Win(s) of the week: Got an email last week from someone who tried our cold email outreach method and got three interviews at startups. Love to hear this. If you’re looking for a sandbox to test out your cold messaging, please do join our Slack. You’ll find like minded people who would love to bounce ideas with you and give you some feedback along the way. You can join our community here.

Join here

Co-founders and people to jam with:

• Andrew is an engineer and CTO who has owned a P&L for a major business line at a global services firm. Building Knowhow, multiplayer AI for company memory, live with customers. Looking for a commercially oriented co-founder to own GTM, sales, and fundraising. Reach out at andrew.atiya@gmail.com. (NYC)

• Brandon is a biochemist turned pharmacist with 10 years across drug information, toxicology, and infectious disease, now building with AI. Building a drug discovery platform focused on pandemic preparedness and antibiotic resistance. Looking for people driven to solve hard healthcare problems. Reach out at bcadkins01@gmail.com. (Lexington, KY)

• Anna is a software engineer turned Developer Experience Lead building APIs, developer platforms, and authentication systems. Exploring developer infrastructure and AI products that make developers more productive. Looking for customer-obsessed founders strong in GTM, design, or enterprise sales. Reach out at amarie.engle@gmail.com. (West Virginia/Detroit)

Check out our latest list of engineers, salespeople, and operators looking to meet a co-founder.

By the way are you looking to hire great people? We can help connect you to great engineers, ops people, salespeople, and more. Our community is now over 91,000+ people. Email us: hi@nextplay.so.

Early teams:

• Andrey from Keenable is hiring a head of product and a head of revenue. They are building search infrastructure for AI labs and agents. Apply here. (Remote)

• Sam from Skyward Wildfire is hiring a technical product manager. They are building a platform that identifies where lightning is going to strike to protect critical infrastructure. Apply here. (Vancouver)

• Ryan, former CEO of Cadre (a16Z, $500+ M exit) is building his next start up Ellis AI and hiring AI product engineers. They are an AI Native Operations platform for private credit. Apply here. (NYC)

• Andrew from Offline Talent is hiring a founding engineer. They are building a platform that enables brands to launch IRL activations at scale. Reach out: andrew@offlinetalent.com. (NYC)

• Tiphaine from Covera is hiring a founding GTM person. They are building AI agents for the insurance brokerage industry. Apply here. (SF)

• Peter from Vouched is hiring a developer advocate. They are building a trusted way to verify people and agents. Apply here. (SF)

• Sumit from Zapata Quantum is hiring a senior software engineer. They are building a platform that’s partnered with Nvidia to accelerate quantum algorithm development. Apply here. (Remote)

• Andrew from Yardstik is hiring an account executive. They are building a human trust platform that helps organizations verify identities. Apply here. (Minneapolis)

• Nathan from Lone Palm Labs is hiring with a general application. They are building Retro, a new type of social network that’s like a photos-only journal. Apply here. (Remote, SF, NYC)

• Naman from Airbound is hiring marketing people. They are building a drone delivery service in India. Apply here. (Bangalore)

• Anna from Transfyr is hiring a technical program manager. They are building physical AI for science. Apply here. (Boston)

• Anuraag from Zensors is hiring a founding account executive. They are building AI sensors that understand and automate the physical world. Apply here. (SF, Pittsburgh, Remote)

• Danny from TrueBiz is hiring a head of sales. They are building a platform that does instant background checks on businesses. Apply here. (Remote)

• Meng from Ruma Care is hiring a chief of staff. They are building an operations stack for biologic infusion clinics. Apply here. (SF)

• Jota from YouShift is hiring a founding account executive. They are building an OS for hospital workforce management. Apply here. (NYC, Remote)

Reminder to check out the free AI-powered talent agent that sends you personalized recommendations sourced from the Next Play network. Lots of interesting under the radar opportunities that we’ll try and match you with!

