New team at OpenAI, chief of staff roles, early Deel employee
opportunities at breakout startups, co-founder searches, and early teams 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.
If you’d like to meet more people — highly suggest checking out Friends of Next Play. When you join, you get invited to our private Slack group where you’ll meet like-minded people. Zach, for example, met Sha via the community - they’ve since started a company, raised a $2m pre-seed, and signed multiple large enterprise customers. The Slack group is buzzing with conversations (and weekly events) ranging from product feedback to hanging out to career strategy. You can join the conversation here - hope to talk soon.
Co-founders and people to jam with:
Adham is a senior software engineer building Aaris, an ai-powered personalized learning platform starting with test preparation. He’s looking for a co-founder. Reach out: adhambishr@gmail.com.
Alice previously worked in private equity for five years. She’s now finishing her Stanford MBA while building an AI copilot for commercial real estate private equity deal flow. She’s looking for a co-founder. Reach out: alice02@stanford.edu.
Ilanit was an early employee at Deel and created their customer onboarding team. She’s exploring ideas to build the “ultimate customer onboarding platform” and is looking for collaborators. Reach out: ilagold94@gmail.com.
Alec works at Beehiv and previously did growth at Ramp. He’s looking to connect with collaborators curious about building in the personalized health tech space. He’s currently exploring ideas at the intersection of wearable data, functional medicine, and consumer-first health marketplaces. Reach out: akremins@gmail.com
Looking for a co-founder? Ping us on Slack (when you join Friends of Next Play) and we’ll try to make connections!
Early teams:
Retell AI has reached $7m ARR with 7 employees. They are hiring a former founder, as they build a conversational AI platform. Apply here. (SF)
Sam from Superfluent is building an ai-powered language learning platform. They are hiring a head of growth and a senior growth marketer. Apply here. (Remote)
Alex from Neon Mobile is building a platform that allows users to make hundreds of dollars per year by securely selling their anonymized data. They recently raised a pre-seed round. They are hiring a founding engineer and a business operations person. Apply here. (NYC)
Aamir from Mixedbread is hiring founding team members: growth, generalist, engineering, design. They are a team of ex-Google search engineers who have AI models with 50M+ downloads. Apply here. (SF, Remote)
Devin from Squint is building a platform that helps empower frontline manufacturing operators. They are hiring a customer strategy partner, a director of product, GTM engineers, and more. Apply here. (SF)
Chad from Gruns is hiring for brand, finance, and operations roles. They are building a comprehensive nutritional gummy. Apply here. (Remote)
Alex from Happenstance is building a search engine (for things like sales and fundraising). They’ve raised from Elad Gil and Garry Tan and are hiring engineers. Apply here. (Remote)
Carolina from Opus Health is building a healthcare payments platform. They are hiring a founding engineer. Apply here. (Austin, Remote)
Yoland from Comfy.org is hiring a non-technical founding team member. They are building open-source generative AI infrastructure. Apply here. (SF)
Anuraag from Manifest is building a platform that digitizes retirement fund transfers. They are hiring a senior engineer. Apply here. (Remote)
A stealth startup rethinking industrial equipment maintenance is hiring a founding engineer. Apply here and reach out: careers@runthunderbird.com. (SF)
Jimmy from Plug is building a wholesale auction designed for EVs. They are hiring an operations coordinator and account executives. Apply here. (LA)
Aman from FurtherAI is building an AI platform for insurance underwriting and compliance. They are hiring account executives. Apply here. (SF)
Ephemera helps build private and decentralized messaging. They are hiring engineers and a “wildcard” role. Apply here. (Remote)
Anada from BoldVoice has reached $8.5m ARR with just 8 employees. They are building an AI-powered speech coach. They are hiring a growth marketing person. Apply here. (NYC)
Scaling startups:
Daniel from Perplexity is hiring someone to join their “special situations group” to work on strategic projects like m&a and partnerships. They are building an ai-powered search engine. Learn more here and reach out: daniel@perplexity.ai. (SF).
John from Stan has reached $30m in revenue with 30 employees. They are hiring for a bunch of roles including a head of product, product manager, head of community, content creators, and more. They are building an all-in-one creator store. Apply here. (Remote, Toronto)
Merrill from Graphite is hiring for nearly every role: account executives, marketing leads, product managers, and more. They are building an AI-developer productivity platform that already has tens of thousands of developer users. Apply here. (NYC)
OpenAI is hiring people to join their newly formed “Focused Bets” research teams - which are small teams focused on doing deep dives into domains that could be ready for AI disruptions. Reach out: michelle.kim@openai.com. (SF, NYC, London, Remote)
Cristina from Linear is hiring salespeople, customer success managers, and a creative director. They are building a product planning platform. Apply here. (Remote)
Aaron from Snapdocs is hiring a chief of staff, a customer success person, and an enterprise account executive. They are building a digital mortgage closing platform. Apply here. (Remote)
Ryan from Warmly is building an agentic marketing platform. They are hiring a customer success manager and SDRs. Apply here. (Remote)
Lauren from Cofertility is building a tech-enabled fertility platform. They recently raised a Series A and are hiring a head of finance, marketing manager, member experience manager, and more. Apply here. (Remote)
Justin from Charta Health is building an automated chart review platform. They are hiring a product marketing manager, growth marketing lead, forward deployed engineer, and an account executive. Apply here. (SF)
Lumafield is hiring in every department: sales, marketing, operations, engineering, etc. They are building an advanced 3d X-ray technology. Apply here. (SF, Boston)
Ryan from Vori Health is building a virtual healthcare platform. They are hiring customer success leaders, people leads, and more. Apply here. (Remote)
Are you hiring? Send us an email (hi@nextplay.so) and we’ll invite you to the new Next Play hiring platform — should help you meet high-quality people.
Investing and other:
Mike previously founded Skillshare. Now he incubates new companies and is building an audience and is hiring a chief of staff. Reach out here. (Remote)
Austin previously founded Morning Brew and is hiring a chief of staff to help him build a business empire. Reach out here. (NYC)
AI Fund is hiring a principal investor to invest in AI-native startups. Apply here. (SF)
Unusual Ventures is hiring an operations manager. Apply here. (SF)
Featured resources and products:
Startup equity 101: A practical guide to help you understand equity compensation and stock options.
On building a founding team: Tactical advice for founders and candidates interested in early-stage companies.
Next Play community member Sandra is building Meshly - think of it like a smoke detector for revenue (and here’s a video demo). (We’re experimenting with featuring more products from the Slack community!)
Note:
A challenge for people this week - can you send 2 personalized cold emails in the next seven days? Sounds small and simple - but you really never know what could happen…sending a thoughtful email could change your life! It could help you find a new job or make new friends or meet mentors.
Thanks for participating in the community. Please email us hi@nextplay.so if you have any feedback - would love to be as helpful as possible.
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