Spotify founder, Y Combinator, OpenAI Chairman/Stripe CTO

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.

A hopefully encouraging reminder - you are potentially just one email away from landing your next opportunity. Multiple people landed roles from cold emails they sent via next play over the past few weeks. We are rooting for you this week.

Co-founders and people to jam with:

• Elad spent the past 11+ years working in engineering and team leadership roles, helping scale startups like WalkMe, Island, and Transmit Security into unicorns. He’s thinking about a new cyber-security focused startup and is looking for a business-oriented co-founder. You can reach out here: elad532@gmail.com.

• Tim previously was a senior software engineering lead at Tesla, and worked as a CTO at two early-stage startups. He wants to build something impactful and is looking for a co-founder (or at least someone interested in brainstorming). You can reach out here: tim.tobi.me@gmail.com.

• Olga was previously a product manager at Microsoft. She’s exploring ideas around YC RFS "1 million jobs", earlier researched AI-driven personal productivity tools and solutions to tackle social isolation and loneliness, looking for collaborators. You can reach out here: o.petrova@live.com.

• Adi previously was a software engineer at Microsoft and before that did ML research at Oxford. He’s building a new company using AI for voice cloning/dubbing in many languages and is looking for a co-founder. You can reach out here: iadityavishnu@gmail.com.

• Will was a product manager at Redfin, leading AI/ML applications for their rentals business. He was also the first employee at Coterie, an e-commerce brand that scaled to over $100mm ARR. He is looking for co-founders for his new AI b2b saas startup. You can reach out here: will.henderson22@gmail.com.

• Emmett previously worked in product and engineering at Salesforce, Stripe, and Bloomberg. He’s looking for a co-founder to work on “AI-native knowledge management.” You can reach out here: emmett@nonfiction.tech.

• An anonymous VP of product at a Series D startup is working on a new AI-related idea and is looking for a potential co-founder. You can reach out here: hi@adolam.ai.

Want to meet more like-minded people? You should explore friends of next play, where you get access to a private Slack group, additional content, and literally hundreds of dollars worth of discounts to our favorite products (like Notion, Granola, Perplexity, and much more). You can join friends of next play here.

Early teams:

• Irene from Chiyo is hiring a founding product manager. They are building a “food-is-medicine platform for women’s health” - this person will own the personalized nutrition hub. You can learn more here and reach out here: team@wearechiyo.com.

• Hannes from Blumen recently closed large enterprise deals with some of the largest power developers in the US for their energy operating system. They are hiring a software engineer and a product designer. You can learn more here and reach out here.

• Mohak from HoneyHive is building an evaluation and observability stack for AI agents. They’ve signed contracts with leading startups. They are hiring engineers across full-stack, infrastructure, and DevRel roles. You can learn more here and reach out here: mohak@honeyhive.ai.

• Altera is building digital agents with human qualities. They are hiring engineers and a people operations analyst. You can learn more and apply here.

• Andrew from Tiny (which owns Dribbble, LetterBoxd, and several other businesses) is hiring an “ai-first” director of finance for one of his portfolio companies (someone who can hack together AI workflows with lots of tooling). You can learn more here and reach out here: ben@follypartners.com.

• Novella is trying to fix the way complex insurance policies are sold. They are hiring engineers, designers, and salespeople. You can learn more and apply here.

• Ben from Composer is building a platform for people to test investment strategies. They are hiring a head of account sales and engineers. You can learn more and apply here.

• Josh from Ranger is building an automated quality assurance platform. They are hiring an account executive, customer success people, and software engineers. They just announced $8.9M in total funding over two rounds led by General Catalyst and XYZ. You can learn more and apply here.

• Alfred from Listen Labs is building an AI interviewer that conducts qualitative research. They are hiring for all sorts of roles. You can learn more and apply here.

• Newtone is building digital workers for the e-commerce industry. They are hiring an ai engineer, and also invite anyone to apply that thinks they could be a good fit. You can learn more and apply here.

Hiring? Send us an email: hi@nextplay.so - we’d love to try and be helpful.