Scaling startups:

• Asher from Beacon Software is hiring a member of their GTM staff. They are buying and operating niche, founder-built businesses. Apply here. (SF)

• Paul from FleetWorks is hiring a senior product manager. They are building omni-channel agents for freight booking and management. Apply here. (SF)

• Eric from StackBlitz is hiring a community manager. They are building an online IDE that’s used by over 1 million developers per month. Apply here. (Remote)

• Matt from Doctronic is hiring a product lead, a partnerships manager, and a recruiter. They are building the first AI that is legally authorized to practice medicine. Apply here. (NYC, Remote, SF)

• Scott from Faro is hiring a director of implementation and a senior product manager. They are building an AI platform for clinical development. Apply here. (SF, NYC, Boston)

• George from Monk is hiring engineers, sales engineers, and a GTM engineer. They are building an AI-native accounts receivables platform. Apply here. (NYC)

• Dima from Metriport is hiring a partnerships lead and a salesperson. They just raised $26 million. They are building a platform to help a solution to the US’ medical data exchange. Apply here. (SF)

• Adam from Owner is hiring for dozens of roles across customer success, talent, and product. They just raised $240m to scale their AI platform for restaurants. Apply here. (SF, Remote, Toronto)

• Andrei from Siena is hiring a head of community, a product manager, and a talent person. They are building empathetic AI agents for customer support. Apply here. (NYC, London)

• Zach from Brellium is hiring an account executive. They are building an AI-powered healthcare platform. Apply here. (NYC)

• Everett from Rho is hiring a founding startup banking GTM person. They are building a modern banking platform built for startups. Apply here. (Miami)

• Noam from Alice is hiring a salesperson. They just raised $120m to build safe and responsible AI. Apply here. (SF)

• Ashesh from Coram is hiring an account executive. They are building a video security platform. Apply here. (SF)

• Steve from Current is hiring a marketing analyst and tax managers. They are building one of the fastest growing accounting platforms. Apply here. (Boca Raton, Somerset)

• Nitin from freehand is hiring an AI product manager. They are building an AI coworker for spend management. Apply here. (Remote)

• William from ChipAgents is hiring a strategic finance manager. They are building an AI-powered platform for designing chips. Apply here. (San Jose)

• Yoseph from Relay is hiring a product marketing manager and a product manager. They are building a digital banking platform for small business owners. Apply here. (Toronto)

• Will from Antithesis is hiring a biz dev rep. They are building a platform engineering teams use to assess reliability and performance. Apply here. (London)

• Akash from Glimpse is hiring a product operations manager. They are building an AI platform for CPG brands that has hundreds of customers and $50m+ raised. Apply here. (NYC)

• Dan from Brain Co is hiring a private equity engagement lead. They are building AI-native operating systems for large institutions. Apply here. (SF)

• Ethan from Meshy is hiring a senior growth marketer. They are building a 3d generative AI company that has over 5 million users. Apply here. (SF)

• Brad from Anrok is hiring for 22 open roles: an onboarding manager, a GTM systems manager, and a product marketing manager. They are building an automated sales tax platform. Apply here. (SF, NYC)

• Marc from Higharc is hiring a director of product and salespeople. They are building a platform that changes how new homes are designed. Apply here. (Remote)

• Varun from Emerald AI is hiring a talent partner and a senior product manager. They are building software for data centers, and recently raised $150m. Apply here. (SF, Boston, DC)

• Here’s a list we just made of 27 newly minted unicorns currently hiring.

Investing and other:

• Bessemer Venture Partners is hiring an associate to focus on AI investing. Apply here. (SF)

• Alumni Ventures is hiring a community manager. Apply here. (Boston)

Resources and tools:

• We want to hear your best ideas for Next Play. How should we think about growing? Making the community better? Should we launch more newsletters? Should we partner with influencers? Should we do new (useful!) things? Email us: hi@nextplay.so with your ideas.

• Our latest roundup of hot AI companies and interesting trends.

• We received a lot of demand for the Job Search Accelerator. Taking in the feedback and will see what we can do to even further expand access in a few weeks. Stay tuned.

