MongoDB software eng, Cursor team, Google PM
opportunities at breakout startups, early teams hiring, and co-founder searches
✨ 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.
We hope 2025 is your most fulfilling year yet—to help with that, we are launching our most requested update: Slack! Now when you join friends of next play ($10/month), you’ll get access to our private Slack group - filled with high quality people looking to brainstorm ideas, give each other feedback, and share resources. You’ll also get discounts to our favorite products, invites to gatherings, and additional content. You can join here. Hope to talk soon!
Co-founders / people to jam with:
Tanay previously worked at Citadel and MongoDB as a software engineer. He’s looking for people with interesting ideas to work with. You can reach out here: chandak.tanay@gmail.com.
Julian is a writer who has worked with the former CEO of Reddit, the founder of Twitch, and the founder of Floodgate. He is looking for a collaborator to help him develop a “new platform for reading books.” He has already designed the platform (and also written a book to use on it). You can reach out here: julian.w.wise@gmail.com.
Sam is looking for people to chat with about interesting ideas (particularly people who enjoy debating controversial topics) and potentially found something together. He previously founded Pinstripe, a local fashion marketplace and also worked in investing. You can reach out here: sam@compounding.ventures.
Matthias previously founded and was the CTO a crypto startup that raised millions of dollars and scaled a team to 40 people. Now he is working on a new company (building audio-visual immersive experiences) and is looking for a co-founder. You can reach out here: matthias.zandanel@gmail.com.
Barry previously led growth at Workvivo before they were acquired by Zoom and also did sales at Hubspot. He’s now looking to build a new b2b SaaS company and is looking for a co-founder. You can reach out here: barry@barrynyhan.com.
Gabriel spent the past 5.5 years as a product manager at Google building privacy focused tools for millions of EU users to control their cross-product data sharing. He’s now developing a new suite of ai-powered tools for product managers and looking for a co-founder. You can reach out here: gabrielfish579@gmail.com.
Looking for a co-founder? Reach out with a blurb hi@nextplay.so
Early teams:
Sunset helps tech startups shut down. They’ve gone from $0 to $3m in annualized revenue in <18 months (having raised just $1.5m in pre seed money). They are hiring a director of customer success. You can learn more and apply here.
Pranav from Paramark is hiring for nearly every founding role: AE, customer success lead, marketer, data science, etc. They are building a forecasting platform for marketing teams. You can learn more and apply here.
Paddy from Stackfix is building a platform that helps you quickly compare software to make purchasing easier. They are hiring a founding marketing lead. You can learn more and apply here.
Barbora from Trueclaim is building a transparent third party healthcare administrator. They are hiring a founding operations person. You can learn more and apply here.
Ali from Letter is building an ai-powered revenue enablement platform. They are hiring a founding account executive, SDR, and product manager. You can learn more and apply here.
Flora is building a new kind of tool to help shape the future of creative work. They recently raised from a16z and Long Journey. They are hiring engineers and a head of growth. You can learn more and apply here.
Sachin from Elvex is building an enterprise AI platform. Sachin sold his last company Parsley to Automattic. They are hiring a customer success manager, account executive, and product engineer. You can learn more and apply here.
Hannes from Blumen is building software to streamline permitting, compliance, and regulatory hurdles for project developers. They are hiring designers and engineers. You can learn more and apply here.
Justin from Cassidy is building an AI workspace personalized to your company. They are hiring a business development representative and a customer success manager. You can reach out here: careers@cassidyai.com.
Joe from Instant is hiring a founding engineer. They are building a new Firebase. You can learn more and apply here.
Tarek from Stuut is building an AI co-pilot to help companies collect revenue more efficiently. They are hiring founding team members for operations and growth. You can learn more and apply here.
Gentrace is building an intuitive LLM evaluation platform. They are hiring a founding engineer. You can learn more and apply here.
Here’s a bigger list of early teams backed by top tier firms.
Scaling startups:
Bret has been a leader and board member at companies like OpenAI, Facebook, Twitter, and Salesforce. Now he’s building Sierra and is hiring for every department (engineering, marketing, operations, research, etc.). They are building a conversational AI platform for businesses. You can learn more and apply here.
Samir from Vise is hiring across operations, design, investments, and engineering. Backed by Sequoia, they are building a technology-driven investment manager that added billions of dollars to its platform over the last 12 months. You can learn more and apply here.
Benji from Ashby is building a modern applicant tracking and hiring system. They are hiring GTM people like an enterprise account executive and a head of sales enablement. You can learn more and apply here.
Chris from Jasper is building a generative AI platform for marketing. They are hiring an enterprise customer success manager. You can learn more and apply here.
Bureau is hiring for 25+ roles across customer success, engineering, and marketing. They are building a no code identity decisioning platform. You can learn more and apply here.
Michelle from Anrok is building a global sales tax automation platform. They are hiring a partner manager. You can learn more and apply here.
Bobby from Range is hiring an account executive. They are building an online wealth management service. You can learn more and apply here.
Anysphere, the makers of Cursor, just raised a $100m Series B. They are building an applied research lab working on automating coding. They are hiring engineers. You can learn more and apply here.
Guillermo from Vercel is hiring a senior marketplace partner manager. Vercel provides tools for developers to build faster web experiences. You can learn more and apply here.
George from CloudTrucks is hiring a Senior Front End Engineer to work closely with him on their growth engineering team. CloudTrucks is building tools to help truck driver's manage their business and earn more money. You can reach out here: george@cloudtrucks.com.
Brad from Superblocks is building an AI co-engineer for building internal apps. They are hiring software engineers and account executives. You can learn more and apply here.
Here’s a list of companies who say they sponsor US visas for exceptional international talent.
Are you hiring for any interesting roles? Reach out hi@nextplay.so.
Investing and other:
Ed from Pareto was recently named one of the most active angel investors in the startup ecosystem (900+ companies to date!). They are hiring someone to join their investment team (no prior experience ideally) and another person to be an EIR/Chief of Staff to support new incubations. You can reach out here.
TCV is hiring an investment associate. You can learn more and apply here.
Datadog is hiring a corporate development lead. You can learn more and apply here.
Microventures is hiring a venture fund associate. You can learn more and apply here.
Techstars is hiring an investment manager in London. You can learn more and apply here.
Featured resources:
What you’ll wish you’d known: traps to avoid when planning your career from Paul Graham.
Be Kind: reflection from Meta’s CTO on how to lead with kindness (and effectiveness).
How to get startups to notice you: best practices from hiring managers at companies like Ramp, Notion, and Figma.
Traits That May Cease to Be Valuable: prompt to help you think about what skills may stop/start being valuable in the future.
Note:
Next play is less than one year old but has already helped lots and lots of people find (what they describe to be) “life-changing” opportunities (like roles at new companies or meeting their co-founder). We want to 10x the number of people we impact in 2025 — and have a lot planned. Please let us know if you have any feedback or ideas: hi@nextplay.so. Thank you once again for all the support!
We are looking for people who want to write tactical career advice to be shared with the next play audience. The more insightful and interesting (e.g. including real world examples that people can learn from), the better. Send us your essay ideas here: hi@nextplay.so. Should be amazing brand exposure for you while helping lots of people.
Reminder - we really appreciate you being engaged in the next play community. Please reach out to as many opportunities as you find interesting, but do avoid spamming people in the newsletter/community. If you are reported for this too many times, we will (and have had to) remove you.
Thanks again for reading - talk soon!
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My favorite newsletter!