ChatGPT inventor, Decagon acquihiring, Chief of Staff for fashion brand
roles at breakout startups, co-founder searches, early startups hiring
✨ Hey there this is a free edition of next play’s newsletter, where we share under-the-radar opportunities to help you figure out what’s next in your journey. Join our private Slack community here and access $1000s of dollars of product discounts here. Recent top posts: Startup job market analysis.
Really loved seeing this quote from a community member this past week:
Be sure to check out Friends of Next Play to get invited to our Slack community and loads of events that’ll help you meet like-minded people. You can join here.
Co-founders and people to jam with:
An anonymous repeat founder is leaving OpenAI to start his 3rd VC-backed company building infrastructure to help AI agents safely interact with the internet at scale. He is looking for a cofounder (ideally someone technical) with experience in e-commerce, protocols, and APIs who wants to build something as foundational as OAuth or Stripe and he is looking to speak with more e-commerce brands. They have already spoken to dozens of potential customers and VCs. Reach out: hi@userails.ai.
An anonymous AI engineer from a well-known tech nonprofit is looking for cofounders to explore building agentic architecture, security, and agent memory. Reach out to hi@nextplay.so and we’ll try to connect you.
Gayatri is a Wharton MBA student and former BCG consultant building an AI-driven fitness and wellness product. She’s looking for a cofounder, especially someone technical. Reach out: gayatrisriram1@gmail.com.
Hiring? Reach out to hi@nextplay.so and we can introduce you to some really amazing under-the-radar candidates from our community who are open to new things.
Early teams:
(Reminder to not spam any posts and only reach out if you’re a candidate)
Diogo from TypeSafe was one of the creators of RLHF and ChatGPT. Now he is building a new class of frontier AI models to make intelligence reliable, programmable, and composable. They are looking for senior engineers. Apply here. (SF)
Lucas from A24 Labs is hiring devops, design, and data people. The team is building the future of production. Reach out: lgelfond@a24films.com. (NYC)
Alex from Active Site is hiring a head of operations. They are building a nonprofit frontier AI Biology research lab. Apply here. (Boston)
Jordan from Turnstile is hiring an account executive/GTM person. They are building a revenue management platform. Apply here. (Remote)
Immad, the founder of Mercury ($3.5 billion startup), announced his wife Fatema is looking for a chief of staff to help run a fashion brand, her personal brand, and their philanthropic endeavors. Apply here. (Remote, SF)
Wesley from Moshi is building an AI agent that handles the full customer journey inside a conversation (like instagram DMs). They are hiring a founding growth engineer. Reach out: wesley@moshi.ai. (Remote, LA)
Lenny from Accord is hiring a content creator. They are building a revenue management platform that’s reached 100+ paying customers in <12 months since launching. Apply here. (Toronto)
David from Datalane is hiring enterprise account executives, as they’ve had three public companies come inbound in the past two weeks. They are building a data platform to help you contact businesses that can’t be found on Linkedin. Apply here. (NYC)
Ari is hiring a founding customer success person for his stealth startup as he says they have a clear path to $1m ARR. Apply here. (NYC)
Benjamin from Matia is hiring a head of partnerships and a product marketing person. They are building a unified data infra platform that’s grown 10x revenue in the past year. Apply here. (Miami, Remote)
Here’s a list we made of 37 of the fastest-growing startups that are hiring.
Scaling startups:
Taylor from Sully is building AI-employees for the healthcare industry. They are hiring an enterprise client success manager. Apply here. (SF)
Vince from Nabis is the US’ largest wholesale marketplace, selling $1b+/year. They are hiring across sales, operations, and more. Apply here. (Remote)
Nico from Corgi is building the first fully automated insurance carrier. They are hiring a strategic finance lead, specifically people with background in VC/IB. Apply here. (SF, NYC)
Edith from Launch Darkly is hiring a chief of staff. They are building a feature management and release platform. Apply here. (SF)
Jason from Faire recently surpassed $550m in annualized revenue for their online wholesale marketplace. They are hiring finance people. Apply here. (SF)
Chris from Uber is hiring product managers to help support drivers (as they’ve nearly reached 10m drivers on their platform). Apply here. (NYC)
Jesse from Decagon is actively looking to acquire founders and small teams. They are building an AI customer support platform, and recently raised at a $4.5 billion valuation. Apply here. (SF, NYC)
Spiros from Resolve AI just raised $125m at a $1b valuation for their production operations platform. They are hiring salespeople, finance people, and growth people. Apply here. (SF, NYC)
Shreman from Granola is hiring a community manager. Granola is a popular AI notetaking platform. Apply here. (SF)
Willie from Watershed is building platform to help companies track their sustainability initiatives. They are hiring an SDR manager. Apply here. (SF)
Art from Heard just passed $11m in ARR. They are hiring an engineer as they scale their financial operating system and back office for therapists. Apply here. (Seattle)
Sam from Monaco is hiring GTM people: sales, post-sales, and client operations. They are building an AI sales platform. Apply here. (SF)
Max from Vast just raised $500m to build next generation space stations. They are hiring for dozens of roles across mostly engineering and manufacturing. Apply here. (LA)
Investing and other:
Ali from Equal Ventures is hiring an investment analyst. Apply here. (NYC)
Willem from Terrain is hiring a director of production - someone to help build out their office and put on portfolio events. Apply here. (NYC)
Ford from Chicago Ventures is hiring an investment associate. Apply here. (Chicago)
Resources and tools:
We added more discounts to the Friends of Next Play perks. Recent highlights include a bunch of discounts to Stripe ($500+ in credits), in addition to loads of other discounts to popular ai-tools (Lovable, Wispr Flow, Clay, Attio, and more) worth literally thousands of dollars. You can join Friends of Next Play here.
Dear Aliens: A writing contest with thousands of dollars in prizes.
Startup job market analysis: Analysis from 1000s of job postings and job-seeker data.
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!
Delighted to see the attention on agent memory/continuity. Also makes me think the term “hallucination” might be doing us a disservice, since it attributes human perception to systems that are really just generating probabilistic outputs.