Note:

• Thanks for reading! If you have any notes, thoughts, or suggestions, please send us an email: hi@nextplay.so.

• Would appreciate if you could upvote and share this edition if you liked it. Thanks so much!

Everyone is talking about AI. We said that a year ago. And also two years ago. And it was true both of those times, and I think it’s somehow? even more true now.

Where will be a year from now? It doesn’t seem like this overall trend is slowing down anytime soon. Companies are getting started. Startups are getting funded. Smart people are very much “getting to work.”

If you’re reading this newsletter, you may be looking at this ecosystem and wondering to yourself: “okay I hear and see that a lot is going on…but what should I do about it? Should I switch jobs? Should I sit this party out? Should I wait? Should I take a risk?”

I’ve got no guarantee for you, other than saying, it can’t hurt to spend a few minutes educating yourself about what’s going on, so that you can make an informed decision for yourself (or perhaps your family). And I suggest doing this every so often. What was true three years ago is not necessarily going to be true today. AI is getting better in certain dimensions. It’s also not getting better in other dimensions.

My advice, and yes this is advice!, is for you to dig in for yourself. Don’t just read the headlines. Don’t just follow the VC money. Sure there are smart people making decisions, but I encourage you to do some thinking for yourself.

To aid with this, I went ahead and put together a sort of “AI company market map.” It’s not perfect, nor comprehensive, but I think you spending a few minutes getting a better idea for the types of AI companies out there (at least from the vantage point that we’re seeing), you’ll be better equipped to filter signal from noise and figure out what really makes sense for you. I tried to highlight interesting companies that I think could be worth checking out.

If you’re hiring, be sure to send us an email: hi@nextplay.so. We’d love to share your open roles with our audience of talented people (engineers, designers, salespeople, and more).

AI infrastructure

• Physical infrastructure

  • GPUs and AI accelerators

    • Etched: Transformer architecture burned directly into silicon; sells frontier inference clusters. Raised a $700M Series D in August 2026.

    • Groq:LPU inference hardware and a hosted API sold on speed and cost per token. $350M Series A.

    • Positron: Energy-efficient AI inference chips aimed at the power ceiling rather than raw FLOPs.

    • Callosum: London seed lab co-designing chips and models together. $100M seed.

    • Substrate: Building a next-generation American semiconductor foundry.

  • AI data centers

    • Crusoe: Energy-first AI factory company: data centers sited at stranded power.

    • Starcloud: Data centers in orbit, where power is solar and cooling is free.

    • Cowboy Space: Orbital data center for AI workloads.

    • TensorWave: AMD-based AI cloud.

  • Power generation and electricity infrastructure

    • Valar Atomics: Mass-produced fission reactors.

    • Aalo Atomics: Mass-manufactured nuclear plants sized for data center campuses.

    • Radiant: Portable nuclear microreactors for off-grid and critical loads.

    • Pacific Fusion: Pulsed-magnetic fusion energy.

    • Base Power: Building America’s next-gen power company.

• Digital infrastructrure

  • Cloud platforms

    • Modal: Serverless GPU compute for AI teams — containers that scale to zero.

    • Baseten: Model serving and inference infrastructure.

    • Together AI: Neocloud for open-model training and inference.

    • Prime Intellect: Decentralized training across distributed compute; “commoditizing compute and intelligence.”

  • Model training infrastructure

    • Scale AI — The incumbent data-labeling and model-evaluation vendor.

    • Surge: Human data platform for RLHF and fine-tuning.

    • Mercor: Marketplace organizing human expert supply into training and eval data.

    • Datacurve: Frontier code data for foundation model labs.

    • Bespoke Labs: RL environment curation.

  • Model evaluation and monitoring

    • Braintrust: Eval and observability layer for production AI; the default in many agent stacks.

    • Arize: AI observability and LLM evaluation for enterprise ML teams.

    • Vals: Independent public LLM benchmarks, plus private enterprise evals.

    • Langfuse: Open-source LLM engineering platform.

  • Security and safety infrastructure

    • Lakera — Guardrails against prompt injection and LLM abuse at runtime.

