chief of staff. They serve millions of users and doubled revenue each of the last two months. They are building self-improving software. Apply here. (SF)

• Michelle from Flint is hiring a customer success manager. They are building an ai-powered website builder. Apply here. (SF)

• Cheryl from Tiny Health is hiring a partnerships manager and a growth marketer. They are building a gut health platform. Apply here. (Remote)

• Dakota from Vacation Inc is hiring a VP of operations. They are building a best-selling sunscreen brand. Apply here. (Remote)

• Marc from Scalar is hiring engineers. They are building a docs product that’s downloaded more than 20 million times per month by developers. Apply here. (Remote)

• Drew from Kya is hiring a founding GTM engineer. They are building an AI platform that helps companies expand revenue. Apply here. (NYC)

• Luke from a stealth space startup is hiring a technical program manager. Apply here. (Scottsdale)

• Alex from Sphere Labs is hiring a VP of operations. They are building money movement infrastructure. Apply here. (Remote)

• 35 startups now hiring with $5m-$10m raised.

Scaling startups:

• Ted from Arena is hiring for 15 open roles across people, security, and engineering. They reached $100m in revenue run rate in the last 8 months for their AI evals platform. Apply here. (SF)

• Andy from Runlayer is hiring GTM people and FDEs. They just raised $30m to scale their AI platform for MCPs, skills, and agents. Apply here. (SF, NYC, Remote)

• George from Monk is hiring an agent strategist, a BDR, and engineers. They are building an automated accounts receivables platform. Apply here. (NYC)

• Chris from Hanover Park is hiring a chief of staff. They are building an ai-native fund admin platform. Apply here. (NYC)

• Miranda from Teamshares is hiring a transactions associate. They just did an IPO as they scale their tech-enabled SMB acquirer. Apply here. (Remote)

• Elle from Coinflow is hiring a business development person and a FDE. They grew 23x in revenue since their 2024 Series A. They are building a payment service provider built on stablecoins that processes billions of dollars in transaction volume. Apply here. (Chicago)

• Jason from Relay is hiring a business development associate. They are building a low-cost cross-chain transaction platform that has 5 million users who have completed 59 million transactions and $6 billion in volume. Apply here. (Remote)

• Billy from Crosby is hiring a writer. They are building an ai-powered law firm. Apply here. (NYC)

• Michelle from Knoetic is hiring a head of special projects. They are building a second-brain for chief people officers. Apply here. (NYC)

• Ibrahim from Reducto is hiring a GTM ops lead. They are building an agentic document platform that’s raised over $100m. Apply here. (SF)

• Sasha from Broccoli is hiring an AI strategy lead. They are building an AI operating system for home services businesses. Apply here. (SF)

• Lennard from Langdock is hiring a product marketer and a salesperson. They reached $40m ARR and are growing $1m ARR every week. They are building an AI platform for AI adoption. Apply here. (Berlin)

• Shreya from Partiful is hiring a business operations person. They are building an events platform. Apply here. (NYC)

• James from Firefly is hiring a GTM associate. They are building a physical AI company that’s working towards the future of safety by creating software and hardware for any space with people in it. They are launching later this summer. Apply here. (NYC)
  

Investing and other:

• Duncan from Oak HC/FT is hiring an AI product lead to help accelerate investments. (NYC, Remote)

• Meagan from Redwoods is hiring a philanthropic advisor and a senior writer. Apply here. (SF, Remote)

Resources and tools:

• We just launched a new “AI-powered talent agent” in the free Next Play platform. Try it out here to get personalized job recommendations and let us know what you think.

• A quick survey for curious people.

• Missing the Trees for the Forest

Note:

• Thanks for reading! If you have any notes, thoughts, or suggestions, please send us an email: hi@nextplay.so.

• Would appreciate if you could upvote and share this edition if you liked it. Thanks so much!

There’s a lot of advice on the internet about how to build your “personal brand.”

I find most of it pretty ineffective. And worse, I think a lot of it advises you to be rather untrustworthy.

The result I think for many people is a lot of wasted time and partially destroyed reputations. It turns out that “Winning Friends and Influencing People,” at least in my opinion, can very easily come across as quite manipulative and disingenuous. And doing that over long periods of time is negative (to yourself and those around you).

I would like to propose an an alternative approach. A way for you to build a “personal brand” that can positively change your life (without compromising your personal integrity).

I think it can be useful for people in the tech world. It can help you find jobs. Build new projects. Hire people. And make new friends.

It’ll sound really simple but here’s the general idea.

Step 1: Be yourself

Step 2: Be helpful to others

And…

That’s it. That’ll be your personal brand.

If you are rolling your eyes thinking “well thanks for the pretty obvious general advice” hold on. I’m about to get into more detail.

Why I’m writing this post is not because I think you have never heard the advice to “be yourself” and that you should consider “being helpful to others.” I am sure you have. Many times.

I would also take the bet, however, that most of you have probably not thought very seriously (or for very long periods of time) of what it means to do those things extremely well. How good are you at helping others? How “yourself” really are you?

I bring this up because I believe that if, after reading this essay, you were to spend an hour thinking deeply about those questions (and perhaps writing out some answers), you could make decisions that would lead to radically better answers than you’re doing currently. And that investment would be well worth your while.

On being yourself

The mistake I see people sometimes making is that they try and scale their personal brand before they actually have any idea around who they are and what they want and what is important to them. Sure it’s the sort of thing you figure out over time but imagine how much harder it is to evolve and adapt once you’ve created an audience for yourself. Now you may feel the pressure to act a certain way that’s grounded not in your own beliefs but rather the expectations of others. That’s a recipe that I’ve seen fail many many times.

If I could write a specific formula for figuring out how to be perfectly self-aware, trust me I would. But I don’t believe such a thing exists. Instead, my main guidance here is to try different things and use them all as signals or input into figuring it out for yourself. But at the end of the day, take the extra time to ask yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing. It’s a small step but can make a big difference. You can do this in your head. You can do this by meditating. Or you can write it down. Or talk about it with others.

So obvious right? So few people actually do this. Instead I think many people are just copying what they see others doing without pausing to reflect on if it makes sense for themselves.

You can take this further. You could pause now and answer some questions for yourself:

• What do you think is important? Why?

• Who do you find impressive? Why?

• What does the world need now? Why?

Those are intentionally vague and broad. Try answering them by writing them out. There’s no right answer. And your answers can be temporary of course. But even thinking about these things once a week and revisiting them often can help you sharpen your mentality.

Also note that “understanding yourself” is not a one-time exercise but rather a life-long journey. Something that’ll evolve and change over time.

Being helpful to others

Once you feel like you have a better grip of your own opinions, the next thing I suggest doing is simply helping others. I think it’s one of the best ways to build a strong flywheel for your personal brand.

This can take many forms, as I’ll document below, but starting from this place I think can really set you up for success.

The alternative would be to start from a place of how do you capture as much as value as possible. I think this approach is short-sighted and misses out on the bigger picture. Leading from a place of how do I help others in one way or another can really help you with your own personal brand.

We wrote a whole essay about this so if you want a deeper dive feel free to explore it here:

The summary I’ll give you, though, is pretty straightforward. We basically make the case that helping others is not as hard as you may think. And the returns come in the short and long-term in all sorts of ways. We also put together some ideas you. can use to actually practice being more helpful to others, but invite you to try and come up with your own.

Now if you want some specific ideas you could use today that would lead to what I think would be an interesting personal brand, here are some:

• Always send physical thank you notes/letters.

• Create a food review youtube channel focused on reviewing the food at different tech startups.

• Survey your friends or people all the time by asking interesting questions and share the findings.

• Create a book but make the books very rare.

• Write a book where you interview the parents of very successful people and ask them how they think about parenting and what their childhoods were like.

• Create a daily blog where you interview a stranger every day. Commit to doing this for 365 days.

• Build a blog where you review new consumer software companies. Here’s a guide to writing frictionlogs that you could follow.

• Create a video series where you do a sort of MTV style cribs but for tech companies.

• Become known as an expert in a growing niche. Do this by building a community and helping others. For example FDE.

• Design a museum of tech company swag/clothing/merch. Can be physical or virtual.

Thanks for reading! What did you think of the essay? Let us know: hi@nextplay.so.

If you have a moment please upvote and share with your friends.

Here’s a list of 34 startups currently hiring with $10m-$50m raised.

Thank you to Harmonic (startup database) for helping us source this list!

1. Nectar Social - AI platform for social community management (Bay Area / Remote) - Careers

2. CircuitHub - on-demand circuit board assembly (South Deerfield, MA / UK remote) - Careers

3. Outmarket AI - AI platform for insurance brokerages (US remote / India remote) - Careers

4. belo - digital wallet for international payments (Buenos Aires) - Careers

5. 9amHealth - cardiometabolic care for chronic conditions (US remote) - Careers

6. CopilotKit - open-source frontend stack for AI agents (Bay Area / Seattle) - Careers

7. Living Carbon - reforestation and carbon removal projects (Remote) - Careers

8. Novella - E&S insurance wholesaler (NYC / Tel Aviv) - Careers

9. BranchLab - AI platform for pharma commercialization (NYC / Boulder) - Careers

10. Casa - home maintenance membership (Austin) - Careers

11. Enzo Health - AI-native home health EHR (Lehi) - Careers

12. Dandelion Health - real-world patient data platform (NYC / Remote) - Careers

13. Dome Systems - AI agent infrastructure platform (Bay Area / Remote) - Careers

14. Photon - transparent prescription marketplace (NYC) - Careers

15. Windmill - code-first workflow orchestration platform (NYC) - Careers

16. Lithosquare - AI mineral exploration platform (Paris) - Careers

Read more

There is a term I recently heard for the first time: the financial singularity.

The ‘normal’ singularity, of course, is generally defined as the point at which self-improving AI triggers runaway growth beyond human control or prediction. Maybe you’ve heard of it.

The financial singularity, I was told, is different: “[it’s] the point at which the entire finance function runs autonomously, not just billing and collections. The entire contract to cash workflow. A contract comes in, the agent reads it, invoices the customer, follows up, applies the cash, recognizes the revenue, closes the books, and escalates only what genuinely needs a human.”

You can theorize about a number of potentially great outcomes for the world if this were to happen. Perhaps companies would get paid faster. Perhaps they would make more strategic decisions. Perhaps a team of one or two could run finance for a company doing $100M. Perhaps companies would grow faster and make better decisions and improve the world.

It’s now that I should tell you about the person who told me this term: Ali Hussain, CEO and co-founder of the AI revenue automation startup, Tabs, which I’m covering today.

While the ‘financial singularity’ sounds like a lofty idea, Tabs has spent the past three years shipping real products to help companies get there. To, more concretely, help companies close their books clean and fast. Do this, Ali believes, and you unlock a lot of downstream benefits.

Tabs has already raised over $90M from investors like Lightspeed, General Catalyst, and Primary, signed hundreds of customers, and grown ARR more than 5x in the last 18 months. The rest of this essay is designed to help you understand what Tabs is building, why it’s different, what it’s like to work there, and whether or not you should join.

The product

Somewhere in every business, there is one person (more often, dozens or hundreds of people) whose job is to turn signed contracts into accurately recognized money in the bank. An average day for a person like this might be: arrive at the office, open a signed contract, find the terms that matter, key them into a billing system, create a custom invoice, send the invoice, chase down the invoice, and accurately recognize the payment once it comes through.

Problems start to crop up as the company grows. One such problem is that, if you want to do this well, it requires a lot of manual work. Talented people spend hours every day doing fairly tedious, routine work. You can get software to automate some of this, but the existing software tends to be impersonal and templated. It’s a step-change but not a serious fix.

Inefficiencies, too, become the default. It takes too long to get paid. You aren’t sure which customers have paid what. Data lives in silos. It’s hard to understand the gap between what you’ve invoiced and what you will get paid. “If you get [this] right,” Ali said, “everything downstream (RevRec, forecasting, collections) gets easier. We’re building foundational infrastructure and the commercial context graph that has the data and context to truly make accounting & revenue the most strategic function in the company,” he said.

On a practical level, Tabs is an AI billing and revenue automation platform. It connects to your contracts, your CRM, and your accounting system. It reads every contract, pulls the terms that matter, creates and sends the invoices, chases the unpaid ones, applies the cash, and recognizes the revenue. All in one platform, all run by AI (with human input when needed).

“Revenue ops isn’t broken because nobody built a good invoice tool,” Deepak Bapat, co-founder and CTO of Tabs, told me. “It’s broken because everything lives in silos. But when [Tabs] encounters an ambiguous payment, it doesn’t guess. It knows which contracts are active, which invoices are outstanding, and what the customer’s historical behavior looks like.”

So you could imagine the following situations:

• A payment comes in with a blank memo

• A customer pays a number that doesn’t match any invoice

• A contract’s price ramps over year 1 with a usage-based discount

• A customer signs an amendment mid-term that changes their rate

• A payment lands 40 days late

• Revenue recognition for a contract ≠ when cash comes in

• Late payment needs a personalized, one-to-one followup

These are just a few rather simple examples of 1000s of things that traditional software generally can’t solve, things that people used to do manually. Tabs solves them all. (If you want an example, read their story about how Statsig scaled to $1B with a one-person finance team.)

The Tabs launch in 2024 had a narrower focus: AI for accounts receivable. Read the contract, bill, collect. Revenue recognition and reporting came next. By 2025, much of the work was being done by AI agents. The scope moved from sending an invoice to closing the books.

Tabs uses autonomous AI agents rather than other interfaces (like chat) because they believe it is more effective. “Chat is the worst agent interface for vertical software,” Deepak said. “Most of the industry is racing to build better conversations. We’re building toward fewer of them.”

The strategy

So, back to the financial singularity. This grand vision for a world where AI agents (in this case, Tabs’ AI agents) are automating most of the finance for companies and allowing them to be more strategic, get their money faster, and so on. “In 20 years, Tabs is the system of record for every financial event between a company and its customers,” Deepak said.

How do they get there? And why Tabs?

One factor is timing. Tabs is arguably the market leader in AI-native revenue automation. They’re ahead of their competitors, are quite well-funded, and have plenty of traction (which I will cover in more depth shortly). The market timing is favorable, too; there’s been a big shift to usage-based billing (and other more complex billing methods) in the past couple of years, which makes contract-to-cash workflows a lot more complex. Finance teams are moving off of their clunkier legacy platforms to find something new, and many of them are moving to Tabs.

Having a head start is particularly important, Tabs’ co-founders told me, because of the way data compounds to make their AI agents more effective. “The commercial graph gets richer with every contract, every payment, every customer that goes live. That compounds in a way competitors can’t replicate by starting fresh,” Deepak told me.

The goal at Tabs has always been to build a broad revenue platform teams can use to house everything under one umbrella. Deepak said the team made three bets early: “in-person when everyone went remote, functional depth with lean operations, [and] platform over point solution from day one, even when it was harder and slower.” And the team has, in many ways, already built much of the platform.

“[Tabs] is the only platform that runs the full lifecycle,” Ali said, “billing, cash application, revenue recognition, and reporting, all connected and automated.”

Success over the long run looks something like a marathon. “The person who wins a long race isn’t the fastest [in one specific moment], it’s whoever slows down the least. We’ve always been building for where the market was going, not where it was.”

As for the financial singularity, well, the Tabs team doesn’t believe they have arrived just yet. But “we’re partway there,” Ali told me. And if you want to underwrite all of these big claims with something tangible, I’d suggest you look at Tabs’ growth and traction so far.

The growth

Ali, Deepak, and Rebecca Schwartz founded Tabs in late 2022. The company stayed in stealth for roughly the first year and a half, spending most of their time talking to CFOs and controllers to figure out why revenue and billing were still this broken. In 2024, they launched publicly.

Early Tabs customers came from those conversations they had while building the product. Tabs sold founder-to-founder via their own connections and referrals, and many of the early adopters were AI-native companies with the kind of messy usage-based contracts Tabs is great at.

Money followed traction. Tabs raised a $7M seed from Lightspeed in April of 2024, a $25M Series A led by General Catalyst that October, and a $55M Series B led by Lightspeed in September 2025 (nice to see the same firm lead multiple rounds).

They now have more than 300 customers and ARR is up more than 5x in the last 18 months. Billions of dollars in annualized billing volume now run through the platform, and Tabs just had what the founders told me is the best quarter in company history.

The culture

When I ask most people at startups what meetings are like, they often say encouraging but ultimately boilerplate stuff: short and to the point, productive, helpful. When I asked Naomi Pohl, an Engineering Manager at Tabs, I heard something else. “I sometimes walk out of meetings [surprised by] how intense the debate was; turns out that’s just how people operate here, and it is a sign of a healthy culture.”

