Founding Head of Growth

Founding Head of Growth

Location: Seattle (in-office Monday/Wednesday/Friday, downtown)

Reports to: CEO

Compensation: Highly competitive base salary plus bonus, equity in our company, and equity/portfolio benefits from our strategic backer. We’ll walk you through the full structure in process.

We’re an AI-native consumer travel company rebuilding travel from first principles, with AI at the core — a proactive, personal companion that knows how you travel and does the work for you. Our mission is making room for what matters most.

We’re a small, senior founding team (currently ~12, growing to ~28 by year-end) heads-down on our first public release, with the backing and distribution reach of one of the world’s largest travel companies behind us.

This is the seat that builds our go-to-market playbook from scratch. You’ll own how we launch, how we grow, and how travelers discover, adopt, and stay with us — from our initial public launch through the durable, compounding growth engine that follows. You’ll do this as a 0→1 builder on a small team: no existing playbook, and a brand that wins on taste and trust.

You’ll be equal parts strategist and operator — setting acquisition, lifecycle, and retention strategy while staying hands-on in the experiments, the copy, the channels, and the numbers. And you’ll turn our strategic partnership into a genuine growth advantage without ever compromising our independence.

• Own the end-to-end launch strategy that converts our pre-launch waitlist into activated, retained users — sequencing, segmentation, and a phased rollout that protects quality of experience.
• Design the launch narrative and moment in partnership with the founders and brand — PR, earned media, founder-led channels, and the first wave of organic distribution.
• Build the activation funnel from waitlist invite → onboarding → first meaningful product moment → first booking.
• Stand up the measurement and attribution foundation before launch.

• Build a diversified acquisition engine across organic, content/SEO/AEO, lifecycle/CRM, paid performance, referral, and partnerships — weighted toward durable, low-CAC channels that fit a premium, trust-led brand.
• Design and ship referral and word-of-mouth loops native to the product.
• Own paid acquisition with discipline: test, measure true incremental CAC and payback, and kill what doesn’t work fast.

• Own the full lifecycle — onboarding, activation, engagement, resurrection — anchored to travel’s natural cadence.
• Build the proactive, anticipatory messaging system that brings users back at the right moment (price drops, rebooking opportunities, planning nudges) — leaning into our agentic, always-on product surface.
• Drive retention and habit formation as the real growth lever for a low-frequency category.

• Build and run the growth experimentation program — hypotheses, prioritization, clean reads, honest post-mortems.
• Be a collaborator to product to prioritize features that nurture the growth flywheel.
• Own the growth metrics that matter: activation, retention curves, cohort LTV, CAC/payback, and PMF benchmarks.
• Be the truth-teller on what’s actually working.

• Turn our strategic backer relationship into a structural advantage — distribution, data, and reach — while rigorously protecting our independent, unbiased positioning.
• Partner with BD and the founders to unlock co-marketing, cross-portfolio, and distribution opportunities.

• 0→1 operator. You’ve built growth from nothing, not optimized a mature funnel. You create structure out of ambiguity and don’t wait for permission.
• Consumer DNA, non-negotiable. Deep consumer product instinct from B2C experience — you know the difference between what users say and what they do, and you’ve grown a consumer product people genuinely love. Travel experience is a strong plus, but not required.
• Full-stack growth leader. Fluent across acquisition, lifecycle, retention, and brand — hands-on in the work, not just managing people who do it.
• Founder-…