    • Irregular: Frontier AI security.

    • Keycard: Identity infrastructure for AI agents.

    • AIUC: A certification standard, and insurance, for AI agents.

Looking for a new role? Check out the Free Next Play Platform where you’ll get personalized recommendations for interesting startups to join.

Check it out here.

Foundation models

• LLMs

  • Liquid AI: Efficient general-purpose models small enough to run on device.

  • Thinking Machines: A fine-tuning API on open weights.

  • Reflection: Frontier open intelligence — an American open-weights lab.

  • Inception: Diffusion language models.

• Audio models

  • ElevenLabs: Realistic TTS and voice cloning.

  • Cartesia: State-space models for ultra-low-latency realtime voice.

  • Deepgram:” Speech-to-text and voice agent platform built on its own models.

  • Suno: Generative music — full songs from a prompt.

  • Sesame: Conversational voice models with unusually natural presence.

• Video and world models

  • Runway: Generative video models plus the creative tooling around them.

  • Moonvalley: Video models Hollywood can legally use.

  • Decart: Realtime, live generative video models.

  • World Labs: Fei-Fei Li’s lab: large world models that generate 3D scenes.

  • General Intuition:Spatiotemporal reasoning models trained on gameplay video.

• Open-source models

  • Ollama: A local runtime for open models.

  • Nous Research: Open-source model research collective shipping competitive weights.

  • Comfy: The company behind ComfyUI, the open graph editor for generative media.

  • OpenHands: Open-source software development agents.

  • Browser Use: Open-source library that lets agents drive a real browser.

• Specific foundation models

  • Medical and healthcare models

    • OpenEvidence: Point-of-care medical answers grounded in the literature; used widely by US clinicians.

    • Latent Health: Intelligence infrastructure trained on American healthcare data.

    • Amigo: Reliable clinical agents with behavior you can specify and verify.

  • Biology models

    • Latent Labs: Frontier generative models for all molecules of life; ex-DeepMind founding team.

    • Chai Discovery: Chai-1/Chai-2 structure and binder design models, released openly.

    • Cradle: Protein engineering models in a design tool wet labs actually use.

    • Profluent: Protein language models.

    • Lila Sciences: Scientific superintelligence paired with autonomous labs.

Application layers

• Agents and software tools

  • Coding agents

    • Cursor: AI coding agent.

  • AI design and creative tools

    • FLORA: Node-based creative workspace chaining image, video and text models. NY, Series A.

    • Krea: Realtime generative creative suite for designers.

    • Recraft: Image generation and vector editing built for design teams.

  • AI search and research products

    • Exa: Embeddings-based search API.

    • Profound: Answer engine optimization.

    • Polar Browser: An AI browser that does the work for you.

    • Browserbase: Headless browser infrastructure so agents can use the whole web.

  • Sales agents

    • Unify: Outbound agents that research, sequence and hand off warm leads.

    • Hyperbound: AI roleplay sales coach for reps. SF, Series A.

    • Nooks: AI dialer and sales assistant platform.

    • Lightfield: Natural language CRM. SF, Series B.

    • Rox: Revenue agents for the Global 2000.

• Vertical AI

  • Legal

    • Legora: Stockholm-based AI workspace for lawyers; fast-growing in Europe and the US.

    • Norm AI: Turns regulation into executable rules agents can enforce.

    • Manifest OS: Legal work rebuilt around models rather than documents.

  • Real estate

    • Cambio: AI for commercial real estate operations and building performance.

    • Mainstay: Market intelligence platform for real estate investors.

    • Valon: An operating system for mortgage servicing.

    • Vesta: Modern loan origination infrastructure for mortgage lenders.

  • Financial services

    • Model ML — Digital teammates for investment banking and PE workflows.

    • Brightwave — Research assistant producing investment memos with citations.

    • Casca: — AI loan officer — banks process 10x more applications.

Physical AI

• Robotics

  • RobCo: Modular robot systems leased to German Mittelstand factories.