Perhaps the best takeaway from that anecdote is how deeply people at Tabs seem to care about their work. You don’t get that kind of passion at a startup where people aren’t very invested. “I’ve worked at startups where everyone checks out at 5pm,” Nicholas Gatti, who is in sales, told me. “Those companies went nowhere and it ruined the culture. I’m amazed how everyone shows up everyday excited to tackle hard problems.”

That care also shows up in how close Tabs works with their customers. “We have a very direct connection between client-facing teams and our engineering teams” Nicolas Buitrago, an Engineering Manager, said. “If a client-facing team is dealing with a bug or issue … It is encouraged they go over to the engineering desk to help get their issue resolved. In a typical company there is a fence of PMs to guard engineering resources … We are high ownership.”

“Our PMs have full access to Cursor, and a couple have even merged PRs into production,” Naomi said. This is not common (though the culture seems to be moving that way) and it’s another useful example of the kind of ownership you could expect to have at Tabs.

Partly, this high ownership and high care environment stems from being in the same room. Tabs works in person, five days a week, in New York. It’s easy for customer success people to solve problems with engineers because the engineers are right there. It’s natural to have intense debates that resolve cordially because everyone is talking face-to-face. (The in-office decision was made from the start, by the way, at a time when remote was a bit more popular.)

Should you join Tabs?

I asked Nicolas what kind of people do and don’t work out. “There’s a certain kind of talented engineer that doesn’t fit in at Tabs. The ticket chugger whose focus is on dequeuing tickets and only doing the work specified… If someone is expecting all of this to have already been answered for them and just wants to kill it on a few pre-chewed problems, this isn’t the place.”

I don’t think Nicolas’ diagnosis is engineering-specific. “If you want to work on hard problems, move quickly, have real ownership, and help define an entirely new category,” Ali said, “this is the kind of company where you can do the best work of your career.”

Other themes: move fast, make calls with incomplete information, have an appetite for agency, and be curious. Think hard about problems. Oh, and “don’t be a dick,” Deepak said.

I’d also encourage you to think about where Tabs sits in the market. Look at their traction so far. Compare them to the other options on the market. It’s hard to argue that they are not currently ahead in their category (AI-native revenue automation), and customers seem happy. Do you believe in the thesis? Does this feel like the right long-term play?

If you applied today, you’d be joining at Series B, which for lots of people is a nice time to join; the startup is probably less risky than it was at the seed stage but you can still get enough equity to be meaningful if, and when, Tabs makes some kind of exit.

But an exit—and the financial singularity—is likely still years away. What Tabs needs now are talented people to help them build the best possible version of their product and become the revenue automation platform for every company on the planet. If you think you could help them do that in some way, check out their open roles here.

Cold emails work, if you’re curious. Messages with “a sample project, a relevant analysis, or a specific take on B2B billing get read. Generic applications get filtered,” Ali said.

(Here are some ways to get creative, if you need inspiration.)

Thanks to Tabs for supporting Next Play and making this essay possible.

Here’s a list of 35 startups currently hiring with $5m-$10m in funding.

Thank you to Harmonic (startup database) for helping us source this list!

1. Preset - managed BI dashboards (Remote) - Careers

2. littlefish - merchant services (Remote) - Careers

3. AgentMail - email API for agents (Bay Area) - Careers

4. Yourco - employee SMS communications (Chicago) - Careers

5. Worktrace AI - no-code AI workflow automations (San Francisco) - Careers

6. VITL - cloud e-prescribing platform (Nashville) - Careers

7. VeryAI - identity authenticity verification (Miami / NYC / SF / Remote) - Careers

8. Monk - AI-powered accounts receivable (NYC) - Careers

9. Understood Care - Medicare patient advocacy (Remote) - Careers

Read more

If you have 15 minutes this week, I suggest trying out a new tool and seeing if you can make it useful in your professional or personal life. A few recommendations would be: Notion, Clay, Wispr Flow, Speechify, Superhuman, etc.

And if you want discounts on any of these tools and more be sure to check out Friends of Next Play, where you get $1000s of dollars off of these subscriptions + access to our community Slack group. You can join here.

Join Friends of Next Play

Co-founders and people to jam with:

• Rory is a founder who sold his last company. He’s building an AI-driven fintech for payments and data sharing and is looking for a co-founder, ideally someone technical. Reach out: rory@kolt.ai.

• Josh is a data scientist and engineer interested in building a new b2b company. Reach out: jcochrantech@gmail.com.

• Ari is a former founding engineer and product person who is exploring the world of construction/permitting and wants to build something new. Reach out: ari@ariporad.com.

Hiring? Email us (hi@nextplay.so), we’d love to share your role with the community.

Early teams:

• Patrick from Aligned is hiring a growth person. They are building a national, value-based primary care network. Apply here. (NYC)

• Allen from Ditto is hiring a head of marketing. They grew 5x to 150k college users in the last 4 months. They are building a matchmaking platform for college students. Apply here. (SF)

• Accountable is hiring a founding engineer. Their co-founders previously founded Acorns, a unicorn fintech company. They are building a consumer tax platform. Reach out: brendan@accountable.org. (NYC)

• Adam from Clipbook is hiring enterprise client success people and founding engineers. They are building an AI research and analysis tool. Apply here. (Remote, SF, DC, Melbourne)

• Tacit is hiring a recruiter, a head of hardware, and an electrical engineer. They are building a stealth deeptech startup focused on rethinking human-computer interaction. Apply here. (SF)

• Diogo from Typesafe is hiring a founding recruiter. They are building AI models that focus on reliability. Apply here. (SF)

• Jake from Marble Health is hiring a founding marketing lead and an expansion GM. They are building an operating system for teen mental health. Apply here. (NYC)

• Nick from Sandstone is hiring salespeople and a forward-deployed engineer. They are building a legal relationship management platform for legal departments. Apply here. (NYC)

• Gero from Levity is hiring across GTM, customer delivery, and engineering. They are building an AI automation platform for complex email and phone workflows in logistics. Apply here. (Remote)

• Aubrey from Swoop is hiring a head of growth. They are building a food delivery service in Nigeria that’s expanding internationally. Apply here. (US, UK)

• Alexander from Coefficient Giving is hiring a senior operations associate to work in the office of the CEO. They are a philanthropic funder of over $5 billion since 2014. Apply here. (SF, Remote)

• Lodovico from Trellis is hiring hustlers to help them scale. They are building AI agents for vacation rentals that grew from $0 to $600k+ ARR in the last few months. Apply here. (SF, Remote)

• Natalie from Capsule is hiring a head of demand generation. They are building AI-powered video tools for enterprise teams. Apply here. (Remote, LA)

• Ed from Prof G. Media is hiring a research analyst. They are building a media network with over 415,000 subscribers. Apply here. (Remote)

• Luba from Clove is hiring a financial adviser. They are building a personalized financial advisory platform. Apply here. (London)

• Ahmed from Risely is hiring forward-deployed engineers. They are building AI agents for university admin. Apply here. (SF, Remote)

Scaling startups:

• Tanay from Wispr Flow is hiring a chief of staff. They have grown revenue 150% every quarter for the last 4 quarters for their AI dictation platform. The job is 16 hours a day sitting next to him. Apply here. (SF)

• George from Monk is hiring salespeople and engineers. They are building an AI-native accounts receivables platform. Apply here. (NYC)

• Oban from Spade is hiring a tech recruiter. They are building a data and AI platform that turns messy financial transaction data into structured records. Apply here. (NYC)

• James from Firefly is hiring a GTM associate. They are building a physical AI company that’s working towards the future of safety by creating software and hardware for any space with people in it. They are launching later this summer. Apply here. (NYC)

• Ben from Omnea is hiring across every department: GTM, customer, partnerships, engineers, and more. They raised $75m from Accel, Insight and Khosla to redesign enterprise operations and procurement and 10x’d revenue over 18 months. Apply here. (NYC, London)

• Patrick from Atlas Card is hiring a growth person. They reached $1 billion in annualized payment volume with no marketing. They are building a concierge charge card for HNW and UHNW people. Apply here. (NYC)

• Alex from Tenex is hiring 50 people, especially AI strategists. They are building an AI transformation partner for enterprises. Apply here. (NYC)

• Rachael from Notion is hiring a finance person for their special projects team. They are building an AI workspace for people and agents. Apply here. (SF)

• Josh from Corgi is hiring a head of people. They are building a startup insurance platform that raised at a $2.6 billion valuation. Apply here. (SF, NYC, London, Dallas, Chicago)

• Megan from Sierra is hiring several people for their events and experiences team. They recently raised at a $15.6 billion valuation for their customer experience platform. Apply here. (SF)

• John from Stan is hiring a General Manager and a chief of staff. They are building an all-in-one store for creators that’s grown to $30m ARR in the last 2 years. Apply here. (Los Angeles)

• Kathleen from Windfall is hiring a product marketing manager and a field marketing manager. They are building a wealth and people data platform. Apply here. (SF)

• Ofek from Forage is hiring a consumer fintech PM. They just raised a Series B and are building a payments platform enabling SNAP EBT payments. Apply here. (Remote)

• Aly from Stripe is hiring a short-form video and social lead. Apply here. (SF, NYC)

• Richie from Finix is hiring a startups and VC partnerships manager. They are building a payments platform that processes billions of dollars annually and raised $75m back in 2024. Apply here. (SF)

• Here’s a list we made of 32 startups now hiring with $10m-$50m in funding.

Investing and other:

• General Atlantic is hiring an investment associate to focus on life sciences. Apply here. (NYC)

• Variant is hiring an AI lead. Apply here. (NYC)

• Padriac from Rallyday is hiring an investment associate. Apply here. (Denver)

Resources and tools:

• What is Forward-Deployed Engineering?

• Writing about writing.

Note:

• Thanks for reading! If you have any notes, thoughts, or suggestions, please send us an email: hi@nextplay.so.

• Would appreciate if you could upvote and share this edition if you liked it. Thanks so much!

A weirdly high percentage of my friends and former co-workers have told me they’d like to become better writers. For the rest of this essay, I make it my job to explain why I believe you should consider writing and how you might go about getting started.

(This is a guest post from Quarter Mile)

1.

If you really wanted to run a marathon, you could do it. All it would take is going outside and running for at least a few days a week until you were capable. And then, a few months from now, you could be racing across the finish line with a half-decent time. That would feel great. And not only would it feel great, it would be normal. People run marathons all the time.

Things weren’t always this way. Half a century ago, running was a weird thing to do if you weren’t a professional athlete. In the ‘60s it was so weird to run that it wasn’t uncommon for police officers to stop you just for running outdoors. But that changed, and now more people than ever run.

Why? Ask runners why they do it and you’ll notice there is a quality without a name to their answers. “It just feels good,” somebody might tell you. “It helps my mental health,” or “I can think more clearly.” People don’t just run because it is good for their physical body (and in fact it may actually be bad for your knees). People run because it can improve other parts of their life. Because it helps them feel better.

But this is not an essay about running. It’s about writing. Funny thing, though, is that writing is in many ways similar to running. Sure, it feels good to write. But writing can also help with other things:

• It can help you think more clearly

• It can land you a job interview at any company you want

• It can help you communicate more effectively and persuasively

• It can give you new ideas

• It can cause you to develop a deeper appreciation for the world around you

• It can be a tool you use to explore new ideas

• It can help you work through complex situations and make more effective decisions

• It can make you a happier, more thoughtful person

• It can be a way you relax, or process emotions, or resolve conflict

• It can be a path to creating beautiful art

• It can even be a career (like it is for Substack writers, or professional copywriters)

Just to reiterate, these are a few of the extra things that writing can help you with. Writing on its own is pretty great, too, and even without any of these benefits it would still be a worthwhile pursuit; there is real value to be found in writing a great essay to learn about a new topic, or producing a fun story.

We think writing needs a sort of revolution, like what happened with running. Writing something like 1,000 words a day should be as common as going on a regular jog in the park. And if you can agree with me on that, then I’ve got some good news: just like anyone can learn to run a marathon with a bit of persistence, anyone can learn to write. You could start as soon as you are done reading this essay.

2.

The trouble with all this is that you probably agree with me and yet you probably won’t start writing.

Disagree? Well, most people at various points in their life (school, work, essays like this) are told that writing is powerful, and most people do not write outside of their basic obligations, like emails at work and texts in their personal life. So, clearly, the argument for writing has not been convincing enough to date.

I have many friends and coworkers who have told me they agree with my argument for writing, but who do not actually write. When I press them on it, I often find they have one or more limiting beliefs about writing. The below are mental viruses that I believe have infected lots of people I’ve met, and unlearning them may be the most effective way to get yourself to write:

• You’re either a good writer or you aren’t (i.e. “I’m just not a writer”).

• It takes a long time to produce good writing.

• Writing is a magical, arts-y process where you have to wait for inspiration to arrive.

• There just isn’t enough time in your day to write.

• Writing is a super-important high art form that has to be approached carefully.

• You need some sort of qualifications or fancy training to write and publish.

• To be a ‘real writer’ you have to write fancy prose, or novelist stuff.

• There’s some objective quality bar you need to meet in order to post writing online.

This is all bullshit. Anyone can learn to write, including you. You can write about anything you want in whatever tone, style, or format you want to. It does not take months or years to produce something worth reading. You do not need to carve out 6 hours a day to write. There is time in your day to write if you really want to, and if somehow there isn’t, you can wake up 30 minutes earlier. There is no objective ruling board of supreme writers that determines what you’re allowed to write about, or what’s worth publishing.

The only valid excuse not to write is that you simply don’t want to write badly enough. And if that’s you, that’s okay. But for everyone else: you can become a good writer and you can write. All it takes is to sit down and write one sentence, and then another, and then another.

Here is a little bit of advice about getting started (or improving, if you are already writing).

3.

While it is true that both of us who write for Quarter Mile have published millions of words, it is also true that we have struggled at times to produce writing consistently. Some things that have helped (which are not all the world’s most novel pieces of advice, but which can actually work):

• Have someone hold you accountable.

• Get regular, consistent, ideally useful feedback.

• Gamify it. Create challenges, e.g. over 30 days, where you write a lot.

• Write at the same time every day.

• Read a lot. (This can be a way to gain inspiration and learn new ways of writing.)

• Create an environment you like. Don’t obsess. Just something simple that works.

• Create a place to publish your writing. Then publish!

• Build an audience with an expectation (e.g. 1 post a week)

• Write first drafts as fast as possible. Try writing a 2,000-word essay in an hour.

• Lower your bar, then lower it even further. You can always fix things later.

• Try outlining before you write. Try not outlining. See what works best.

• Share your writing sooner rather than later.

• Go reread the list of myths in the previous section and make sure you don’t believe any.

This is soft guidance, not a list of hard rules. You should, of course, do whatever is most effective for you. As for how to get ideas, as you write more often you will notice that ideas start pouring in on their own; writing opens a sort of mental door for ideas. We doubt you will struggle with those.

And, if you really want to improve quickly and get feedback from other people…

4.

…then you may want to consider joining a community. (For example you could consider joining Friends of Next Play or join our latest project, Writing Club).

5.

Imagine a world where every human who was capable of it ran for 90 minutes a day. It sounds crazy to say, but almost everything (except for maybe knee cartilage health) could be better. Life expectancies would be higher. Incidences for many kinds of disease would be down. People would probably be a bit more satisfied with their lives, on average; median mental health would be improved. As a result, productivity would likely also increase. We’d hit our goals faster, and so on. You see the picture.

We think that something similar is true for writing. A world in which everyone wrote consistently might be a world with more observant, thoughtful, effective, possibly even happier people. And, as a nice little bonus, we’d also have millions of additional words of wonderful writing to read.

Writing is not exactly a silver bullet to solve all of humanity’s problems, no. But if you are looking to answer the persistent and important question of what to do with your time, we suggest you pick up a pen.

In mid-2022, Patrick McKenzie wrote the following in his Bits About Money newsletter: “[B2B payments] are one place human effort is currently required and glaringly should not be.”

At the time, Accounts Receivable (i.e. AR, the business of getting paid) was done one of two ways: you paid an in-house team of people to do a lot of tedious manual work and/or you used legacy software that kinda, sorta, sometimes automated some parts of AR. It was pretty rough.

