Product-market fit, founding sales, Robinhood acquisition
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 are not already in Friends of Next Play, here’s why you should consider joining:
Access to our private Slack community where you can connect with like-minded peers (like potential co-founders, mentors, and friends)
Discounts to our favorite products (like Airtable, Replit, Superhuman, Granola, and many more).
Invites to weekly gatherings where you get feedback on your ideas and meet new people.
You can join here.
Co-founders and people to jam with:
Karia previously founded/was CEO of WonderFi, which was recently acquired by Robinhood. He’s been incubating a legal AI startup and is looking for a founding team (CEO, CTO) to run with it. Reach out: samaroo@gmail.com.
Dayo is the former VP of Product at Indeed (responsible for a group that exceed $300m in revenue) and VP of Product at Datasite (who owned growing revenue from $100m to $500m in revenue). They are interested in connecting with collaborators (engineers, designers, community builders, ideas people) who are interested in AI-driven social experiences. Reach out: cequal@gmail.com.
Adam is a repeat founder who also spent years leading teams at Meta and Zendesk. He’s been working on a full stack AI-powered alternative to Notion and Google Docs. He’s looking for a cofounder to help build as he already has dozens of founders and small teams on the waitlist. Reach out: adam.e.voll1@gmail.com.
An anonymous executive and several time startup founding team member with 20+ years of experience building at the intersection of healthcare, data, and technology wants to create an an AI-optimized healthcare concierge. Looking for a co-founder. Reach out to hi@nextplay.so and we’ll try to connect you.
Email us hi@nextplay.so if you are looking for a co-founder.
Early teams:
Veeraj from Dart Health has built a fraud identification platform that has already reached 7 figures in ARR and is profitable. They are hiring founding engineers. Reach out: veeraj@darthealth.ai. (NYC, SF)
Upeka was previously the lead engineer on the HR platform at Gusto. She is now building DianaHR, an AI-powered HR person. They are hiring a founding GTM person. Apply here. (SF)
Neil from Conversion AI has reached $6.5m in ARR. They are building an ai-native b2b marketing automation platform. They are hiring an account executive and a growth lead. Apply here. (SF)
Jacqueline from Artie is hiring their first product marketer. They are building a platform that streams data from databases to warehouses in real-time. Apply here. (SF)
Billy from Clip Automation is building a platform that transforms the industrial manufacturing process. Their founders previously worked at Apple and Juul. They recently landed a contract with a S&P 100 company and are hiring a data analyst (part-time), software engineers, and a project manager. Apply here. (Remote)
Ethan previously started/sold a company to Capital One. He’s building another company in the travel market, has raised some early capital, and is hiring a founding team (growth, engineering). Reach out: ethan.z.bernstein@gmail.com.
Tahsin from a37 is building an AI platform specifically for developer operations. They are hiring a GTM person and engineers. Apply here and reach out: team@a37.ai. (SF)
Sarah from Highlight is building a context-aware AI assistant that aims to increase your productivity across all workflows without browser limitations. They just raised a seed round and are hiring software engineers and design engineers. Apply here. (NYC)
Eric from Parakeet Health is building conversational AI voice agents to ”solve a universal frustration - the “please hold” while scheduling medical appointments.” They are hiring a customer success manager and engineers because they have “too many customers.” Apply here and reach out: emao@parakeethealth.com. (SF)
Ari from Salient is hiring a founding account executive. They are building an operating system for loan servicing, and have already reached $10m in ARR. Apply here. (SF)
Parthi from Letterdrop is building a platform that “listens to your calls & buyers to flag high-intent contacts you're missing today.” They are hiring a sales development representative. Apply here. (NYC)
Ben from David AI is building an audio data research lab. They recently raised a $25m Series A and need to scale. They are hiring a founding business operations lead and product managers. Apply here. (SF)
Sebastian from Monumental Labs is building a robot stone-sculpting factory. They are hiring a director of marketing and shop technicians. Apply here. (NYC, Remote)
Reevo is building a sales automation platform. They are hiring a product designer and a technical recruiter. Apply here. (SF)
If you would like to get connected to more startups, make sure to create your free profile on the Next Play platform. You can also use the platform to search (by location, skill, etc.) for the perfect opportunity. Sign up here.