  • Charge Robotics: Robots that assemble utility-scale solar farms.

  • Hadrian: Autonomous precision-parts factories for aerospace and defense.

• Drones

  • Airbound: Very low cost delivery drones, aimed first at medical logistics in India.

  • Seneca: Autonomous firefighting aircraft.

  • Sunflower Labs: Autonomous security drone that patrols a property.

• Defense tech

  • Quartermaster: Distributed real-time maritime domain awareness.

  • Array Labs: Satellite constellations for 3D space-based radar imaging.

  • Apex: Productized satellite buses built on a factory line.

Thanks for reading! Hope this is useful. Please like if you enjoyed.

If you want to found a startup, you should solve a problem you experience yourself. That’s the traditional wisdom (Paul Graham et al.) at least. It is probably good advice. Certainly it leads to good companies some of the time. But if you give this piece of advice to a group of young, highly-selected, and ambitious tech people in San Francisco…

Well, you end up with overexposure in some areas and underexposure in others.

How many would-be founders consider what kind of company to start and walk away thinking “gee, I really would like to build a software product to help landlords run their buildings and make renting easier for everyone?” Not many. Not many indeed.

There are two founders, though, who did find this idea attractive: Minna Song and Tony Stoyanov. They cofounded the startup EliseAI, and their big mission is stated quite clearly on the homepage of their website: AI that improves how we live.

So, how exactly is EliseAI improving the way we live? What does the product do? Why is it a company worth joining as compared to the ~1,000s of other AI companies out there? I sat down with the team to take a behind-the-scenes look at EliseAI and the way they work.

By the end I think it should be easy to answer the question: Should you join?

The product

Landlords have one big problem: managing properties requires a ton of administrative work that is both important and tedious. For example, you have to:

• Pick up the phone at all hours of the day

• Answer the same questions about parking/pets/etc over and over

• Schedule appointments (and reschedule when plans change)

• Send reminders so people actually show up

• Chase unpaid rent

• Follow up when people stop responding

• Collect applications and lease paperwork

• Triage maintenance requests

• Dispatch technicians

You may notice that every one of these tasks has a renter on the other end of it. The landlord’s unanswered phone call is a real person, looking for housing, who can’t reach anyone. An untriaged maintenance request is a renter whose toilet is broken. Real, human problems!

EliseAI is building AI that solves these problems from both ends. If you are up-to-date on what AI startups are doing these days then I’d imagine you already have a decent idea of how the product works: it uses AI to automate admin tasks end-to-end so that its customers can run much more effectively. (As one example: almost half of all inquiries to apartment rental buildings never even get a response; automating this means that not only will teams spend less time on responses, they will respond a lot more, and renters will finally hear back.)

The previous generation of software did not really do these tasks. Instead, it reminded humans to do them. A solution in 2019 would have asked some templated questions, asked for your phone number, and let humans do the rest. These solutions did maybe 10 percent of the real work; EliseAI does virtually all of it.

Is it effective? Well, for example: in mid-2023, the median EliseAI-handled call lasted 46 seconds. (Users gave up quickly.) By the end of 2025, those calls lasted 1 minute 40 seconds; about the same length as calls with a human usually last. The AI that used to route you to humans can now be the human across the board: calls, emails, texts, and more. Renters treat it accordingly; they call whenever, text about the broken toilet, and can even tour apartments on their own schedule. Someone (or in EliseAI’s case, something) always answers.

(Worth noting: EliseAI also sells to doctor’s offices for similar reasons.)

The strategy and growth

One concern you might have about a company like EliseAI (i.e. tech people take on a traditional and unsexy industry) is that the team doesn’t really care, or know, much about the problem. That couldn’t be further from the truth here. “Before we built anything,” Minna (CEO) told me, “I took a job as a front desk admin at a real estate firm in Manhattan. I wanted to understand what was actually broken. The answer was obvious almost instantly. People were calling buildings and not getting called back… It [was] so stupid.”