But then, later that year, magic. OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public. LLMs went from something that people in the know were excited about to something that everyone was using and making grand proclamations about. These models were full of promise, and the faster companies like OpenAI (and later Anthropic, and Google, and others) made improvements to them, the more possibilities people saw. Among them: what if we solved AR?

Fast forward to 2026. You might expect that we are now living in a dream utopia where the AR problem has been completely solved by wonderful AI software products. A world where companies no longer have to worry about how they will get paid, when they will get paid, or who paid them. A world where companies have their money sooner, are not buried in manual work chasing past payments, and can move faster and spend time forecasting.

So you may be surprised (or perhaps not) to learn that this is not the world we are living in.

Believe it or not, most companies are still doing AR the old way. Manual invoice-to-cash matching, dunning emails sent one by one, and finance teams perpetually buried trying to answer the most basic question: who actually paid us?

And there still isn’t much great software out there to solve it. The whole space remains underloved and underserved, despite it being one of the most universal headaches in business. “$10T is currently stuck in unpaid invoices,” George Kurdin, co-founder and CEO of Monk. “And an average invoice takes 59 days to clear. If you’re doing >$10M in revenue, getting paid in 30 days instead of 59 will literally make you millions over two years.”

Monk’s co-founders’ George Kurdin and Joe Zhou’s answer to the AR problem. Their bet is that they can build a generational B2B revenue platform, and they’re starting by solving the mess that is how businesses get paid.

There’s a lot to like about Monk, and plenty of reasons you might consider joining, which is what I’ll focus on for the remainder of this essay. What are they building? How is it different? Why is Monk going to be the platform that a bunch of companies finally adopt? Why will it be the company most people want to work for? And why should you join now, before the window might close?

The product

The sad state of AR today is not necessarily due to a lack of products. If you run a Google search for “accounts receivable software” you still see plenty of companies that purportedly offer the tools to help you get paid. The problem is moreso that a lot of these products are not very good, or at least, not very comprehensive.

Part of this is because, if you want to run an excellent AR operation, you generally have to end up doing a lot of things that are not (or do not seem to be) scalable:

• Personalized, 1:1 email/Slack/text follow-ups

• Uploading invoices into customer-specific AP portals

• Matching payments to invoices when the memo is blank

• Chasing the right approver when you get ghosted

• Resolving disputes over line items and PO mismatches

• Random invoice changes at the last minute

This kind of hard-to-scale work accounts for at least 39% of invoice delays, George Kurdin said.

So, is it very hard to send an automatic reminder template? No. Plenty of software can automate that. But those things, George says, “are the easy parts.” Most existing products stop there and then hand the hard stuff to your team. This may explain why there is no one AR platform that every company in the world uses and is happy with. (Far from it!)

The world accepts AR as a broken hard problem. And the workflows that solve it are deterministic and rigid. The bet that the team at Monk is making is that this is a systems problem that is solved via conversational agents.

Even though AR workflow automation is act 1 of the company, there are a number of technical challenges embedded in this problem:

1. Agent harness for workflows that touch money (evals, observability, reliability, deterministic vs. probabilistic fallback design)

2. Building reliable long-horizon agents (ETL, data hydration, guardrails)

3. Multi-modal agents (voice, text, email)

4. Improvement mechanisms beyond RLHF

5. Distributed systems and data wrangling

6. System design (data modeling, unified abstraction layer, parent/child hierarchies, business domain-specific logic)

7. Customer-facing design (information density, escalation paths, agent design, enterprise-level controls)

A version of an AR platform designed from first principles automates the cash cycle. Including the bits that historically required a human to do well, like sending a custom-written email to a specific person asking them when they are going to make a payment.

This is what Monk built: an AR platform that doesn’t just automate follow-ups, but makes them smarter and context-aware enough to actually strengthen the customer relationships your business runs on.

Monk plugs into your ERP and your CRM, follows up on unpaid invoices, matches incoming bank deposits to the right invoice, produces real-time reports, and lots more. It’s effective at each step of the way because it is using AI agents which can understand context and execute the way a human would; this unlocks capabilities that legacy platforms never had a way to offer. So, if you are a company that uses Monk, you can spend as close to zero hours worrying about payments as is humanly possible with the right escalations and guardrails in place to protect your customer relationships.

Monk already manages more than $1B in receivables for customers. They’ve reduced the amount of time it takes for their customers to get paid by 40%. Their collections messages receive 24% higher response rates vs. standard dunning emails. AR teams using the platform save more than 25 hours a month. Instead of chasing, they get a full picture of their cash position, collections, and which customers need attention, all in one place.

The strategy

The master plan here is much bigger than AR. Writing on his Substack, one of Monk’s investors (Nikhil Basu Trivedi from Footwork) observed that “Stripe started with payment processing. Ramp started with corporate cards. Like those two companies, Monk has the opportunity to move beyond its initial wedge to building a broader B2B finance and revenue platform.”

But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. In order to build a ‘broader B2B finance and revenue platform,’ as Nikhil hopes they will one day do, Monk most likely needs to first win in AR.

So how does Monk achieve the first step?

One way is what I covered when explaining their product, which is that they build the most effective and comprehensive platform; the platform that covers all of the edge cases and takes you from contract to cash. That’s already a leg up on competition.

But it’s very likely that Monk will also need to establish itself as the most trustworthy platform you could use to run your AR. “Revenue automation software has a credibility problem,” George wrote. LLMs and ‘AI-native software’ sounds good, but it also raises doubts for a lot of people. We’ve all seen how AI can hallucinate. We’ve seen how it can be inaccurate, particularly when it comes to getting specific numbers right. These mistakes are intolerable when your product handles customers and revenue.

Monk is solving this by taking a transparent and deterministic approach. By transparent, I mean that customers can drill into anything and everything the product does on their behalf. “Every message, every ambiguity, and every general ledger entry,” Joe Zhou, co-founder, wrote. “Our principle: white-box by design.” This means you’re never left wondering how something happened or where a specific number came from. The info is all there.

And by deterministic, I mean that they wrap LLMs (which are probabilistic) with an additional, non-LLM layer that determines whether the model’s output is actually correct and safe to act on. This is an increasingly common approach when dealing with AI in important contexts, like finance. “There’s no room for error,” George said, and Monk has tested its approach “against thousands of edge cases.”

You can start to envision the arc. Build a reliable, effective, trustworthy AI automation product, put it at the center of cashflow for huge numbers of businesses, and then expand in a bunch of useful ways. The growth so far suggests it’s working.

The growth

Co-founders George and Joe make for a confidence-inspiring pair. George worked at D.E. Shaw, spent years as a professional poker player, ran product at Minecraft, and was GM of Streamlabs through its sale to Logitech in 2019. Joe was at Intuit, then Google, then Snap.

The two spent months getting to know each other (mostly by going on runs) before starting Monk. They mocked up fintech products in Figma and pitched them to more than 200 CFOs across stages and sectors. AR landed almost every time, so they started work on Monk.

Today, just six months after Monk came out of stealth in October 2025, Monk manages over $1B in receivables. Customers include AI-forward companies like ElevenLabs, Profound, Siro, Subject, Unify, and Pump. When I asked George about revenue, he told me ARR was up 10x in the past 6 months. Much of this early growth (especially during the first few months) happened with no dedicated marketing spend at all. It’s mainly been “email and inbound,” George said. (This is generally an encouraging thing to hear; people really, really want what Monk is building!)

Investors have moved fast, too. Better Tomorrow Ventures led Monk’s $4M seed in spring 2025, and a year later, Footwork and Acrew co-led a $25M Series A.

Much of this success is, George said, “talent density + past experience + our DNA/culture. Deeply believe that our judgement and sense of urgency/obsession with winning will beat out everyone else, regardless of their funding or our late start.” Which begs the question: just what would it be like to go and work at Monk?

The culture

When I asked George what success for Monk would look like, he said building it is building a truly useful applied AI platform loved by customers. He said something else, though, which struck me as a bit more rare: Monk will be a success if “100s of early teammates go on to build successful businesses.”

When I asked how he pitches the work to people who want to join, George said he will “share everything I’ve learned over the last 20 years and help you become a founder.”

This was, I thought, an uncommon way to talk about the startup culture. And as I chatted with the team and looked deeper into how work gets done at Monk, it’s clear that this very founder-esque focus is a big part of how they get their work done and think about winning.

“I had ownership and trust the moment I walked in the door,” Henry McQueen (ops) said, “with the opportunity to work on anything that drives us forward. On my first day, George said ‘let nothing fester, be relentless with questions, max transparency’. That’s how the team operates.”

“I am genuinely, enthusiastically proud of what I’m doing,” Nurah Kutty, also in ops, said. “Coming from banking, it is very different to have nobody telling me what to do and no structure or process to follow. I choose where to focus, and when something goes well I know it’s mine.”

Even on their careers page, Monk is quite clear that they care about winning and outcomes more than anything else. Part of the description for their Applied AI role reads: “we do not care about your education, age, location, or past titles. All that matters is (1) your heart, (2) whether you have taste/exercise good judgement, and (3) if can ship quality code faster than us.”

There’s a culture of “extreme transparency,” Henry told me, and almost everything is discussed publicly rather than in private DMs. Meetings are rarely (“if ever”) scheduled. People tend to work long hours, not for its own sake but as an input to producing a lot of great work.

Of course, the team (and the founders) care a lot about everyone at Monk and want to make sure everyone is feeling good about the work. Nurah said that George is “constantly asking what he could do better and how he can help. On my first week, he asked me: are you happy? Do you like this? What would you like more? What do you like the least?”

All of which raises a natural question…

Should you join Monk?

Success and failure at Monk are rather straightforward. If you succeed, you are “always learning,” George said. And you are an “owner with an obsessive work ethic. You know when to rip it and go deep on a problem.” (More of that founder mindset.) If you fail at Monk, it is probably because you are “not learning/not improving.”

This criteria alone should give you a good feel for whether or not it might be a good fit to reach out about a role. If you’re at a stage of life where you feel like you just want to come into a company and execute what you know how to do (as opposed to becoming 2x or 5x or 10x better), then Monk might not be the right fit for you. And vice versa.

The Monk team believes that this intense culture of pace and ownership is exactly what they need to become the company they’d like to become. To beat all the competition and build a generational B2B revenue platform. If you think you’d be a good fit to help them build a category winning platform, check out their open roles.

Thanks to Monk for supporting Next Play and making this spotlight possible.

Another challenge for you this week: send three cold e-mails. You can use this guide we wrote that many people seem to like, or just freestyle it. What’s important for building momentum is simply that you send some e-mails. That could be to companies on this list below or people you find interesting.

And if you want help with the latter, I encourage you to check out our Slack group, where you’ll meet loads of unique/ambitious people. You can join here.

Join Friends of Next Play

Co-founders and people to jam with:

• Naitik is a design engineer who previously was employee #1 at a YC company that’s grown to $180m+ in payments volume. Thinking about new AI agent products like a life coach or designer. Reach out: naitikmmehta@gmail.com.

• Jen was the head of design at Masterclass and several other startups. She’s looking at building a new company, and enjoys working in complicated/regulated spaces. Reach out: j@magicalthinking.co.

• Newest list of people open to meeting a cofounder (part 3).

Hiring? Email us (hi@nextplay.so), we’d love to introduce you to great candidates.

Early teams:

• Patrick is hiring founding team members including a head of GTM and head of marketing. He previously founded Dandy, a dental operating system that’s valued at over $1b. Now he’s building a new AI-native OS in an adjacent healthcare vertical. Reach out: patrickylee1@gmail.com. (SF/NYC/Toronto)

• Julie from Rentana is hiring a strategy and operations associate. They are building an AI copilot for the real estate industry. Apply here. (NYC)

• Monique from Factir is hiring a founding software engineer. They are building a financial account for cross-border trade. Reach out: monique@factir.com. (SF, Toronto)

• Andrea from Beezie is hiring. They are building a trading platform for collectibles that has $3m+ on-chain. Apply here. (Remote)

• Philip from Crunched is hiring a growth manager, an account executive, and an excel person. They are building an AI agent for analysts who use excel. Apply here. (NYC, Oslo)

• Jason from Clad is hiring a founding BDR. They are building project management software for building infrastructure. Apply here. (NYC)

• Eugen from Edra is hiring a founding account executive. They are building an AI platform to run operations for enterprises, and they are backed by Sequoia. Apply here. (NYC)

• Jack from Kickoff is hiring an AI product builder. They are building a personal training platform that’s growing double digit percentages every week at an 8-digit scale. Apply here. (NYC)

• Anvisha from Moda is hiring a GTM engineer. They are building an AI design platform that recently went viral. Apply here. (NYC, SF)

• Eva from Altara is hiring a chief of staff and a founding GTM person. They are building scientific intelligence for the physical world. Apply here. (SF)

• Ron from Aryon is hiring an account executive. They are building a cloud based security platform. Apply here. (Remote, Tel Aviv)

• Rae from Maneva is hiring a forward deployed engineer. They are building an AI operating system for manufacturers. Apply here. (Chicago, NYC, Denver, Atlanta)

• Vedant from Salus is hiring a founding GTM/BDR person. They are building runtime guardrails for agents. Apply here. (SF, Remote)

• Akash from Storylane is hiring a sales development representative. They are building demo automation software that reached $10m+ ARR with a small team. Apply here. (SF)

• Here’s a list of companies we made of 39 companies that like to hire future founders.

Scaling startups:

• Amanda from Recall is hiring a growth marketer. They are building an API for meeting recording. Apply here. (SF)

• Varun from Clay is hiring across 83 roles: brand, FDE, sales, design, and more. They recently did an employee tender offer at a $5 billion valuation as they scale their growth and data platform. Apply here. (NYC, SF, London)

• Parker from Valence is hiring a strategy and operations associate and an engineer. They are building an AI-native coaching platform. Apply here. (NYC, Toronto, Seattle, Austin, SF)

• Anh-Tho from Lago is hiring a growth chief of staff. They have over 10k+ stars on Github. They are building an AI-native billing platform. Apply here. (Remote)

• John from Kaizen is hiring a deployment strategist and founding people operations manager. They are building an operating system for American public services that reaches 40 million US residents across 50+ agencies in 17 states. Apply here. (NYC)

• Carl from Stepful is hiring in marketing: performance marketing, partnerships, b2b marketing, and more. They just raised $55m to scale their healthcare training platform. Apply here. (NYC)

• Sara from Adaption Labs is hiring a head of enterprise sales and a growth lead. They are building an adaptive AI platform that raised $60m. Apply here. (Remote)

• Ashley from Thatch is hiring a product manager. They are building a health benefits platform that’s raised $40m. Apply here. (Remote)

• John from Raptive is hiring a head of intelligence products. They are building a creator-driven advertising platform. Apply here. (Remote)

• Sydney from Tixel is hiring a global operations lead. They are building a ticket marketplace. Apply here. (Sydney, Melbourne)

• Nathan from Perplexity is hiring a people generalist. They last raised $200m at a $20b valuation for their AI search platform. Apply here. (London)

• Paul from Morpho is hiring a strategic partner manager and an account manager. They just raised $175m to build their open credit network. Apply here. (Remote)

• Hadrien from Alta Ares is hiring a defense salesperson and an office manager. They are building an air defense platform. Apply here. (Paris)

• Alon from PointFive is hiring enterprise salespeople. They just raised $60m for their AI efficiency operating system for finops and engineering teams. Apply here. (London, NYC)

• Joubin from Roadrunner is hiring a product marketer. They are an incubation of the VC fund Kleiner Perkins and raised $27m to build an AI-native CPQ platform. Apply here. (SF)

• Eric from Goodfire is hiring across 20+ roles: GTM, people, ops, and more. They are building an AI interpretability platform. Apply here. (SF, NYC)

• Max from Flourish is hiring an account executive and an email marketer. They have over $1.1 trillion in assets on their platform for financial advisors. Apply here. (NYC)

• David from EliseAI is hiring across sales, engineering, design, and more. They just reached $200m in ARR. They are building an AI platform for healthcare and property management. Apply here. (NYC, SF, Boston, Chicago)

Investing and other:

• Nathan from Pear VC is hiring a former founder who wants to be a VC. Apply here. (SF)

• Erin from Gradient Ventures is hiring a talent person. Apply here. (SF)

• AlleyCorp is hiring an events leader. Apply here. (NYC)

• Mario from Emerge VC is hiring a head of platform. Apply here. (London)

Resources and tools:

• Check out FDEverything - Sanjay’s new newsletter we helped make focused on all things forward deployed.

• How to reclaim your attention this weekend.

• Underrated essays that’ll help you with your career.

• How to get better at your job.

