Strategic Initiatives Apprentice

Job Description The Short Version

You're the person who makes sure things actually happen. Not in a "project manager with a Gantt chart" way – in a "the CPO trusts you to keep ten spinning plates airborne while they’re in a board meeting" way.

A Founders' Studio. We co-build with repeat founders, many of them unicorn founders, providing build expertise, capital, and unfair access from founding to Series B. We call ourselves a Founders' Studio because "venture studio" undersells what we do and oversells what most of them deliver.

You sit inside the product team, work directly alongside our CPO, and make sure the distance between "we decided" and "it shipped" is as short as humanly possible.

You own timelines, track deliverables, chase stakeholders, and flag bottlenecks before they become crises. You're the person who walks out of a messy 90-minute meeting and produces the three-line summary that makes everyone realize what they actually agreed to.

What makes this different from a typical ops role: access. You'll be in the room – strategy sessions, founder meetings, investor conversations, product reviews. Not as a note-taker. As someone expected to absorb how decisions get made at the highest level and eventually start pattern-matching on your own.

• Execution and delivery. Own and drive project timelines and deliverables across multiple work streams simultaneously. The gap between a decision and its execution is where most startups die, yet you exist to close it.
• Structure from chaos. Build lightweight tracking systems and workflows that actually get used. You bring order to ambiguity without bureaucratizing it.
• Stakeholder coordination. Align priorities across product, engineering, design, and growth. Prepare crisp summaries, action items, and progress updates that respect people's time.
• Strategic exposure. Join the CPO in internal and external meetings. Observe how founders pitch, how investors evaluate, how product strategy gets pressure-tested in real time. You learn by proximity to consequential decisions.

• Exceptional organizational instincts. Multiple competing priorities don't stress you, they focus you. Nothing falls through the cracks because you built the system that makes cracks impossible.
• Ownership mentality. You don't wait for instructions. You see what needs doing, flag it or do it, and report back.
• Sharp communication. You write clearly, summarize precisely, and know that a five-sentence email that took twenty minutes to distill is worth more than the rambling ten-paragraph alternative.
• Curiosity and comfort with ambiguity. Zero-to-one environments don't come with SOPs. You find that liberating, not terrifying. You adapt with a keen interest to learn.
• Contrarian streak. Independent thinker. Arguments from first principles. Unafraid of unpopular positions. You believe the best ideas survive open debate. You know how to disagree and commit.

You have a background that taught you to coordinate under pressure: a student organization you ran with COO intensity, a consulting stint where you were tired of making decks about problems and wanted to solve them, or a military background where discipline and execution were the job. If you can tell us why you want to be inside the engine room rather than reading about it, we'll notice.

Twelve months. Meaningful stipend. Embedded alongside the CPO and product team on live projects with real stakes: not shadowing, not observing from a safe distance. If you want to understand how ventures are built from the inside, this is the door.