Scaling startups:
Henson from Two Dots is hiring for 12 roles: engineering, marketing, operations, sales, and more. They are building an underwriting automation and fraud prevention platform. Apply here. (SF)
SpokeO is a people search platform that has over 18 million monthly visitors. They are hiring a data science lead, as well as a VP of Sales and an account executive. Apply here. (Remote)
William from Chai Research is building a social AI platform that has reached 30 million in revenue with just 12 employees. They are hiring software and AI engineers, as well as a recruiter and a “general application.” Apply here. (SF)
Kelsey from Regal AI is hiring a forward deployed engineer. They are building a platform that helps sales, support, and operations team implement AI-powered calls. Apply here. (NYC)
Kaizen Labs is hiring for several roles: head of engineering, customer success, executive assistant, sales, and more. They are building a software platform that helps governments manage permitting for public resources like parks. They currently serve 1.5 million residents across the US and that number is on track to reach 7 million soon. Apply here. (Remote, NYC)
Mark from Gynger is on track to grow 3x again this year (after already growing 3x last year). Mark previously was the founding CEO of Braze ($3b+ valuation) and Gynger raised $120m last year ($20m equity + 100 facility). They are building an embedded financing platform and are hiring their first BDR manager (reporting directly to the CEO!). Apply here. (NYC)
Burkay from Fal is building a generative media platform specifically for developers. They have $40m in revenue with just 22 employees. They recently raised a $49m Series B and are hiring an account executive, customer success, and engineers. Apply here. (SF, Remote)
Harish from Augment just launched with a $25m seed round. They are hiring a product marketing manager, a customer success manager, and a data scientist. They are building an AI assistant for logistics. Apply here. (Remote, Chicago, Toronto)
Leonard and a team of Stanford PhD dropouts from Haize Labs are building an “AI reliability platform” that helps companies move from proof of concept to production. Their GTM team is one person, and they’ve already signed customers like Anthropic, The Gov’t of Singapore, and other Fortune 2000 companies. They raised $12.5m and are hiring software and research engineers. Apply here. (NYC)
Jared from PromptLayer is building a prompt engineering platform. They are hiring for many roles: engineering, customer success, and developer relations. They are also offering a $5k referral bonus if you know anyone. Apply here. (NYC)
Tanay from Athelas is building an ai-powered practice platform for modern healthcare organizations. They have dozens of open roles across engineering, operations, product, people, and sales. Apply here. (Remote, SF, India)
Spandana from Pump.co is building a “Costco for Cloud Computing.” They reached $15m in ARR and profitability with a 35 person team. They are hiring a BDR, a technical product manager, and many other roles. Apply here. (SF, Remote)
Here is a list we made of 33 post-product-market-fit companies.
Investing and other:
Partners Capital is hiring a senior investment associate. Apply here. (SF)
First Round Capital is hiring a writer. Apply here. (SF)
a16z is hiring a chief of staff to work closely with a venture investing partner. Apply here. (SF)
Featured resources and products:
Reflections from a startup founder failing forward: An essay written by Next Play community member who shares lessons from his startup journey.
Ways to Stand Out When You Apply for a Startup: A list of actionable things you can do to improve your likelihood of getting hired.
Scout: A platform (we helped make!) that automates recruiting software engineers (identifying people and reaching out to them on Linkedin).
We would like to feature some community-made-projects in the newsletter. Email us hi@nextplay.so with some context about your project.
Note:
If you are hiring, send us an email — we would love to connect you to candidates (and we recently launched our new Next Play hiring platform). Every week, we get emails from companies who made critical hires via Next Play. For example, recently someone hired a founding engineer. Another hired a customer success person. Another hired someone to be their first business operations person. Email us hi@nextplay.so to get access.
Thanks once again for being part of the community - please do email us if there’s anything we can do to be helpful.
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