• Slow tools: where are the tools that help you really be more productive?

Note:

• Thanks for reading! If you have any notes, thoughts, or suggestions, please send us an email: hi@nextplay.so.

• Would appreciate if you could upvote and share this edition if you liked it. Thanks so much!

Reading a useful essay can go a really long way at helping you clarify your thoughts and make important life decisions. I put together a collection of essays that have helped me in the past, and imagine they could be helpful to you. Especially people thinking about their career in some way: starting a new company, switching jobs, trying to level up at work, etc. Hope it’s useful! Email me hi@nextplay.so if you have any feedback or suggestions. Enjoy :)

Staring into the abyss as a core life skill

By Ben Kuhn

Recently I’ve been thinking about how all my favorite people are great at a skill I’ve labeled in my head as “staring into the abyss.”

Staring into the abyss means thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs, or in favor of breaking up with your partner. It’s common to procrastinate on thinking hard about these things because it might require you to acknowledge that you were very wrong about something in the past, and perhaps wasted a bunch of time based on that (e.g. dating the wrong person or praying to the wrong god). However, in most cases you have to either admit this eventually or, if you never admit it, lock yourself into a sub-optimal future life trajectory, so it’s best to be impatient and stare directly into the uncomfortable topic until you’ve figured out what to do.

The advice I would give on a mentorship call

By Avital Balwit

Value your free time. While it may not feel like it, you will have some of your most free time during university. You likely don’t have kids, you likely don’t have a full-time job and a full-on life, you may live in a dormitory. In general your life will be simpler than it will be at other points. It also will be one of the few protected times for learning and so there is an argument that you should spend it doing that, but if you want to fill it with other stuff.

Cold emails. As someone who gets a lot of cold emails and doesn’t reply to most of them, it might be odd for me to tell you to do cold emails. I do actually read all of my cold emails. The ideal cold email is sweet, specific, and shows that the person values my time. They explain who they are and why I should care about them, what they want from me and why me specifically, and ideally they have a doable ask. Maybe they have a question that they want answered in that email, or maybe they have a specific reason they want a short call. It’s probably good for these emails to be somewhat flattering to the person. And they should never be essay-length. I have sent many cold emails. I have not gotten responses to all of them, but I have gotten responses to a few that turned out to be helpful or at least deeply encouraging. Cold emails are a good way to search out internships, though probably your first ask should not be an internship. It should be something else that is more manageable.

Radical Responsibility

By Andrew Bosworth

When presenting work I have a simple rule: never let anyone outflank you with criticism.

I don’t want anyone to be more critical of my work than I am. If I did something wrong I want to be the one to say it. If there is a risk I want to highlight it. If there is conflict I want to expose it. I recall one particular review when someone raised a concern about a bug they had read about. I quickly assured them: “oh no, it is much worse than you think” and proceeded with a litany of related mistakes they hadn’t read about. I adopted this approach early in my career and feel it is a major contributor to the roles I’ve been trusted to take on. Many people have a strong instinct to present their work in a favorable light. It seems like the obvious thing to do to ensure continued support. Unfortunately that introduces an antagonistic dynamic to reviews as people feel compelled to dig to get to the truth. When they discover they were presented an optimistic view, reviewers will inevitably wonder whether you were dissembling or unaware of the challenges. Paradoxically attempts to bolster trust tend to undermine it.

You have more than one goal, and that’s fine

By Julia Wise

I have lots of goals. I have a goal of improving the world. I have a goal of enjoying time with my children. I have a goal of being a good spouse. I have a goal of feeling connected in my friendships and community. Those are all fine goals, but they’re not the same. I have a rough plan for allocating time and money between them: Sunday morning is for making pancakes for my kids. Monday morning is for work. It doesn’t make sense to mix these activities, to spend time with my kids in a way that contributes to my work or to do my job in a way that my kids enjoy.

But when you make a decision, be clear with yourself about which goals you’re pursuing. You don’t have to argue that your choice is the best way of improving the world if that isn’t actually the goal. It’s fine to support your local arts organization because their work gives you joy, because you want to be active in your community, or because they helped you and you want to reciprocate. If you also have a goal of improving the world as much as you can, decide how much time and money you want to allocate to that goal, and try to use those resources as effectively as you can.

I could do that in a weekend!

By Dan Luu

I can’t think of a single large software company that doesn’t regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.” Benjamin Pollack and Jeff Atwood called out people who do that with Stack Overflow. But Stack Overflow is relatively obviously lean, so the general response is something like “oh, sure maybe Stack Overflow is lean, but FooCorp must really be bloated”. And since most people have relatively little visibility into FooCorp, for any given value of FooCorp, that sounds like a plausible statement. After all, what product could possible require hundreds, or even thousands of engineers?

Businesses that actually care about turning a profit will spend a lot of time (hence, a lot of engineers) working on optimizing systems, even if an MVP for the system could have been built in a weekend. There’s also a wide body of research that’s found that decreasing latency has a significant effect on revenue over a pretty wide range of latencies for some businesses. Increasing performance also has the benefit of reducing costs. Businesses should keep adding engineers to work on optimization until the cost of adding an engineer equals the revenue gain plus the cost savings at the margin. This is often many more engineers than people realize.

The Mental Model Fallacy

By Cedric Chin

The upshot of this argument is this: don’t read blogs written by non-practitioners, spouting insights that aren’t related to their field of practice. Don’t read Farnam Street. Don’t read self-help hacks on Medium who haven’t achieved much in life. Hell, don’t read this blog — especially if your career goals diverge from mine. I have little to offer you that practice cannot.

Instead read from the source material of practitioners in fields you inhabit, copy their actions, climb their skill trees, and reflect through trial and error.

sparkly people and how to find them

By Anson Yun

Friends and I call it the “sparkle”. They reliably shine in every context. It’s a joie de vivre mixed in with a dedication to craft, lightly encased in wit. Chances are, they’ll become the best in their field (and have fun doing it). You just want to be around them. They have a good vibe.

Note that the “sparkle” is limited to people that are actively prosocial. Being nefarious, even in trace amounts, takes away from the bit.

I care a lot about is finding these people - particularly, picking them out early. Selfishly, they’re fun to be around. Tactically, I think more of them should know each other. I attribute most of any personal success to good luck and great friends. I’d like to enable that for someone else.

Why not to do a startup

By Pmarca

First, and most importantly, realize that a startup puts you on an emotional rollercoaster unlike anything you have ever experienced.

You will flip rapidly from a day in which you are euphorically convinced you are going to own the world, to a day in which doom seems only weeks away and you feel completely ruined, and back again.

Over and over and over.

And I’m talking about what happens to stable entrepreneurs.

There is so much uncertainty and so much risk around practically everything you are doing. Will the product ship on time? Will it be fast enough? Will it have too many bugs? Will it be easy to use? Will anyone use it? Will your competitor beat you to market? Will you get any press coverage? Will anyone invest in the company? Will that key new engineer join? Will your key user interface designer quit and go to Google? And on and on and on...

The Fishing Contest

By Quarter Mile

Late morning now. Still no fish. One of the other guys fishing down the pier comes up and asks me if it’s my first time at the fishing contest. “Yeah,” I tell him. He laughs and walks away. I’m not sure why he laughs. Later I will find out. For now I just keep casting and casting and casting.

What should we be worried about?

By Eric Weinstein

I know that those few of us actively involved in the struggle are deeply worried about the epidemic of excellence precisely because excellence compels its hosts to facilitate its spread by altering their perception of its costs and benefits. Most educated people have come to revere the spending of the fabled ‘10,000 hours’ in training to become respected jacks of one trade. Large numbers of Americans push their inquisitive children away from creative play so that they can excel in their studies in hopes they will become excellent candidates for admission to a center of excellence, to join the pursuit of excellence upon graduation.

The problem with all this is that we cannot excel our way out of modern problems. Within the same century, we have unlocked the twin nuclei of both cell and atom and created the conditions for synthetic biological and even digital life with computer programs that can spawn with both descent and variation on which selection can now act. We are in genuinely novel territory which we have little reason to think we can control; only the excellent would compare these recent achievements to harmless variations on the invention of the compass or steam engine. So surviving our newfound god-like powers will require modes that lie well outside expertise, excellence, and mastery.

The Idea Maze

By Balaji Srinivasan

One answer is that a good founder doesn’t just have an idea, s/he has a bird’s eye view of the idea maze. Most of the time, end-users only see the solid path through the maze taken by one company. They don’t see the paths not taken by that company, and certainly don’t think much about all the dead companies that fell into various pits before reaching the customer. The maze is a reasonably good analogy (Figure 1. Sometimes there are pits you just can’t cross. Sometimes you can get past a particular minotaur/enter a new market, but only after you’ve gained treasure in another area of the maze (Google going after email after it made money in search). Sometimes the maze itself shifts over time, and new doors open as technologies arrive (Pandora on the iPhone). Sometimes there are pits that are uncrossable for you, but are crossable by another (Webvan failed, but Amazon, Walmart, and Safeway have the distribution muscle to succeed). And sometimes there are pitfalls that are only apparent when one company has reached scale, problems which require entering the maze at the very beginning with a new weapon (e.g. Google’s Pagerank was inspired in part by Alta Vista’s problems at scale, problems that were not apparent in 1991). A good founder is thus capable of anticipating which turns lead to treasure and which lead to certain death. A bad founder is just running to the entrance of (say) the “movies/music/filesharing/P2P” maze or the “photosharing” maze without any sense for the history of the industry, the players in the maze, the casualties of the past, and the technologies that are likely to move walls and change assumptions.

How to make the best of the most important century?

By Holden Karnofsky

The path to the future that seems worst is Misaligned AI, in which AI systems end up with non-human-compatible objectives of their own and seek to fill the galaxy according to those objectives. How seriously should we take this risk - how hard will it be to avoid this outcome? How hard will it be to solve the “alignment problem,” which essentially means having the technical ability to build systems that won’t do this?9

Should we be expecting transformative AI within the next 10-20 years, or much later? Will the leading AI systems go from very limited to very capable quickly (”hard takeoff”) or gradually (”slow takeoff”)?12 Should we hope that government projects play a major role in AI development, or that transformative AI primarily emerges from the private sector? Are some governments more likely than others to work toward transformative AI being used carefully, inclusively and humanely? What should we hope a government (or company) literally does if it gains the ability to dramatically accelerate scientific and technological advancement via AI?

What should you do with your life?

By Alexey Guzey

Write down a shortlist of problems that seem exciting

Leave 1-3 most exciting and tractable problems via pairwise comparison of problems from the shortlist (like how tournaments decide on which team is the most “exciting”)

Start learning everything you need to start working on the problem.

I am going to make you a job offer that seems ridiculous: you get a phone, and your goal is to answer it. If you answer, you make $10,000. If you don’t answer, you make nothing. The phone is going to ring at least a few dozen times per day. What would you say?

You would probably say that it sounds like the easiest job in the world. I would agree. You would then ask me what the catch is. And I would answer by adding a few constraints:

• You are never actually in the office

• You are busy with other work all of the time and can rarely pick up

• Calls often come in simultaneously (and they won’t call back)

• You will get calls when you’re not around to answer them (at dinner, at 4AM)

Who cares, you say, $10,000 is a lot of money! “I’ll just hire a team.” But people are expensive, and you can only hire so many. Each of them works a shift and then goes home; on nights, weekends, and holidays, the phone rings in the dark. People get sick. They quit, and they quit often. When there are more calls than people to answer them, the calls wait on hold and aren’t afraid to hang up. Oh, and sometimes, your stressed-out call team makes mistakes.

Trickier than you thought, eh?

What I have just described is the problem that most home services businesses in the United States (think HVAC, plumbing, electrical, garage door, and similar) have to deal with. For these businesses, one call can mean many thousands of dollars, but picking up the phone is hard. Scheduling is hard. Follow-ups are hard. Re-engaging dead leads and old customers is hard.

Doing the actual, important work—the work that keeps America running—is hard enough. Running a smooth front-office operation on top of it is, for many, basically impossible.

This is what the startup we are covering today, Avoca, is solving. Over the past 3 years, Avoca has become the market leader in AI-powered front office software for home service businesses. They’re used by many of the largest services companies in the country. And in April, Avoca raised a Series B at a $1B valuation to continue fueling their growth to become, as co-founder Tyson Chen told me, “a massive, generational ($100B+) company that serves as the agentic AI layer for the multi-trillion services economy.”

So…

What is Avoca building? How does it work? How will they win? And should you join?

The product

Avoca answers the phone for home services businesses. It does other things, too (like web chat, outbound campaigns, and analytics), but got its start taking calls and booking jobs.

The way Avoca gets used is rather straightforward:

• A potential customer calls.

• Avoca’s AI agent picks up in seconds.

• The customizable agent takes personal information and books the job; often within 90 seconds

• The booking syncs directly into the business’s CRM, like ServiceTitan.

Calls don’t go to voicemail, and customers don’t wait on hold or navigate one of those clunky automated menus (called IVR). If a call is too complex or for some reason can’t be handled by Avoca’s AI, it’s passed smoothly off to a human with all of the relevant context prepared so the human can pick up and know exactly what is going on.

I think the size of the impact here is perhaps hard to grasp if you do not run (or have never worked with) a home service business. But this is a really, really big deal. “I can run a $100M business with 9 CSRs because Avoca handles 70% of our entire call volume — all while booking at a higher rate than ever before,” Bryan Enders, President at H.L. Bowman, said.

Answering calls is the cornerstone, but Avoca is a full front-office platform. For instance, the software can also run outbound campaigns (e.g. to chase a $15k estimate that went dead a few months ago, or to re-engage a customer who hasn’t called in a while). It handles web chats and texts through the same brain, so an online lead gets the same response as a phone call. And it coaches the human CSR team (this was actually Avoca’s first product!) by scoring calls and flagging ways to improve for the future.

The whole platform is built by a team that spends a lot of time with the customers using it, which is part of why the software is so effective. “When a customer told us a five-minute route on Google Maps was actually forty minutes for a truck that can’t take the parkway, we shipped a truck-routing fix that weekend,” Rong Ye, a software engineer, told me. “That kind of insight only comes from being in the room.”

The strategy

You hear a lot about tech startups building the “back office” for things. For accounting, for legal, for finance. Something about the back office is sexy to startups and their investors. You also hear a lot about tech startups building products that get adopted by the Fortune 500; prime example, a number of the startups we have written about on Next Play have told us about all of their Fortune 500 customers. This is also, for a lot of founders, rather sexy.

But Avoca has earned success by doing neither of these things. They’ve started by building an AI-powered front office, and they’re building it for home service businesses; these are some of the most underloved industries in the country. (It is probably safe to believe that if Big Tech had the same phone call problem that home services businesses do, thirty identical startups would have fought over solving it years ago.)

So why the front office? Because home services businesses, at least in some ways, live or die by the front office. Most of their revenue (quite literally 90%+ for many) comes in through a phone call. These companies are often doing deals as big as, or bigger than, most B2B tech startups, but their chances of landing a deal feel rather arbitrary; it just depends whether someone picks up the phone and whether they do a good job on that call.

Everything else the business does happens after that first call. So, by starting with the front office, Avoca has put itself at the place almost every dollar needs to pass through.

And why home services? Two reasons. For one, it’s big. Home services are a multi-trillion-dollar part of the economy, and the HVAC market alone is worth more than $50B a year.

The second reason is that few people build great software for home services. Maybe this is because home services is a totally different world from the one most tech people live in. It’s not flashy, most of the founders aren’t on Twitter, they don’t want a demo, they don’t say things like ‘forcing function’ and ‘first principles’ and ‘exponential unlock’. They are just skilled people running successful companies. This can make building for home services feel less glamorous and also more complex in some ways. There’s a different vocabulary, a different vibe.

Put the two together—so, build a front office for the trades—and you start to see where the bigger vision is headed. Tyson Chen, co-founder and co-CEO, told me that he believes “AI will have the most impact not on the F500 but actually the blue collar services economy.” Phone calls are Avoca’s way through the door, but the end-goal is to build a generational company. One day, Avoca’s agents will show up “at every turn for end customers,” Tyson said. “Interact with us when you need your home fixed, junk removed, new car, energy bill questions, and beyond.”

One other reason to believe that Avoca is in a good position to win is their current position in the market. Growth looks good, and it’s fair to say that Avoca is already the market leader.

The growth

While at a restaurant conference in Dallas, the founding team at Avoca met the folks at Rescue Air, one of the biggest HVAC and plumbing companies in the city. Shortly thereafter, Rescue Air became the first in what is now a long list of successful home service companies that use Avoca: Sila, 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, Apex Service Partners, Turnpoint, and thousands of others.

