ABC Startup Company is looking for an experienced founder to lead their company’s initial growth and development, driving our success through to achieving a minimum of US$1 billion in annual revenue within five years.

The successful candidate will (in no particular order):

• Have a proven track record of success that gives confidence to investors that we will achieve our vision
• Be responsible for setting the overall vision and strategy for the company
• Define the product, design, user interface, user experience and requirements for all functionality across the product range
• Perform market research and validation to ensure that we are building something people actually want
• Set the pricing of your products, and inevitably deal with the challenges of changing that pricing, multiple times
• Establish the company’s brand and message
• Design, develop and publish the company’s corporate website
• Drive inbound marketing and leads through blogs, social media and other content
• Understand how to use Mailchimp to build mailing lists and manage email marketing campaigns
• Run advertising campaigns on Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads and various other online platforms
• Run advertising campaigns in industry publications, newsletters, email bulletins, aggregators and more
• Track campaign performance in Google Analytics, Mixpanel and other tools. Run retargeting campaigns and upsell campaigns to established customer.
• Create engaging PR campaigns that gets the company coverage in industry press, and also the general press/paper of record we have visibility to investors
• Evangelise the business at events, speaking at tech conferences and establishing us as thought leaders in our industry
• Be extremely comfortable pitching our company to investors, sales prospects, startup accelerators, startup pre-accelerators, mentors, partners, customers and random people you meet
• Sell the company through direct and indirect approaches. Be comfortable sending cold emails and picking up the phone, “reaching out” to people on Facebook Messenger or whatever the flavour of the month platform is
• Spend hours scouring the Web and contact books to figure out leads into potential investors and customers
• Jump on a plane and travel to places on a whim to close deals
• Recruit out a team of superstar executives to be your COO, CTO, CFO, SVP of Sales and Marketing — you need to be especially good at this, as you’ll be promising them low salaries and long hours
• Have plenty of time to search for, screen and interview candidates
• Establish training and onboarding plans for new hires
• Look after all HR — payroll, expenses, travel, working with recruiters, staff grievances, payrise requests
• Constantly review employee performance, have tough conversations with underperformers and fire people if necessary
• Understand the concepts of each core function of your business so you can effectively hire people in the first place
• Be able to spot the bullshit when recruiting sales people — it turns out the sales people happen to be very good at selling themselves…
• Define the initial product requirements, then own and manage the product roadmap
• Be a rock-star developer who is a front-end ninja, but also has rock-solid back-end skills
• Understand databases, in-memory caching, CDNs, several hundred AWS products and how to use them
• Know the importance of high scalability and availability, and design solutions that can handle sudden spikes in growth
• Figure out ways of getting enough AWS credits to keep hosting costs as close to zero for the first year or two
• Be an accountant, with solid knowledge of bookkeeping, financial reporting and tax
• Able to read lengthy EU documents telling you why you need to be able to charge about 100 different VAT rates depending on where your customer is
• Be able to put together a slick 10 slide investor deck and then predict what order each individual person you pitch to will want you to present it in
• Understand the difference between angel, seed and series A/B/C/D/E investment
• Know who the decision makers are in VCs and customers
• Understand how dilution and shares work, what an RSU is, why stock options are beneficial and when you’ll need an ESOP program for your staff
• Have a solid exit strategy that makes you a valuable proposition to investors
• Constantly flip-flop between investor-mode and customer-mode, the investor wants to hear completely different things to your customer
• Know your LTV from your CAC from your ARR and your Churn
• Differentiate between good and bad advice, but be nice when you’re talking to someone who clearly doesn’t know their ass from their elbow
• Build a customer service knowledgebase and documentation library — preferably in your spare time, as you’ll be too busy to do this any other time
• Set up a system to allow customers request help in a simple and efficient way
• Answer customer queries, usually in the middle of the night on a weekend just after you’ve crawled into bed after a long day
• Take on the chin anytime some random person uses your customer support system to tell you how overpriced your incredibly inexpensive product is

The above is just a taster. You should basically be able to do anything, anytime, with little to no training or prior firsthand experience, and then be able to teach someone else how to do it effectively by the end of the day so you can do something else totally new tomorrow.

In return, you will benefit from:

• A highly competitive compensation package of €0 until we initial raise investment
• No perks of any kind — you’re the founder, the unlimited vacations are for the rockstars you need to hire
• 100% shareholding of the business, although this will inevitably be diluted away each time we raise money
• Health insurance, paid directly by yourself from your own savings — don’t skimp on this, you’ll probably need it soon
• Increased time spent working by reducing the amount of time you waste each day sleeping and doing other non-productive tasks like eating meals without a laptop in front of you and enjoying time with your family and friends
• A rollercoaster lifestyle, with thrilling highs and monumental slumps where you feel on the brink of doom
• A corporate credit card that will routinely fail due to being constantly maxed out
• Sleeping on couches or floors when you travel. It is a rite of passage to being a member of the founder elite

ABC Startup Company is an equal opportunities employer. Please send all applications to careers@example.com. Agencies welcome — after all, 15–20% of $0 is $0.