Scaling startups:

• Dani from Jam is hiring their first revenue/sales leader. This person will work very closely with the founders to help scale the business. Jam is used by 32 of the Fortune 100 - it’s a platform to help their team identify and fix software bugs faster. You can reach out here: dani@jam.dev.

• Ben from Actively is building AI agents to help go to market teams 10x outbound efficiency. They are hiring for dozens of roles: software engineers, salespeople, product manager, deployment lead, and a product marketer. You can learn more here and reach out here: ben@actively.ai.

• Ilaria from Encord is building a platform to curate, manage, and annotate AI training data. They are hiring across the founding GTM team: sales, sales development, customer success, and solutions engineering. You can learn more here and reach out here: ilaria@encord.com.

• Daniel, the founder of Spotify, has a new company: Neko. Neko is a comprehensive body-scan that tells you about your health. They just announced $260 million in new funding and are hiring doctors, engineers, and have open applications for general roles. You can learn more and apply here.

• StackBlitz scaled from $0 to $20m in revenue in just two months. Their platform Bolt is a text to code platform. They just announced a $105.5 million round. They are hiring engineers, GTM people, people people, and more. You can learn more and apply here.

• Anysphere, the company behind coding assistant Cursor, recently announced a Series B at a $2.6 billion valuation. They are hiring engineers. You can learn more and apply here.

• Julian from Linear is hiring a writer. Linear is a tool for planning and building products. You can learn more and reach out here.

• Max from GiveButter is building a platform that helps non-profits fundraise, market, and manage donors in one place. They are hiring a marketing lead, a data analyst, and an SDR manager. You can learn more and apply here.

• HeyGen is hiring for nearly every department: growth lead, recruiter, engineering, sales engineering, and more. Their mission is to make visual storytelling accessible to all. You can learn more and apply here.

• Clint from Cribl is building a “smart logging platform” to help teams build faster. They recently surpassed $200m ARR (after being one of the fastest companies to reach $100m ARR). They are hiring across customer success, engineering, operations, and sales. You can learn more and apply here.

• Leland is hiring a launcher to open new markets and products. They are building a marketplace to find coaches. You can learn more and apply here.

Investing and other:

• Casey from Topology Ventures is hiring a technology and operations lead. You can apply here.

• Commerce Ventures is hiring a strategy associate. You can reach out here: jobs@commercevc.com.

• Voyager Ventures is hiring a chief of staff for their climate focused venture fund. You can learn more and apply here.

• Left Lane Capital is hiring an investment associate. You can reach out here: jobs@leftlanecap.com.

Featured resources:

• “My Path to OpenAI” - Greg Brockman, former CTO of Stripe and current Chairman of OpenAI, wrote about what led to his career decisions.

• Results from next play’s compensation benchmark are here - you’ll learn what people are getting paid across a wide range of roles (and some other interesting insights).

• RFS - Y Combinator’s latest “request for startups” which has ideas to explore.

• Everything you need to know about becoming a Chief of Staff - A comprehensive guide to the Chief of Staff role.

• Check out next play on TikTok and Instagram for additional video content.

Note:

• We have lots of ideas for next play…here’s a new experiment: “Circles.” What if we hand-matched you with a Circle of like-minded peers? Imagine a small group of people with similar interests and experiences—all exploring what’s next. In the facilitated virtual gatherings, you could talk about your job search process or what it’s like going from -1 to 0 on your new startup. Let us know what you think of this experiment (and perhaps if you’d like to try it out!) by filling out this short form.

• If you’re a VC looking to connect with founders at the earliest stages (when they are just thinking about ideas or just started something), email us: hi@nextplay.so - we have another new experiment that we think you could really really like.

• Product Hunt just named Next Play as one of the “top community tools for bringing people together.” We would appreciate your support - can help us win their annual award: the Golden Kitty.

• Friendly reminder: Please do not send spam responses to opportunities listed in the newsletter. A) You will not get responses and B) if you are reported too many times, we will have to remove you from next play.

• Thanks for reading next play and participating in the community. We appreciate your support - please do email us if/when you have ideas or feedback: hi@nextplay.so.

Talk soon!

Ben + next play team