Today, new customers at Avoca mostly come from inbound (referrals, partnerships, marketing) and outbound (cold calling). “We are far and away the market leaders in home services, dominate the enterprise (30%+ of the top 30 PE-backed enterprises use us)... And we have by far the strongest team of engineers and product minds,” Tyson said.

Revenue has grown 8x YoY over the past two years, ARR crossed eight figures last year, and Avoca is on track to book more than $1B in jobs for their customers this year.

Perhaps these statistics are part of the reason Avoca just raised their Series B at a $1B valuation (bringing them to $125M raised in total). Among their investors are firms Kleiner Perkins and Meritech; Alex Clayton, General Partner at Meritech, said that “three years ago, AI voice for home services wasn’t a category. Avoca created it. Today, every major contractor in America knows the name.”

It’s still early, in the grand scheme of things. A billion dollars in booked jobs is a lot, but it’s a sliver in a multi-trillion-dollar market. Most home service businesses are still running their phones the old way. Coupled with the fact that Avoca isn’t going to stop at answering phones, there’s a lot to like about where they might be heading.

The team and culture

You wake up, brush your teeth, make an espresso and take the subway to Union Square station, where you get out and head into the Avoca office nearby. (Or perhaps you do this in Santa Barbara, where Avoca has another, smaller office.) You do this five days a week. What’s it like inside? What will it feel like if you get a job at Avoca?

The first thing to know is that everyone else will be there with you. Avoca is not a remote company and does not seem interested in becoming one. Work, as you will learn, starts fast and you’re expected to take ownership. “Three days in and I was already on a live customer escalation call at 11PM,” an Avoca software engineer said. “That set the tone immediately: at Avoca, when a customer is in trouble, everyone shows up regardless of title or tenure.”

That sense of ownership extends all the way down to the little things. When Federico Crivelli, Head of Partnerships, asked about getting his laptop on the first week, “I was told there was a BestBuy a few blocks down the street.”

Much of how things get decided at Avoca simply comes down to who has the better argument. The culture is “brutally honest,” Rong said. “We dig into first principles and have real discussions about customer pain points. Nobody pulls rank. If you have conviction and data behind your point, it doesn’t matter if you’ve been here three days or three years.”

Along with this relatively flat hierarchy is a lot of room to act on what you think is important. “Early on, our human-in-the-loop service wasn’t working well,” Sissi Li Zhou, a technical account manager at Avoca, told me. “[So] Kareem, our founding engineer, decided he was just going to build the infrastructure to scale that call center himself. He spent full nights at the office for weeks. We now have a call center with 100+ people because of it. That ‘we’ll figure it out’ mentality is what makes me think we’ll win.”

The founders, best friends and co-CEOs Tyson Chen and Apurva Shrivastava, are part of this rather than above it. “I work mostly with Apurva and he’s relentlessly focused on making Avoca successful,” Christian (a founding engineer) said. “It’s part of every conversation we have in some way. He’s great at communicating what’s important. He likes to sarcastically quip about the state of the world of software companies… And is a positive presence with everyone.”

Everyone at Avoca told me they’re impressed by how fast the team moves and how smart everyone around them is. Most startups say this to some extent, but one thing Avoca emphasized more than most was how customer-obsessed they are. There’s a policy at Avoca that every single full-time employee goes live on-site with a customer at least once a year, which I think reflects this obsession better than anything. Avoca clearly cares a lot about their customers. They stay up late shipping for them. They go sit in their trucks on jobs, figuring out what to improve. If you want, you can cross-reference these claims with the outcomes the company has achieved so far; it’s hard to argue customers aren’t happy.

Should you join Avoca?

I asked Tyson how he likes to pitch candidates.

“Avoca is one of the fastest-growing companies in NY that solves a real problem for the physical economy that powers this country. We just raised $125M at a $1B valuation from the top VCs, but it’s still the early innings. We are stacked with talent in every function and are also one of the few AI companies that is insulated from the advancements of the model companies [like] OpenAI and Anthropic.

“We’re 5 days in the office in NY, top of the line comp, and work closely with real business owners in the real world instead of just another SaaS selling to SaaS.”

A reason you might join not listed in Tyson’s list is why Federico joined: “asymmetric upside.” Federico had been chatting with Avoca and another startup, but joined Avoca because it “solves a multi-trillion dollar problem that everyone deals with [and could change] the way regular people around the world communicate with service-based businesses.”

I think there’s a unique opportunity here for the kind of person who is perhaps a bit jaded (or wants insulation from) the kinds of software that usually get funded in tech. Home services is an important but underserved market, and if you find it interesting—personally or financially or both—to make a huge impact on these businesses, you may want to consider Avoca.

The main disqualifier I heard about was a need for structure. “If you don’t drive your own vision and have strong conviction about what’s important, it’s easy to get lost in what needs to be done,” Rong said. “Nobody is going to hand you a neatly scoped ticket and tell you exactly what to build… The people who do well are the ones who see a wide-open field and sprint to the part that matters most. The people who struggle are the ones waiting to be told where to run.”

One place you could run right now is to Avoca’s Careers page. They are currently hiring across most departments in their New York City HQ and for a few roles in Santa Barbara. Cold emails can work, but “LinkedIn is very much welcome as well,” Tyson said.

Thanks to Avoca for supporting Next Play and making this essay possible.

Here’s a list of 39 companies for future founders.

Thank you to Harmonic (startup database) for helping us source this list!

1. Ramp - corporate spend management and cards (NYC / Bay Area / Miami) - Careers

2. Cursor - AI coding platform (NYC / Bay Area) - Careers

3. OpenAI - AI research and products company (NYC / Bay Area / Global) - Careers

4. Vercel - frontend deployment and hosting platform (NYC / Bay Area / Global Remote) - Careers

5. Anduril - defense technology company (NYC / Bay Area / Austin / EU) - Careers

6. Mercury - banking platform for startups and businesses (NYC / Bay Area / US Remote) - Careers

7. Stripe - payments and financial infrastructure (NYC / Chicago / Seattle / Global / US Remote) - Careers

8. ElevenLabs - AI voice synthesis and audio generation (NYC / Global) - Careers

9. Profound - AI marketing visibility and strategy platform (NYC / Bay Area / London / Buenos Aires) - Careers

10. Anthropic - AI safety research and products company (NYC / Bay Area / London / Global) - Career

Read more

Mern, a YC founder, met Owen in the Next Play Community. After becoming friends, Mern eventually hired Owen to be COO and help scale their team.

If you’d like to meet great people, be sure to check out the Friends of Next Play Slack. Tons of ambitious people thinking about their next thing (company building, new job, etc.). You can join here.

Join Friends of Next Play

Co-founders and people to jam with:

• Ananda previously was the founding engineering lead at Uber Elevate. Now he’s a senior engineering manager and active angel investor. He’s looking to find a cofounder, especially at the intersection of marketplaces and applied AI. Reach out: s.anandk.92@gmail.com.

• An anonymous product person leads the AI evals platform at a public tech company. They are looking for a cofounder and has an idea in the AI agent world. Reach out to hi@nextplay.so and we’ll try to connect you.

• Vicente is the founder of the leading independent record label in Portugal. They also spent 5 years as a consultant. Exploring intersection of human-AI collaboration and what does that interface look like for people who will still be profoundly curious and will want to have a hand in their outputs and knowledge. Reach out at vicentefutscher@gmail.com.

Hiring? Email us (hi@nextplay.so), we’d love to help you find the right people and get exposure to the community.

Early teams:

• James from Firefly is hiring a GTM associate. They are building a physical safety platform that protects spaces like a 30,000-student school system and loads of hotels. Apply here. (NYC)

• Ben from Kotcha is hiring a chief of staff. They are building a running platform, co-built with Kipchoge (one of the fastest marathon runners in the world!). Apply here. (Paris)

• Ryan from General Legal is hiring a founding product marketing manager. Their founder previously founded CaseText which sold for $650 million. They are building an ai-native law firm that has 250+ customers and reached over $1m in ARR during YC. Apply here. (SF, NYC, Remote)

• Rick Rubin is hiring an “AI summer resident” to teach him how to use AI. He is the co-founder of Def Jam records and one of the pioneers of hip hop music production. Apply here. (LA, Remote)

• Shivam from Arca is hiring a founding GTM lead and founding engineer. They have signed six-figure enterprise contracts for their agent platform for compliance/legal. Apply here. (NYC)

• Laurel from Hampr is hiring a director of business development. They are building an on-demand laundry service. Apply here. (Dallas)

• Drew from Goose is hiring an implementation specialist, a product manager, and a salesperson. They are building an operating system for pet businesses. Apply here. (Chicago)

• Chandler is hiring a chief of staff. They are building a platform that helps people turn ideas into best-selling books. Apply here. (Austin)

• Will from Bob is hiring a growth and social lead. They are one of the fastest growing d2c brands in the UK with over 50,000 customers and 2 million in revenue. They are building a refillable all-in-one body wash. Apply here. (London)

• Sundar from Mozart AI is hiring a founder’s associate. They are building an AI music platform that has 250k+ users. Apply here. (London)

• Phil from Linkup is hiring a founding salesperson. They are building a web search API for agents. Apply here. (NYC, SF, Paris)

• James from Artificial Societies is hiring a forward deployed engineer. They are building a human simulation platform that helps fortune 500 companies understand how real world audiences think. Apply here. (London)

• Nisha from YourCadre is hiring a founding GTM person. They are building AI agents that PE firms deploy into their portfolio companies. Apply here. (NYC)

• Jake from Scotch is hiring customer success people. They are building an operating system for alcohol retailers. Apply here. (Denver)

• Jean-Denis from Town is hiring a business operations person. They are building a proactive AI assistant. Apply here. (SF)

• Ofek from Forage is hiring an account executive and a product lead. They are building a payments stack that helps grocers accept EBT payments. Apply here. (SF, NYC)

Two quick things for you:

1. We’re experimenting building out an AI-powered Next Play talent agent that sends you personalized job recommendations at interesting companies. It’ll start free, fill out this quick form to get early access/be a beta tester (<1 minute).

2. We heard your feedback. We’re partnering with a former Palantir forward-deployed engineer to build out a newsletter focused on all things forward-deployed. Fill out this quick form to learn more first (<1 minute).

Scaling startups:

• Will from Column is hiring a growth person and a strategic partnerships lead. They previously founded Plaid ($8 billion valuation). They are building a bank that offers technology-forward banking solutions to customers like Ramp and Mercury. Apply here. (SF)

• Matt from Curri is hiring a strategy and operations manager (and for 23 other roles). They are building a last-mile delivery service for the construction industry. Apply here. (NYC)

• Valentin from Studio is hiring a creator growth and operations person. They are building a platform that helps 500+ creators (like Casey Neistat, Mark Rober, Kygo, David Blaine, and many more) build their AI-powered coaching apps. Apply here. (NYC)

• Rissa from Fish Audio is hiring a head of finance and operations, and an AE. They grew from $0 to $15m ARR in 11 months with 7m+ users. They are building an AI text-to-speech platform. Apply here. (SF, Remote)

• Jason from Faire is hiring a head of finance systems and data. They are building a wholesale technology platform that’s grown to $550m+ in annualized revenue. Apply here. (SF)

• Kendall from Warp is hiring sales development representatives and account executives. They are building an ai-native employee management platform that’s raised over $85m. Apply here. (NYC, Remote)

• Chris from Hanover Park is hiring a founding account executive. They are building an ai-native fund-admin that’s raised over $31 million. Apply here. (NYC)

• Paul from Supabase is hiring across every department: sales, engineering, product, and more. They just raised $500m as they scale their development platform. Apply here. (Remote)

• Steven from Allen Control Systems is hiring across supply chain and manufacturing and HR. They are building autonomous defense systems. Apply here. (Austin)

• Itai from Honeycomb is hiring for sales, HR, and product. They just raised $40m to build their real estate insurance platform. Apply here. (Austin, Chicago, NYC, Remote)

• Steijn from Lassie is hiring a business operations person and a founding recruiter. They are building an AI back office platform for doctors and dentists. Apply here. (SF)

• Michael from Canals is hiring a VP of finance, a director of revenue operations, and a field marketing manager. They are fully profitable. They are building AI for manufacturers. Apply here. (Remote, NYC)

• 32 startups now hiring with $10m-$50m in funding.

Investing and other:

• Joe Lonsdale, founder of Palantir and 8VC, is hiring a technical builder and a social media writer. Apply here. (Austin)

• Rob from Dragonfly is hiring investors on their growth fund and on their early stage fund. Apply here. (NYC)

• Parker from Pillar is hiring an investment analyst. Apply here. (Boston)

• Stan from Volta Ventures is hiring a chief of staff. Apply here. (Belgium)

Resources and tools:

• Career hypnosis: a guide to thinking more clearly about your career.

• Sam Altman’s essay from 2018 on how to become more productive.

Note:

• Thanks for reading! If you have any notes, thoughts, or suggestions, please send us an email: hi@nextplay.so.

• Would appreciate if you could upvote and share this edition if you liked it. Thanks so much!

There’s a common arc for human technology that goes something like this:

1. Humans invent a new technology.

2. This technology is good, but has flaw(s) that prevent mass adoption.

3. Humans create new infrastructure that unlocks the full power of the technology.

4. Everyone wins, especially the humans who made that new infrastructure.

This happened with penicillin, which was promising but couldn’t be used at scale until humans came up with a new mass-production process in the ‘40s. It happened with electricity, which was limited by the short range of the DC current until AC took over. It happened with planes, which were speed-constrained by propellers until people invented the jet engine.

It feels a bit like we might be at phase 2 of that arc with AI.

Depending on who you listen to, AI is one of the greatest pieces of technology humanity has ever created. It’s going to transform everything. It’s going to make everything better. That’s what they say. And if you’ve ever used any kind of modern LLM, you can certainly see the potential; AI can do a lot of powerful stuff and it can sometimes feel impressive.

But I wouldn’t blame you if you looked around and asked… Where is all of the progress? Where is all of this mass adoption? One example of this lack of progress is in finance. Where are the investment banking analysts, or the private equity associates, suddenly being 10X more productive? Why are they still working 80+ hours per week (the pain AI was meant to solve)?

What gives? You could come up with a lot of reasons, but I’d argue there is one rather obvious explanation for why AI is still stuck at the door in a lot of major industries: accuracy.

LLMs hallucinate (i.e. generate the wrong information) a lot. This could be okay if you’re working on a personal project with no stakes. But if you’re an investment banker researching a deal, for instance, one wrong number can lose you millions of dollars.

Accuracy is a big deal, and today’s AI can rarely promise it.

Kepler, the startup we’re covering today, is building new infrastructure that aims to take AI through phase 3 of the technology arc and beyond; infrastructure that will, if successful, be a necessary layer in every industry where accuracy matters.

Their approach is to stop asking LLMs to do what they’re bad at, and to instead build a new deterministic trust layer. And they’ve started in an industry that is extremely allergic to getting it wrong: finance.

The product

Say you are an equity research analyst and you need to compare gross margins between AAPL and MSFT over the last four quarters. You would rather not spend valuable time doing this yourself, so you ask your favorite LLM.

The LLM comes back with a confident answer. It tells you that it is completely sure that it calculated the right numbers. And sure, it might have. But it also could have…

• Generated a confident-looking number out of thin air.

• Found a filing from a year ago and pretended it was this year’s.

• Found the right filing but pulled the wrong line items from it.

• Found the right line items but did the math wrong.

• Found the right filings but cited the wrong sources.

• Mixed filings from different periods or companies within the same answer.

• [This list could be 100s of bullets long. But I’ll spare you.]

Bad news for you is that LLMs do some version of this—some version of getting it wrong—pretty often. With many finance questions, major models tend to get it wrong more often than they get it right. (For example, on the foundational task of pulling the right line item out of a 10-K, frontier models only get it right between 38% and 46% of the time.)

And so, if you are this equity research analyst, AI is mostly useless when you are dealing with anything that requires accuracy (which you often are). If you can’t trust the AI’s numbers then you need to double-check yourself, at which point you have saved no time at all.

The reason this hasn’t been solved yet is that “hallucinations are a structural property of how these systems work,” Vinoo Ganesh, co-founder and CEO, told me. There is no such thing as a hallucination-free LLM, Vinoo says, because LLMs are basically just big probability machines.