A deep care for the industries they build for is, in fact, part of Minna’s long-term strategy. Most of the problems obvious to tech people have already been solved, Minna said. “Unsexy industries are where all the most important companies will be built. The biggest problems left to solve are problems that most technologists didn’t find interesting or that were too hard to fix.”

The team chose housing precisely because it was so difficult. “If everyone’s excited about a market, you’re already late. We knew this,” Minna said.

It’s worth remembering that when Minna and Tony started, there was no AI hype train to ride. They were building conversational AI back when they had to explain to landlords what AI even was; they had to prove real value and ROI from day one. And the ethos stuck. To this day, EliseAI pitches actual measurable outcomes rather than a vague “you should be using AI.”

They obviously found something that’s working. In June the company passed $200M in ARR, a fifth straight year of doubling revenue. Today they count 29 of the top 30 property management operators as customers and power 1 in 6 rental apartments in the United States. Since the start of 2023, EliseAI has interacted with 35 million unique people over 85 million conversations. And the renters are better off for it: more than 50 million of those inbound calls came after hours; in a pre-EliseAI world, those calls would have gone unanswered.

In August of last year, EliseAI raised a $250M Series E from a16z at a $2.2B valuation. (The company has recently been taking a similar playbook into healthcare, too.)

So we’re not talking about ‘what ifs’ here. Still, it’s worth covering one strategy risk you may be concerned about: Why doesn’t OpenAI (or similar) just build this? The big labs are already moving into life sciences, legal, finance, and more. Why not housing?

One reason the EliseAI team gave is that housing is deeply operational. Winning has meant building a bunch of things nobody else wanted to build in an outdated industry: a full CRM for renters and residents, AI-guided tours integrated with physical smart locks, and deep hooks into legacy property management systems. And the work doesn’t stop at the conversation. When EliseAI schedules a tour, a real person walks into a real building. When it dispatches a maintenance vendor, someone’s heat actually gets fixed. Customers can’t afford a hallucination or best guess; they need the right answer to produce the right outcome in the physical world. Labs don’t really want that job.

And what about the competition that does exist? How does EliseAI stay ahead? EliseAI has a deep head start and unusually high product velocity. Years of working closely with customers have given the team a detailed understanding of the industry’s workflows and edge cases. At the same time, the team stays close to customers, identifies their most important problems, and builds quickly in response. “We rebuilt our entire system between 2021 and 2022 when we saw where things were heading and were positioned to move immediately when GPT-4 changed everything,” Minna said. “We’ve seen and learned how to handle edge cases no new competitor has seen. We have data they don’t have.”

This sort of quote makes you wonder: what is the culture like at EliseAI? And how does a startup as large and late-stage as EliseAI maintain its edge?

The culture

EliseAI is at Series E; more than 550 people work there. This is exciting, of course, because the company has achieved what most startups do not. But it can be hard to get your finger on the pulse of the culture at a company this size. So… What is it really like to work here?

The vibe I got was much closer to that of an early-stage team than a large late-stage company. EliseAI operates as lots of small teams moving quickly with autonomy (‘startups within a startup’) rather than a big bureaucratic blob. The only difference is that each of those mini-startups has Series E funding and distribution behind it.

For many, EliseAI is a founder bootcamp of sorts. “I hope a lot of the people who come here go on to start their own companies,” Minna told me. “A lot of our best people are former founders. We ask everyone in interviews whether they want to start something someday — it tells me something about their entrepreneurial instinct. With AI making it faster and cheaper than ever to build a company, the people who come out of environments like [ours] are going to be unusually well-positioned.”

You’ll only get promoted at EliseAI “if [you] have already stepped up and taken on ownership beyond [your] role. If you’re waiting to be given more responsibility, you’ll wait a long time.” So the ‘founder’ talk isn’t all for show; you are actually expected to act like one. I hear this a lot from earlier companies, but less often from startups at EliseAI’s maturity.