Most existing products in the space are just LLMs with finance reskins; the AI itself still generates numbers, which means it can hallucinate. Their approach is not to fix the LLM, but to instead build a separate layer underneath it:

• The LLM only figures out what you’re asking

• A separate, deterministic, non-AI system pulls the data and does the math

• A semantic layer that ties everything together, making sure that the LLM and retrieval layer speak the same vocabulary (which is often unique per company)

When Kepler’s AI gives you an answer, it’s backed by real data that was calculated separately from your query to the LLM. You can click any number and see the exact filing, page, and line item it came from, which lets you be confident without running the numbers yourself. Kepler’s output shows up where work really happens (e.g. Excel, PowerPoint, Word), which is a lot better than a chat answer an analyst needs to copy and reformat and validate by hand.

“In finance, the model can’t be the whole system,” John McRaven, Kepler’s co-founder and CTO, said. “We treat it as one stage in a pipeline whose job is to hand the model exactly what it needs to succeed exactly at that stage.”

Kepler also learns how you do your job. Every desk at every fund has its own quirks: how they treat convertible debt, how they handle diluted shares, which assumptions go into an EV calculation. Tell Kepler once, and it applies the rule every time after that. A generic LLM averages toward consensus, but in finance, consensus loses money; personalization is important.

Kepler started with finance because it was an industry where wrong answers are extremely expensive (meaning people are willing to pay a lot to avoid them). But the accuracy problem with AI, as you might imagine, extends far beyond finance.

And if Kepler is able to succeed, you should expect to see their architecture show up everywhere else accuracy, auditability, and verifiability matter. (The team told me they’re already getting inbound from people in other industries asking to implement Kepler’s architecture on their datasets.)

The strategy

It is not outlandish to say that trustworthiness is one of the biggest problems that still needs to be solved for LLMs to achieve their full potential (however you would define that). A huge amount of the hesitation around using AI is not knowing whether you can trust the things it is saying to you, and a huge amount of the ridicule directed at AI companies takes the shape of “look at this dumb AI saying dumb untrue things.”

In the future, “the default answer to the question ‘how do I use AI in trustworthy ways is Kepler,” Vinoo said. Kepler will be used everywhere it matters: “in finance, in law, in medicine, in defense, in any domain where being wrong has real consequences.” In other words, if you want to produce accurate and verifiable work using AI, you’ll need to use Kepler’s infrastructure.

Finance may have been the smartest place to start, and the future holds a lot more. But the skeptic in you might voice concerns. “Why won’t the big model labs just do this better?” you might ask. There are two answers.

The first is that the labs are not really trying to do this. Every dollar a foundation model lab spends building per-customer data infrastructure, vertical-specific ontologies, and the coding of how Desk A treats convertible debt differently from Desk B, Vinoo says, “is not a dollar spent on the core model.” Their economics push them further up the stack.

The second is that Kepler isn’t really competing with the labs. Other “AI for finance” companies build features on top of a foundation model, and those features are at risk the day a lab ships something similar. Kepler builds the layer underneath. This infrastructure (which is a lot deeper into the plumbing than foundation labs go) is complementary with what companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are building. It opens up potential use cases for their LLMs, which can now be used in higher-trust workflows that previously (and still today) defaulted to manual work.

The team and growth

Co-founders Vinoo Ganesh and John McRaven spent a combined 18 years at Palantir, where they spent time working in demanding, accuracy-focused environments. John ran Palantir’s time-series and analytics products with customers like BP and Airbus. Vinoo led the Spark group across Foundry and led a number of customer engagements across financial and defense verticals (including in Afghanistan).

After Palantir, Vinoo ran a geospatial company called Veraset to $15MM ARR and an acquisition. He then worked as the Head of Business Engineering at Citadel, building for the PMs that are basically Kepler’s target customers today. The two founders have, in other words, already built deterministic data infrastructure at scale in some of the most difficult environments to do so. Kepler is the inevitable extension of this background.

The team around them takes the same impressive shape. Just look at some of their founding team: Susannah Meyer, founding engineer, came from Meta and was Head of Engineering at Enigma Labs. Sara Kromwijk spent eleven years at Palantir leading projects like Palantir’s ontology layer. Chris Martin spent 15 years at Palantir working on optimization problems across the organization. Sean Gorsky directed ML at Capital One. Rui Zhang managed a 100M+ chemicals business before joining the investment team at a 10B industrials PE firm. Eddie Hammond ran business operations across Oddity through its IPO.

“They’re the kind of team who could get comfortable jobs at a frontier lab any day,” one person on the team told me. “But instead chose to build together.”

There’s less to say publicly about funding, partly by design, since Kepler hasn’t formally announced a round. But Vinoo confirmed they’ve raised $7M+ from operators who built the data and AI systems the rest of the industry now runs on (including the founders of OpenAI, Meta AI Research, MotherDuck, dbt Labs, Outerbounds, and Square/Block.)

Kepler keeps its growth numbers quiet by design. In finance, access to a tool like this is itself an edge, and many of their customers don’t want competitors knowing they use it, so staying low-profile is the point. ‘We have an unreal amount of customer inbound,’ Susannah Meyer said, ‘our entire focus right now is on shipping product to service that demand.’ Outside validation has started showing up regardless. In April, Anthropic published a piece about Kepler, the kind of recognition most startups don’t get this early.

The culture

Before writing a single line of code for Kepler, Vinoo and John spent sixteen hours in a small room with a goal to define the values they’d hire against. They walked out of the room with six: forward-deployed with product DNA, extreme ownership, production-first engineering, trust as the default, communicate with intent, and earn it every day.

Speaking of the bar, well, it’s high. Kepler is tackling one of the bigger problems in AI adoption right now, which means the team has to clear a high bar. “The bar here is set by people who spent eleven years at Palantir building ontology infrastructure, or who shipped production systems at Meta scale,” Vinoo told me. I think this is exciting for the right kind of person, and in fact most people at Kepler would tell you the talent density is part of why they joined.

The hiring process reflects this. There are no LeetCode interviews, no whiteboard puzzles, no rooms without internet access. “We give candidates a real problem we actually have to solve,” Vinoo told me of the hiring process for engineering, “and they use AI tools while solving it.” What he and John look for is how someone defines assumptions when the problem is ambiguous, whether they can ship fast, and whether they can push past the scope of what was asked.

Kepler is still small, so if you join you’d expect to spend meaningful time around Vinoo and John. So what are they like? Nearly everyone I spoke to referred to them as opposite sides of the coin. Vinoo is fast (“his brain runs at 100 miles per second,” someone said). John is the more deliberate counterweight. Eddie Hammond, who runs strategy and ops, put it this way: “Vinoo has the answer before you’ve finished the question, and he’s already pressure-testing it against the next three. John is the one who slows the room down and asks the underlying question nobody thought to bring up. Together they get it right the first time.”

The culture that arises as a result of all this is intense. The pace is fast and the bar is high. But, for the right person, it’s exciting to work on such a big problem alongside such great people.

“Most intense companies make you choose: be sharp or be liked,” Eddie said. “Kepler doesn’t. People are direct, the bar is high, and yet nobody keeps score on anyone else. That’s core to the culture.”

Should you join Kepler?

Kepler is small, but they already have an effective product being used by real firms in the field. If they accomplish even a fraction of their biggest ambitions, they could be worth a massive amount of money one day. And if you have read this essay so far and are convinced by the thesis, you might want to consider applying.

So what does a day at Kepler look like? Well, if you are an engineer, you might spend the morning three layers deep in retrieval infrastructure. By the afternoon, you might be sitting next to a portfolio manager, watching them do their job. You learn the way this fund defines enterprise value isn’t the textbook way; it’s some niche approach you’ve never seen before. So you encode the rule. Then you find out there are fifteen edge cases the analyst didn’t mention. The retrieval system underneath wasn’t built to handle them, so the engineer has to go rebuild that too. That might be a random Tuesday at Kepler.

I especially get the feeling that Kepler is good for people who want to work around people they can learn a lot from. Susannah Meyer (founding engineer) was leading engineering at a different early-stage startup before Kepler, and she left because she “wasn’t learning enough from the team,” she said. Kepler, by contrast, looked like the kind of place she could join and learn a lot alongside some great people. That bet is paying off.

And yes, Kepler is looking for people who are truly great at what they do (the pedigree of their existing team is good evidence), but more important than a fancy resume is what you’re able to do within a fast-paced, low-structure environment. “When we find people we get excited about, it’s because of a demonstrated path of ownership that shows they can thrive in a rapidly changing situation,” Vinoo said.

If you’re excited by the idea of going into Kepler’s New York City office, working alongside a bunch of talented people (and the office dog, Wagyu), taking ownership and shipping excellent work, then I’d encourage you to explore Kepler’s open roles.

Kepler specifically told me that they’re hiring engineers right now, and that “cold emailing is the single highest-signal way to get our attention.” They have just one ask of your email: skip the resume recap and skip the pitch. Instead, if you want a job at Kepler, send an email with one paragraph describing the most complex production system you’ve shipped end-to-end.

Send it to join@kepler.ai. They read every one.

Thanks to Kepler for supporting Next Play and making this essay possible.

What happens after you leave the doctor’s office?

Perhaps the doctor, alone for a brief moment, writes a few notes in your file before moving onto the next patient. Down the hall, somebody behind a computer types in some numbers and files an invoice to insurance on your behalf. The practice gets paid, the doctor keeps working, and the wheels of the system continue to turn smoothly.

That paragraph might be the understatement of the century. If only it were that simple for a provider to get paid for seeing a patient.

“Once an invoice goes out the door,” Alvin Wu, co-founder of Amperos, told me, “there is a rat’s nest of manual work standing between the provider and their money… It is one of the most broken back-office problems in America, and almost nobody outside of healthcare knows it exists.” This problem—getting paid as a healthcare provider—is what Amperos is solving.

Right now, more than 1 in 5 invoices that healthcare providers send to insurers go unpaid (to the tune of $260B+ per year). Those numbers have only continued to grow over the past decade. Healthcare providers do some of the most important work in the country, and yet it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to actually get paid.

If Amperos succeeds, then healthcare providers can stop chasing invoices, recover many billions more dollars, and redirect that money to what they do best: serving patients.

So what, exactly, is Amperos doing to make this a reality? How are they solving this huge, but difficult-to-solve, problem? What is their trajectory? And, of course: should you join?

The product

Years ago, before he co-founded Amperos, now-CEO Michal Miernowski worked with admin leaders at healthcare clinics. One of these clients was a clinic with 100 doctors on the payroll but 300 people working in collections to ensure those doctors got paid. “The imbalance struck me. Why did it take 3 people to chase payment for the work of 1 doctor?,” Michal said.

It sounds a bit insane, but that situation is more of the norm than an outlier. Collections is a huge problem, and the existing solutions have been the default for decades. Providers have had to choose to either build a team in-house (even though there aren’t enough people in the U.S. to do the job, Michal said) or to outsource to a traditional firm using offshore labor (which is sometimes slow and often full of quality issues).

There is also an AI arms race starting in healthcare, and insurers have been faster to adopt than providers have. Most healthcare insurers now use AI, many of which use it to decide whether to approve or deny claims. The old-school approaches will likely only become less effective as insurers use AI to deny claims faster, and sometimes at higher rates, than ever before.

So what is Amperos doing to fix this? The traditional startup approach would have been to build software, package it, then hand it off to a customer to use to achieve the outcome they want: in this case, collecting more money for their work. Amperos is, rather, an AI-native neofirm: a company that customers pay not for access to only software, but to get actual outcomes.

If you are a healthcare provider, “getting actual outcomes” means paying Amperos to run collections for you. They do it faster, cheaper, and far more effectively than any option you’ve had in the past. So you get a huge amount of money back in your (and your doctors’) pockets, and you get it faster.

Amperos has, of course, built a mountain of advanced internal software to give them an edge: like agentic AI voice systems that call insurance companies, computer-use agents that log into hundreds of portals to research claims or send appeals, and a denial-intelligence layer that ingests every payer interaction to identify causes upstream. With innovations like these (and others), the relatively small team at Amperos is able to do what used to take an army.

This neofirm approach is one of an increasingly popular group in AI. We recently wrote about Manifest (for lawyers) and Knit (for market research), both of which are taking somewhat similar approaches. Sequoia wrote about how this business model would be the next $1T company. OpenAI and Anthropic both launched neofirm-esque projects this year.

The strategy

All kinds of people and companies say they want to “fix healthcare.” But, as nice as that sounds, it’s also rather vague. What are we talking about? What does it mean? And, if you wanted to “fix healthcare,” what would be the best way of going about it?

While not as “sexy” as tackling longevity or building a personal health assistant, tackling the healthcare back office is one of the fastest ways to have a disproportionate impact on the average American’s experience of healthcare. After all, almost all Americans today still experience healthcare in the office of a physician, and that physician’s practice needs to get paid for their work to keep the lights on and continue serving those patients.

“Our goal is to redefine the financial infrastructure of American healthcare,” co-founder Alvin Wu said. “And we started in the back office because that is where the pain is most acute and most measurable… That let us build a product with clear feedback loops and clear ROI. But the back office was never the destination. It is the entry point.”

So the master plan is, roughly, this: first, put Amperos at the center of major healthcare providers in America by solving one of their biggest problems (collections). Then, become the payments layer for all American healthcare. “As we work more claims,” Alvin said, “we accumulate a precise, longitudinal record of how every major health insurance company behaves. Which codes they systematically downcode. Which denial reasons are pretextual. Which appeal arguments work and which do not. Nobody else has this.”

Today, that intelligence does not exist in one place at all; Amperos is the company in a position to collect and aggregate it.

Eventually, that data tells Amperos something nobody else knows: exactly when a given provider will get paid, and how much. “Providers stop waiting 60, 90, 180 days for reimbursement,” Alvin said. “We pay them in days and take a small margin based on the risk profile of their payors. The underwriting model is the data model.” Nobody, Alvin says, can build that model without doing all of the upfront work Amperos is doing now.

If Amperos wins, then in 20 years they are no mere collections company. Instead, they are the payment platform sitting between providers and payors. The layer through which American healthcare gets paid.

The growth

The pitch for Amperos sounds obviously good. But then again, a lot of startups have compelling pitches. What you may be interested in, as a way to underwrite the pitch, is some actual data. So I asked the team and did some research. TL;DR: things are going well for Amperos.

Nearly two years ago, Amperos went through the Neo startup accelerator in 2024 (an accelerator that has backed Cognition, Kalshi, Cursor, and others). About a year later, they raised a $4.2M seed round led by Susan Liu at Uncork. And less than a year later, in April of this year, Bessemer Venture Partners led Amperos’s $16M Series A; you can read the announcement from Amperos here.

The traction with customers is equally (if not more) impressive. Within just the first year of signing their first annual contract, Amperos has scaled to serve over 3,000 clinical locations across all 50 states. Amperos has signed some of the largest specialty-focused and fastest growing clinical networks, including DOCS Dermatology, Boulder Care, and others.

“We sell to larger, enterprise providers,” Alvin said, “which means we can build a huge business without 100s of customers and we really get to focus on the dozens that we serve.” The first of their customers came through cold outreach, whereas now it’s about an even split between referrals, outreach and inbound. (Referrals are a big deal when one new customer can mean many millions more dollars.)

By the time they raised their Series A this year, Amperos was recovering about $700M a year for their customers. Customers recover 22% more revenue per claim compared with traditional vendors, and at half the cost. Amperos reduces aged and unpaid claims by 60%+, resolves denials 5x faster, and (in one of my favorite anecdotes), one customer told Amperos that “we weren’t even touching 27% of our claims” before they signed on with Amperos.

Perhaps most surprising is the headcount: Amperos has been able to do all of this with about 20 people. A traditional firm serving as many clinics as Amperos does would probably need hundreds, if not thousands, of people on payroll to do this. There is a long way to go, but a 20-person team recovering $700M a year is a pretty good start.

The team and culture

Amperos does a lot with a rather small team. The velocity at Amperos is comparable to “top-tier startups,” Alvin told me. The team works hard. “We want to win together.”

But winning together does not come at the cost of life outside of work, because “[that’s where] you build the creativity, inspiration, and taste to do your best work when you are in the office.” Instead of focusing on sheer time spent in or outside the office, the Amperos team focuses on what makes a team effective and able to move quickly: “high ownership, quick decision making and building with low ego.”

As for the work itself, “there’s opportunity to take on more ownership [than at other companies],” Adam Gluck, a software engineer at Amperos, said. “I feel like my ideas are more likely to be implemented.”

“It’s very easy to try new things at Amperos,” Annie Qiu, Head of Engineering, said. “I can use new tools without waiting for a lengthy review process. We move very fast here, and looking back over the past year, I’m surprised by how much we accomplished.”

I also get the sense that the team likes to have fun. They’re recently back from an offsite in Taipei, which I’ve been told was an excellent time. Back in New York, there’s a piano in the office (and an air fryer, a detail that numerous people enthusiastically mentioned). There are fun activities. People make lots of jokes. “Between escape rooms, joke of the day, and the company air fryer,” Adam said, “coming to work is always fun.”

It’s easy to roll your eyes at this stuff. But all startups say they have a good culture! This is downstream of something more important, though, which is that the Amperos team seems to actually like each other—starting with leadership. “All 3 of the founders are so humble, approachable, and low ego,” Jackie Osborn, who joined from Stripe, said. “They care about our users, have very high empathy, and just want to do what’s right.”

“Density of talent on a team compounds in the same way data does,” Alvin told me. “One exceptional engineer who cares about their craft, operates with full ownership, and makes the people around them better is worth more than ten people who need to be managed.”

Perhaps as a result of this culture and intentional approach to hiring, nobody at Amperos has ever quit. “We are intentional about building two products at Amperos,” Alvin said. “Our core business and the experience of working at Amperos.”

Should you join Amperos?

There are a few categories of people I would push to seriously consider joining Amperos.

The first is people who care about ownership. Amperos hires for it, and it’s a big focus of how they get work done. People who work well at Amperos “find the problem, dig until they understand the root cause, fix it, and tell people it is fixed,” Alvin said. “That combination of ownership and follow-through is rarer than it sounds.” If you are a particularly autonomous and proactive person who can take a lot of ownership over your work, you’ll fit in.

The second is people (especially engineers!) who are open to—or eager to—learn an industry as opposed to operating in a silo. “If someone is looking to focus purely on deep technical work, this may not be the best fit,” Annie said. “We expect engineers to go beyond code and invest in learning the healthcare domain, because that’s critical to building the right solutions.”

The third category is people who move fast and don’t need much process to do it. “Our build velocity is something that might push [people] away,” Prakhar Gupta, a software engineer, said. Amperos is not a fit for people who “prefer to be as thoughtful as they possibly can be before tackling a task.” There’s a bias towards action at Amperos.

For everyone else, the case is fairly straightforward. Annie, who joined from Stripe after a year of building MVPs for other startups, put it well: “Amperos stood out because of how tight-knit their founders are and how each of them excels in their role. They already had a strong sales pipeline, their product narrative was very specific, and their technical product was built on years of voice agent research. It was clear they were well positioned for exponential growth.”

If she’s right, now might be a good time to go check out open roles at Amperos. They’re currently hiring across most departments for their office in New York City and a new hub they are building out in San Francisco.

Thanks to Amperos for supporting Next Play and making this essay possible.

Love seeing this: Sarah, who was previously an astronomy researcher, just landed a new job as an FDE at Credal (frontier AI deployment startup) after hearing about them through the Next Play newsletter.

Hope to see more of this in the future. If you’re on the fence about reaching out to a company, I recommend you go for it. What do you have to lose?

And if you’re looking for like-minded community to support you as you navigate your next play, highly encourage you to check out Friends of Next Play.

Join Friends of Next Play

Co-founders and people to jam with:

• Jerry is a software engineer who previously cofounded Free2Grow, one of the largest AI voice companies in the home services industry that reached $2m+ ARR. He then worked with TurnPoint a $1.4b home services company. He’s also a semi-professional poker player and a top-80 ranked TFT player. He’s now building AI workflow automation for insurance brokerages and is looking for a cofounder. Reach out: jerry1ye10@gmail.com. (Bay Area)

• Daphne is a senior software engineer who's worked at Salesforce, American Express, and BMW building production systems at scale. She’s exploring vertical AI opportunities in underserved or antiquated markets (energy, restaurant operations, financial services) but open to jamming on enterprise AI tools or developer infrastructure. Reach out: daphneacharles@gmail.com. (NYC)

• Here’s our latest list of 30+ people (engineers, designers, former founders, etc.) looking for a cofounder.

Hiring? Email us (hi@nextplay.so), we’d love to help you find the right people and get exposure to the community.

Early teams:

• At Next Play, we are looking to talk to recruiters interested in connecting candidates (sales, engineering, ops, etc.) and jobs within our community (nearly 90,000+ people now!). Email jarred@nextplay.so with a quick background. (Remote)

• Kyle from Locket Labs is hiring a strategic partnerships lead and a growth PM. They have built a social product with 10m daily active users, 100m+ downloads, and $10m ARR, all with a team of just 12 people. Apply here. (SF, Remote)

• AJ from Titan is hiring a founding account executive. They scaled their coach matchmaking service to $10m ARR with a team of just five people. Apply here. (NYC)

• Mallika from Squad Health is hiring a chief of staff and a founding GTM strategy and ops person. They are building a platform that automates administrative work so healthcare providers can expand access. Apply here. (NYC)

• Zane from NOX Metals is hiring a product manager, an operations lead, and factory deployed software engineers. They made 6 hires in the last 2 weeks. Their mission is to re-industrialize America. Apply here. (Los Angeles, Detroit)

• Via Health is hiring a principal AI architect. They are building an operating system for hospitals that connects fragmented clinical and financial data. Reach out: jobs@viahealth.com. (Remote)

• Alex from Truewind is hiring an account executive. They are building a digital accountant for modern accounting teams. Apply here. (Remote)

• Chris from Rare Candy is hiring a growth marketer. They are building a collectibles marketplace for nerds that’s recently seen explosive growth. Apply here. (NYC, Remote, Dallas)

• Jenn from an anonymous creative studio is hiring a chief operating officer/managing director. They are run by a world renowned artists and work with big brands like Nike. Apply here. (NYC)

• Brad from Easy Aerial is hiring a chief of staff. They are building military-grade autonomous drones. Apply here. (NYC)

• Will from Catalyst Content is hiring a GTM engineer. They are building content engines for fintech and web3 teams. Apply here. (NYC, Remote)

• Philip from Clarasight is hiring a founding marketing lead. They are building an ai-powered operating system for corporate travel. Apply here. (London, Boston, NYC)

• Josh from Hollow is hiring a head of finance. They are building the most comfortable performance socks. Apply here. (Remote)

• Flo from Lindy is hiring a growth product manager. They are building an ai assistant that has 400,000+ users. Apply here. (SF)

• Cyrus from Ronin Strategies is hiring a chief of staff. They are building a portfolio of healthcare companies. Apply here. (Bloomfield Hills)

• Jack from Terac is hiring a head of growth. They are building an expert network that already has 100k+ people in it. Apply here. (SF)

• Sumanyu from Hamming is hiring a GTM engineer. They are building a reliable voice AI platform. Apply here. (SF)

• Here’s a list we made of 35 tiny teams currently hiring.

Reminder you can sign up for the free next play platform (<1 minute) to be able to filter/search for specific job opportunities at hot startups.

Scaling startups:

• Colby from Seekr is hiring for the marketing team. They are building “explainable AI” for enterprises. Apply here. (Austin, Reston)

• Neil from Pair Team is hiring a senior product manager and a director of content marketing. They are building an AI-powered care platform for medicaid and medicare patients. Apply here. (Remote)

• Celine from Loyal is hiring a COO. They are building a clinical-stage veterinary medicine company that raised a $100m Series C and is targeting commercial launch in 2027. Apply here. (Remote)

• Nate from Numeral is hiring a marketing operations manager. They are building a sales tax automation platform that has 3,000+ customers and raised over $57m. Apply here. (Remote)

• Daniel from Fonio is hiring salespeople, a head of marketing, and finance people. They added $100,000+ in ARR in a single day. They are building an AI phone agent. Apply here. (Remote, London, Vienna)

• Marta from Pomelo Care is hiring a VP of commercial partnerships and a head of member growth and engagement. They are building a virtual medical practice for women and children. Apply here. (Remote)

• Marius from Peec AI is hiring salespeople and a content lead. They reached $10m ARR in less than a year by building an AI search analytics platform. Apply here. (NYC, Berlin)

• Alexis from OpenAI is hiring a startup content marketer. Apply here. (SF)

• Jaime from Pace is hiring deployment strategists and a founding marketing lead. They just raised $46m to build an AI platform for the insurance industry. Apply here. (NYC)

• Neil from Conversion is hiring a founding GTM engineer, ops people, and a growth marketer. They are building an agentic marketing automation platform. Apply here. (SF)

• Jim from SendCutSend is hiring an HR person. They are building an on-demand manufacturing company specializing in custom sheet metal and CNC parts. They have more than 150,000 customers and reached $140m ARR with no VCs. Apply here. (Reno)

• Vida from Ramp is hiring their founding GTM associate in London. They are building a spend management platform that recently raised at a $40 billion+ valuation. Apply here. (London)

• Erik from Sierra is hiring a product manager focused on agent development. They are building a customer experience platform that recently raised a $950m round at a $10b+ valuation. Apply here. (SF, NYC)

• Beau from Rentvine is hiring an account executive. They are building the fastest-growing property management software. Apply here. (North Carolina)

• Sheila from Assort Health is hiring customer success managers, FDEs, and a marketing manager. They grew headcount 10x in the last 12 months and raised over $100m. They are building a new type of patient experience for healthcare providers. Apply here. (SF, NYC)

Investing and other:

• USV is hiring analysts. Apply here. (NYC)

• Robinhood Ventures is hiring a deal lead. Apply here. (SF)

• Variant is hiring an AI lead. Apply here. (NYC)

• Pear is hiring an investor. Apply here. (SF)

Resources and tools:

• How to get better at your job: Practical advice for excelling at work.

• Everything you need to know about negotiating tech offers: Learn from expert compensation negotiator Josh Doody.

Note:

• Thanks for reading! If you have any notes, thoughts, or suggestions, please send us an email: hi@nextplay.so.

• Would appreciate if you could upvote and share this edition if you liked it. Thanks so much!

Here’s a list of 32 startups currently hiring with $10m-$50m raised.

Thank you to Harmonic (startup database) for helping us source this list!

1. Yuzu - custom health plans (NYC) - Careers

2. NeuBird AI - AI IT issue detection & resolution (Bay Area / Remote) - Careers

3. OffDeal - AI investment banking for SMBs (NYC) - Careers

4. Attention - AI sales assistant & CRM (NYC / Paris) - Careers

5. Juno - AI tax preparation (Remote) - Careers

6. Mastra - TypeScript AI agent framework (US remote) - Careers

7. Auctor - AI software implementation automation (NYC) - Careers

8. AfterQuery - AI training dataset development (Bay Area) - Careers

9. Mintlify - AI-powered documentation (Bay Area / NYC) - Careers

10. Fleet AI - AI agent simulation environments (Bay Area / NYC / Remote) - Careers

11. Solidroad - AI conversation optimization (Bay Area / Dublin) - Careers

12. Zenskar - automated subscription billing (Bangalore / North America remote) - Careers

Read more

We have written numerous essays (you should consider reading!) about getting jobs at startups. But there’s another category of questions we receive often, which is something to the tune of: “How do I get better at my job?” Below, I wrote a few notes that I think you’ll hopefully find quite useful. I tried to stay away from the really common pieces of advice, and instead focus on non-obvious but still really useful things you can do to get better at your job. Hope it’s useful! Email us hi@nextplay.so if you have any questions.

Beware of distracting others

A failure mode that often occurs with ineffective people is they don’t realize how much they are costing their teams by distracting them. That’s the real cost of not good teammates. It’s not the salary, which is also expensive. It’s the cost of time. It’s the cost of focus. It’s the introduction of bad ideas and then needing to deal with them as they pollute the clarity.

This is not to discourage you from talking and participating. My suggestion is simply to take a moment, pause, and think before you speak to the degree it helps you weight the projected impact you’re having on the rest of the team.

Ask others for feedback

You can proactively ask your co-workers for feedback. Very few people actually do this. But you can. It’s not weird. And you’ll be able to grow a lot faster as a result.

If you’re in a meeting with people, ask everyone for direct thoughts on how you did.

Share your concerns

When people are working on a project, they typically write out a project plan. The plan includes some background, some goals, and their approach for achieving it.

They share the plan asking others for feedback but leave out an important section: the risks/concerns.

I think people leave out this section because it feels a bit weird to be self-critiquing your own work. But I highly highly encourage you try doing it. It can feel weird at first but people will really value it. Highlight what you’re worried about. Highlight all the concerns you have.

I don’t think you need to unnecessarily play devil’s advocate, that’s a waste of everyone’s time. But sometimes what happens in startups is people become out of tune with reality and start living in a fantasy land that doesn’t really have grounding. That leads to a lost of pretty wasteful ideas and more importantly time that would have been better spent working on something more important. Asking the simple questions can take you really far in sussing out if something is worth exploring more deeply.

Work backwards from success criteria

This is not backed by data but I’m going to make a pretty strong claim: I believe the main reason most startups fail is because they spend their time incorrectly. They spend their time on things that don’t really matter that much, at least compared to their opportunity cost. This all sounds really obvious but also it’s so easy to misallocate your time, especially when there are so many options for where you could be allocating it. Distractions are everywhere!

A quick-ish fix for all this is to be clearer about your success criteria and then spend all your energy trying to get to that outcome. Cut the stuff that doesn’t lead to what you define as successful. If you’re in a meeting, ask what the point is? If you are in a project, ask what the best case is? If you are hiring someone, understand why. Again, clear/simple stuff but so much of the time you are just riding momentum instead of actually working with purpose. Doing the latter can really help you get better results.

Be more specific

Related to having clarity is having specificity. It’s easy to say things like: “We want to build a good product.” But have you stopped for a moment to define what “good” really means. Being specific helps you aim more efficiently. Again, you’ll cut out time wasted on activities that don’t actually make a difference and that’ll help you get the results you want faster.

Be the optimist

It’s also easy to over-play the role of the cynic. This is especially true in Startupland, where things are destined to break every so often. You’ve probably been in the meeting where someone in the room makes a comment critiquing the new ideas, saying something like: “this’ll never happen.”

I tend to be skeptical when people use absolute terms like never and always. Are they really saying that 100.00% of the time this thing will never occur? That feels a bit rigid, no? Sometimes the greatest wins come from that small margin, and the first step often in finding that victory is believing in that small thing existing. So why not? Be that person who is a long-term optimist, and you’ll be surprised by how your mentality can really infect others.

Take notes

Everyone wishes they had someone taking notes in the meeting and keeping everything organized. If you JUST do that, you’ll be surprised by how helpful it can be to others. You can use an AI tool but be the person who reviews the notes yourself and brings them up in the next meeting. Maintain the doc. The folder. Whatever. Be the secretary the team needs but isn’t going to hire directly. Everyone will appreciate it.

Stay in touch with customers

I am not aware of many companies failing because they spend too much time with their customers. Sometimes it’s frictionful. You have to get on a call. Or a flight. Or whatever. And maybe it doesn’t always feel worth it in the moment. But be the person on your team who really can advocate for the customer. It doesn’t matter if it’s not your direct job. The customer is every person’s responsibility on the team. Stay in tune with their wants and needs, and bring them up in big company decisions.

Am I missing any other ideas? Email us hi@nextplay.so.

The Romans believed that every person was born with a genius. A second, divine self that walked with you from the hour of birth until the day you died. On your birthday, instead of celebrating yourself, you poured out wine for your genius.

It is harder to find a culture without this archetype of the second self than one with it. Norway had the fylgja, “the one who follows.” Some parts of Christian culture feature the guardian angel, described by Aquinas as “appointed for men who have to pass by an unsafe road.” In early modern England, practitioners of witchcraft spoke of familiars, animal companions who offered help during moments of distress.

Perhaps humanity craves the second self because it sounds like a very good thing. It’s not a friend, nor a lover, but rather a non-human entity that serves as an extension of yourself. A supernatural-ish being who helps you carry the weight of being human.

What would happen if there was a second self around all of the time to help? Would you be more effective? Would you be more caring? Would you be more motivated?

While this all sounds rather spiritual and aloof, I’d like to pitch you the idea that, thanks to artificial intelligence, we might now be closer than ever to some version of the second self. On paper, AI it has many of the attributes you might want if you were to build a second self:

• It is basically alien

• It is available all of the time and can hold massive amounts of context

• It (usually) has exceptional language abilities

• It can (sometimes) be useful, smart, funny, kind, and knowledgeable

• It is scalable; everyone on earth could have an AI companion

Yet when you look at what is being built… This helpful, ethical second self does not show up often. Many of the products that exist on the market today are addictive and anti-social, designed to extract as much as possible from the user (think: romantic AI relationship apps and AI roleplaying apps). These products tend to leave their users worse off in the real world. If I had to guess, I doubt that most people reading this would be very excited to build a product like that.