Then there is the intensity. At EliseAI, it follows from the stakes: the company is trying to rebuild how an essential industry operates, and its products affect real people in moments that matter. A missed response can mean a renter loses an apartment or a resident goes without heat. “The problems we’re taking on are enormous, and they demand urgency,” Minna said. “As founders, Tony and I have to lead by example. We work seven days a week because we believe the opportunity and responsibility are that big.”

Will you work seven days a week if you join? Well, probably not. That schedule is mostly true of the founders and some senior leaders; most employees don’t work CEO hours. But a company’s personality is often its CEO’s personality, and Minna’s sense of urgency resonates downstream. One of EliseAI’s core values is “no passengers, only crew”: everyone is expected to take ownership and make an impact.

Much of this intensity is visible even from Day 1. Zac Gottschall (engineer) said that his first week “moved a lot faster” than he expected it to. “There were a lot of fires. I was given a lot of responsibility on day one.” Shruti Goli, who works in product, said that she “got exposed early to some challenging customer problems that didn’t have a playbook. Rather than easing me in with toy projects, I was given real context on the stuff we’re trying to solve.” And Fran Loftus, the company’s CXO, said that on her first week she “had no idea what anyone was talking about despite having worked with these clients before. I had a lot of in-office dinners with engineers to learn about the product, the future of AI, etc.”

The other thing you might encounter at EliseAI is a maturity about the product. Housing is an important industry where mistakes matter, so the approach is fast but cautious. “The team is incredibly honest and grounded,” Fran said. “I’m used to startups that launch products and say they are going to change the world. At EliseAI, our releases sound a lot more like Here’s V1, this is what we need to test with a client, and this is not who this product is for yet.” Compared to other startups, Fran says, there is lots of clarity at EliseAI.

Should you join EliseAI?

The generic case for joining EliseAI is straightforward: it’s a successful, later-stage startup that has proven its product solves real problems. The risk of joining and watching the company crash and burn a year later is much lower than at a seed-stage startup.

And that’s a pretty good pitch! If everything you’ve read so far is interesting and you think EliseAI sounds like somewhere you’d like to work… Go look at their open roles.

But the more compelling case is how much remains to be built. EliseAI has reached $200 million in ARR and become a trusted partner to many of the country’s largest property managers. Its ambition extends far beyond the products that got it here. The team wants to rethink how housing operates with AI at its core. The company has the scale and customer relationships to make that vision real, while the amount left to build preserves the pace, ownership, and entrepreneurial opportunity of a much earlier-stage company.

You could also consider a negative pitch. I think you should not join EliseAI if you want to join a later-stage startup because they’re more ‘chill’ or have a slower pace. “There are easier places to land,” Minna said. And some of the people I talked to weighed their EliseAI offer alongside offers from much earlier companies. I would also avoid joining if you view yourself as a ‘specialist’ who needs to go deep on one particular thing and follow clear playbooks. EliseAI feels more like what you might expect at an earlier-stage startup; people are expected to take lots of ownership and design their own playbooks. (And are encouraged to act like founders!)

But if you’d like to join a fast-growing startup with proven success and have an impact on one of the most important industries in the world, and if you would like to roll up your sleeves and work like a founder, then EliseAI might be a great place to consider joining. The company is currently hiring across all departments, mostly in New York City (but also in Austin, Boston, Chicago, Austin, San Francisco, Toronto, and some remote). Check out EliseAI’s open roles here.

Thanks to EliseAI for supporting Next Play and making this essay possible.

* * *

Here’s a list of 27 new unicorns hiring now.

Thank you to Harmonic (startup database) for helping us source this list!