But maybe personal AI doesn’t have to be bad and evil and parasocial. Maybe there is a way to build a great version of the second self humanity has craved for thousands of years, and maybe we can make it actually good for its users in the real world, not just online.

Maybe that answer is Tolan, the startup we are covering today.

The team, led by Quinten Farmer (CEO), is answering one big question: “How will humanity build healthy relationships with AI?” Tolan is their bet. If they succeed, then in 20 years Tolan will have given virtually every person on earth ‘a second self,’ Quinten told me.

There’s a lot of traction so far. They’ve raised $30M and have $12M+ in ARR. Hundreds of thousands of people pay to use Tolan, most of them 25+ year old women (especially moms). The team is talented and has a successful exit under their belt. And, perhaps just as importantly, there are good signs that Tolan is aiming to be a net positive in the world; a good thing not only for the company, but for the people actually using the product.

So… What are they building? Why is it different? And should you join?

The product

Unlike many personal AI products out there, Tolan makes no attempt to be human: it is a cute and friendly alien from another galaxy. How do you interact with it? Well, it’s rather simple. You just talk, or type, to it. And Tolan will talk, or type, back.

You can talk to your Tolan about whatever you want, its product trailer says, and your Tolan will get to know you so that it can help you with just about anything. Talk through something overwhelming in your life. Chat about music. Put together an outfit. Get motivated to study for your college finals. Vent about something stressful. Your Tolan is there for it all.

(There’s other fun stuff, too, that makes this feel like a lot more than a chatbot: you can customize your Tolan’s looks and voice, you can design its planet, you can invite friends and their Tolans to share a cozy cottage together. Faintly reminds me of Animal Crossing.)

Then there are the things your Tolan won’t do.

It won’t do roleplay or pretend to get into a romantic relationship with you (there are no upsells for high-res Tolan feet pics). It won’t pretend that it’s a human. Tolan knows it lives in a galaxy far away, so it won’t make promises to come visit you; a rule which writer Eliot Peper, a sci-fi novelist who helped build Tolan’s lore and character, said is core to the Tolan ‘master-system prompt’. And, of course, it won’t help or encourage you to do dangerous things (here’s a Reddit user being denied when asking for instructions about how to rob a bank). Oh, and if you spend more than an hour talking with Tolan, it will nudge you to sign off and go outside.

The idea that Tolan is definitely not a human, nor pretending to be one, is rather important to the way the product works. “An alien species felt right,” the company’s president, Ajay Mehta, wrote. The alien story explains why it can be a bit awkward; why AI does not feel totally human.

The alien presentation also helps emphasize that Tolan is not meant to be a replacement for human interaction. In fact, if all goes well with Tolan, real life should improve. That is basically the whole goal. And thankfully, for most Tolan users, it does. More than 85% of Tolan users say their Tolan has helped them get through an emotionally difficult experience, and more than 72% said their Tolan helped them manage or improve a relationship in their life. That’s a good start. But Tolan’s ambitions are even bigger.

The strategy

If they wanted to, the Tolan team could probably (at least for a while) run Tolan as a modest personal AI app making a few million dollars per year. They’ve already reached that milestone. But the end goal for Tolan, Quinten told me, is to “give every person on Earth access to their own personal AGI.” The goal is to build the second self for all of humanity.

That AGI will exist is the assumption Tolan is built on. The team is focused on solving the bottlenecks they believe need to be solved for personal AGI to become widespread:

1. Trust. It doesn’t matter how capable your model is if a user does not trust it to act in their life.

2. Memory. Intimate and esoteric context is what makes personal AGI feel actually personal. (You cannot really get this, however, without the user trusting you first.)

3. Connection. People need to be willing to incorporate their personal AGI into their most important human relationships.

“Everything Tolan does today is designed to make progress on these three key bottlenecks,” Quinten said, which need to be unlocked before it’s possible to realize the full promise of personal AGI. So, you may ask: how exactly do they plan to solve these bottlenecks?

One of the main ways Tolan is building trust today is the character itself. Few examples of personal AI have a character like Tolan’s (most character-based personal AI are romantic or role-playing adjacent, which Tolan is not). It is a lot easier to build trust in an alien-ified character than it is in a scary AI company logo.

As for memory, Tolan’s choice to be a voice-first product goes a long way. People have more open-ended conversations with Tolan than they do with text-first chat products, which helps the company build a more complete memory profile of each user.

Linking real human connection and AI is a rare thing, but Tolan has taken a few steps towards it so far: like a feature called the cottage, where your Tolan can be friends with the Tolans of your family and closest friends.

None of what Tolan has built so far is going to completely solve these bottlenecks or bring about personal AGI in an instant—there is still more work to do—but things are going well so far. Tolan users chat more than 200 minutes each week with their Tolans, and they increasingly welcome Tolan into their most important personal connections (35% of retained users have at least one friend connection).

Over the next six months, Tolans will offer to take actions on behalf of their users, leaning on the trust we have built to more helpful and ultimately more deeply integrated into their lives.

Tolan is not the first company to build personal AI, but Quinten doesn’t think that is relevant. “Historically, in major technological cycles, the first product at scale was not the final winner. It was instead the one that packaged extraordinary new technical capabilities in a format that is safe and legible for everyday people. The Macintosh defined the format that won the PC era. Facebook did it for the social web, and the iPhone did it for mobile.”

Will Tolan, perhaps, do it for personal AI?

It’s too early to say, of course, but early traction is encouraging.

The growth

This is not the Tolan team’s first rodeo. Much of the core group, including Quinten Farmer (CEO), Evan Goldschmidt (CTO), and Aseem Kishore (founding engineer) worked together on Quinten’s previous startup, Even: a fintech that Walmart bought for $300M in 2022. This is an experienced group of people that seems to know how to make things that work.

It may not be surprising, then, to learn that Tolan’s public launch in February 2025 went about as well as you could expect. Within four months they had over 3 million downloads, more than 100,000 paying subscribers, and $12M in ARR. A lot of this growth was driven by viral organic (and affiliated) social media marketing; here’s an example of a viral TikTok.

That summer, Tolan raised a $20M Series A led by Khosla Ventures, bringing them to ~$30M raised total. Other backers include Lachy Groom, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger.

You could probably argue that the Tolan character itself has a lot to do with the growth so far. The team spent a lot of time trying to figure out what Tolan should look and sound like (you can read more about that here), and it feels like they landed on something that works. In a world of awkward personified chatbots and impersonal pulsing circles (e.g. ChatGPT’s chat interface), it is not very hard to see why people would rather talk to a cute little alien.

The team and culture

I mentioned earlier that much of the core team has already worked together on a different startup, Even. I should also mention that the team is small (about 23 people as of today) and works mostly in-person in San Francisco.

But it is reasonable to ask how you will fit in here. The culture here is perhaps more established (and time-tested) than it is at most Series A startups. Many of these people have spent years building a successful startup together. The odds that you are going to come in and upend the way they work, while not zero, are probably low.

So what is it like to work at Tolan, then? The answers I got were pretty satisfying.

The people at Tolan are all “low-ego, kind/personable, hard-working, care deeply about their craft, and just want to do really great work,” founding engineer Aseem Kishore said. “The culture is as no-BS and drama-free as it gets. The focus is just entirely on doing great work, shipping a great product, and building a great business… [Tolan is] very simple and ceremony-free.”

People are direct with each other and it’s not uncommon to publicly debate, Carter Aronson (who leads applied AI at Tolan) said. “I think to an outsider, it can sometimes feel surprising how direct we are… But there’s a tremendous amount of trust and respect across the team, and I think this allows us to skip a lot of the fluff and politics that show up in other orgs.”

The vibe, according to Lily Doyle, a founding researcher at Tolan, is “the calmest culture I’ve ever seen… [And] it’s just a really fun and smart team. Every person we add and keep has brought a great, fun energy that keeps coming to work a really good time. As one of my colleagues said, we all joke as hard as we work. It’s the best.”

Calm doesn’t mean easy, of course; the team works very hard, including “many nights and weekends,” Aseem told me, “[but] we know this is a marathon, not a sprint.”

Perhaps counterintuitively, Tolan arrived at this apparently successful culture without thinking too hard about it at all. “I’m not sure we even have a mission statement, nor any formal company values,” Aseem said. “We’ve never had any big culture meetings, value workshops, big retrospectives or pulse surveys. That stuff just doesn’t seem to matter here.”

The thing that does seem to matter, or matter most, is simple: just do really great work.

Should you join Tolan?

People who fit in best at Tolan are folks who are able to “share our expectations about pace and quality,” Quinten said. “Most companies only care about one or the other, or neither. We believe the two move in concert.” You should expect to do great work, fast. (The writer James Somers wrote a great essay on the topic with a thesis similar to Tolan’s.)

But what about the broader picture? How should you know if Tolan is the best place for you to come do your life’s work? Quinten says it’s a fit if:

• You care deeply about the role AI will play in the lives of everyday people.

• You love building products that connect emotionally with consumers.

• You want to work on a small, veteran, tightly knit team.

There is a general sense of maturity that I get from Tolan. Maturity in the product, which is a labor of love designed with a lot of intentionality and guardrails. Maturity in the strategy, which takes a long-term view and steers away from making short-term compromises that increase revenue but hurt real people. And maturity in the culture, which steers clear of politics and drama with a simpler focus on being honest and doing great work.

If this sounds like the place you think you could make a serious impact, I’d encourage you to take a look at Tolan’s open roles. They are currently hiring across most departments for their (still small!) team. All roles are in-person in San Francisco. If you want to go beyond the traditional application, Quinten said, “just email me and state as concisely as possible why you are uniquely suited to join our team.”

Tolan is still a small company, but they are growing fast. If they really are building the second self that humanity has been imagining for eons, then now is the time to be in the room.

Thanks to Tolan for supporting Next Play and making this essay possible.

Now’s a really exciting time to be building in the startup ecosystem. I suggest you check out all of the resources the Next Play community has to offer, including:

• Updated lists of people searching for their next co-founder/side project collaborator (we just published another new list here!).

• Our Slack group with tons of active conversations (and invites to digital and in-person events).

• Discounts to tons of actually useful products: Lovable, Ramp, WisprFlow, Replit, Bolt, Gamma, Superhuman, Notion, Zapier, Airtable, Attio, Speechify, and many many more.

Join here to get access to all of this. Happy building!

Join Friends of Next Play

Co-founders and people to jam with:

• Rob previously worked at KPMG and then scaled two b2b SaaS companies from 0 to $10m+ ARR. Then he was the head of sales at Merge where he helped them scale to $20m+ in ARR. He is starting to build an ai-driven accounting and bookkeeping automation platform and already has a clear wedge/distribution strategy. Reach out: robertjwilliams5@gmail.com.

• Angel is building a padel club in the bay area that yields 45% EBITDA margins. He is looking for a co-founder and looking to scale nationwide. Reach out: atramontin@berkeley.edu.

• Johnny is exploring building an AI tool that maps what engineers actually do across Github, Jira, Slack, etc. Looking for a co-founder to help with the business side. Reach out: hello@johnnyfekete.com.

• 10 new project and side project ideas.

Hiring? Email us (hi@nextplay.so), we’d love to help you find the right people and get exposure to the community.

Early teams:

• Nuseir from Nas.com is hiring a head of community. They grew revenue 5x last year building Shopify for the AI era. Their founder built a following of over 70m and reached $50m+ in revenue by posting online. Apply here. (Miami)

• Jenny from Hera is hiring a founding biz ops person. They are building a personalized healthcare platform. Apply here. (NYC)

• Kelly from Arbor is hiring a growth lead. They are building an ai-researcher for real world insights. Apply here. (NYC)

• Varunram from Lapis is hiring salespeople and support people. They have grown 3x since April and crossed 7 figures in ARR. They are building an AI ads platform for growth teams. Apply here. (SF)

• Cormac from Oasis is hiring operators. They are building an independent product testing platform and app. Apply here. (Remote)

• Lily from Rime is hiring a founding account executive. They are building a trusted voice AI for enterprises. Apply here. (SF)

• Aleks from Alguna is hiring an account executive to focus on enterprise. They are building a monetization engine. Apply here. (NYC)

• Ramiro from Okteto is hiring a customer success lead. They are building a one-click cloud development environment platform. Apply here. (Remote)

• Sudarshan from Smallest.ai is hiring a finance and admin operations person. They are building real time voice AI designed for scale. Apply here. (SF)

• Tim from Sofar Ocean is hiring a sales director and a communications designer. They are building a maritime intelligence platform. Apply here. (SF, Remote, Singapore)

• Arnau from Throxy is hiring an SDR. They are building a vertical AI agent for running sales funnels. Apply here. (London, Remote)

Reminder you can sign up for the free next play platform (<1 minute) to be able to filter/search for specific job opportunities at hot startups.

Scaling startups:

• Alvin from Amperos is hiring a product manager. They are building an ai-first denial management platform that raised a $16m Series A. Apply here. (NYC)

• Martin from Rings is hiring a senior account executive. They are building a modern CRM for recurring relationships. Apply here. (NYC)

• Maor from Base44 is hiring. They grew to $150m ARR just two months after reaching $100m ARR. They are building an AI app building platform. They are now owned by Wix, which is hiring for roles in every department. Apply here. (Tel Aviv)

• Justin from Confido is hiring a VP of supply chain and a forward deployed engineer. They reached 8 figures of ARR with half the headcount of a typical startup their stage. They are building AI infrastructure for CPG brands. Apply here. (NYC)

• Dan from Dwelly is hiring for 30+ open roles including a head of people, a UK general manager, and integrations people. They have over 10,000 properties under management on their AI-first property management platform. Apply here.

• Aneri from ElevenLabs is hiring a creator growth community person. They are building a voice AI platform. Apply here. (Remote, NYC, LA, SF)

• John from Leland is hiring 10 people in the next 30 days: head of sales, GMs, growth managers, and more. They are building a platform to help people level up with AI. Apply here. (Lehi, Utah)

• Jimmy from Rubie is hiring forward deployed engineers and SDRs. They are automating customer onboarding and have massively increased their revenue this year. Apply here. (NYC)

• Rohan from Speechify is hiring a head of agent relations. Their text to speech products have over 30 million users and Google recently named them the chrome extension of the year. Apply here. (Remote)

• Jennifer from Parafin is hiring a platform growth lead. They are building an embedded financing platform as a service. Apply here. (SF)

• Simon from Turbopuffer is hiring a growth marketer, an executive operations person, and a deployed engineer. They are building really fast search as a service. Apply here. (Remote)

• Haley from Chess.com is hiring an SVP of commercial strategy. They are the #1 platform in the world for playing and learning chess. Apply here. (Remote)

• Ben from Moxie is hiring a principal business operations person. They are building a platform to help over 700 aesthetics practices scale their businesses. Apply here. (Remote)

• Liz from Hims is hiring a director of people operations. They are a leading health and wellness platform. Apply here. (Remote)

• Felix from Trustwallet is hiring a business development director. They are building a leading non-custodial currency wallet with over 200 million users. Apply here. (Remote)

• Sarah from Fora Travel is hiring a head of partner marketing and growth. They are building a modern travel agency that raised a $60m Series B and C. Apply here. (NYC)

• Victorien from ScorePlay is hiring a customer success person and a salesperson. They’ve grown 3x YoY since inception for their sports tech platform that works with teams across the NBA, NHL, Premier League, and more. Apply here.

• Here’s a new list we made of 33 of the fastest growing startups.

Investing and other:

• Atomic VC is hiring a talent acquisition partner. Apply here. (SF, Miami)

• Yale, the Ivy League University, is hiring a program manager to work on their investor network. Apply here. (New Haven)

• Elspeth from Entrepeneurs First is hiring a talent acquisition specialist. Apply here. (London)

• Diagram Ventures is hiring an analyst to focus on their venture creation team. Apply here. (Toronto, Montreal)

Resources and tools:

• How to get more useful advice and feedback.

• Ways to actually be helpful to others.

• Really good: how good are you at your job?

• How to enter side doors: a field guide to jobs, cold emails, and making yourself legible to the right people

Note:

• Thanks for reading! If you have any notes, thoughts, or suggestions, please send us an email: hi@nextplay.so.

• Would appreciate if you could upvote and share this edition if you liked it. Thanks so much!