1. Norm AI - AI agents for regulatory compliance (NYC) - Careers

2. Collate - AI document automation for pharma (Bay Area) - Careers

3. Super - savings app (North America remote) - Careers

4. Twenty - AI systems for offensive cyber operations (US) - Careers

5. Runpod - GPU cloud for AI developers (US remote) - Careers

6. Square Yards - real estate transactions and services (India) - Careers

7. Oxylabs - proxy and web data infrastructure (Vilnius / Kaunas / Warsaw) - Careers

8. Kraken Technology Group - autonomous maritime platforms (Fareham) - Careers

9. Assort Health - AI voice agents for healthcare (Bay Area / NYC / US remote) - Careers

10. FINN - all-inclusive car subscription service (Munich / Europe remote) - Careers

Read more

Tip for the week: You can try and get a job at a startup even if they’re not hiring for your particular role. All you need to do, a lot of the time, is just find a way to add value. Before you even get hired. If you like sales, try and find them customers. If you like writing, try and write some content for them or give them suggestions. If you like building, build out a potential feature. Then share it with them. It’s a simple formula but can really work!

And if you want some support along the way, join our Slack. You’ll meet some like minded people which can help you unlock some doors (and have some fun throughout your journey). You can join our here.

Join here

Co-founders and people to jam with:

• Joshua has been a designer and developer his whole career, 3x agency founder, owns the design and front-end for one of the most recognizable event brands. Wants to start a proper startup. Looking for idea, market, and business-minded collaborators who reinforce his weaknesses. Reach out at hey@jawr.sh. (Austin)

• Noni is the former Global Head of Product at Amazon Prime Video, shaped experiences for 200M+ customers and saved £1M+/year through automation. Building Butter Labs, accent-adaptable voice AI agents for telcos, cable, and utilities. Looking for a co-founder passionate about solving customer experience failures. Reach out at noni@butterlabs.ai. (London)

• Daniel spent his entire career in fintech product, helped build four neobanks: N26, Onefinance, Klar, and Ready. Exploring ideas at the intersection of AI and fintech, open to joining a founding team. Looking for a product co-founder and people with an edge in distribution. Reach out at mail@danielburgmann.com. (Berlin)

Check out our latest list of engineers, salespeople, and operators looking to meet a co-founder.

By the way are you looking to hire talented people? We can help connect you to great engineers, ops people, salespeople, and more. Our community is now over 91,000+ people. Email us: hi@nextplay.so.

Early teams:

• Quang from Vybe is hiring a chief of staff. They are building a platform that helps your company become AI-native. Apply here. (SF)

• Shivam from Arca is hiring founding GTM & engineers. They are building the agentic operating system for life sciences, with the goal of bringing life-saving drugs to market dramatically faster. Reach out: founders@arca.inc. (NYC)

• Hakan from Primerli is hiring a VP of GTM and business development. They are building a platform that helps generate industry-learning content. Apply here. (Remote)

• Talha from Vega is hiring a GTM engineer and a founding marketing lead. They are building an AI-native claims TPA. Apply here. (NYC)

• Peter from Success.co is hiring a director of marketing. They are building a modern EOS software operating system. Apply here. (Boston, Remote)

• Roxane from Lemrock is hiring a founding salesperson and a founder’s associate. They are building infrastructure for agentic commerce. Apply here. (Paris)

• Cherie from Holly is hiring a chief of staff, a product support analyst, and founding product manager. They are building an HR platform for the government. Apply here. (NYC)

• Sean from Compensaite is hiring a founding engineer. They are building AI agents to fix GTM tooling. Reach out: sean@compensaite.com. (London)

• Connor from Baba is hiring a director of growth marketing. They are building an applied AI lab modernizing risk and care delivery for people with medicare. Apply here. (NYC)

• Yoon from Pensive is hiring a founding account executive and a generalist problem solver. They are building an automated grading platform. Apply here. (SF)

• Philip from Crunched is hiring a growth manager and an account executive. They are building a platform that allows consultants to build and analyze their work. Apply here. (NYC, Oslo)

• Alex from Antioch is hiring a product marketer. They are building simulation for physical AI. Apply here. (NYC)

• Paul from Ando is hiring an account executive to focus on restaurants. They are building ai-native workforce intelligence. Apply here. (Remote)

• Shan from Aristotle is hiring a founding generalist/ops person. They are building a voice AI tutor. Apply here. (SF)

• Pablo from Infinite Watch is hiring a chief revenue officer and an FDE. They are building AI agents that understand and act on every customer touchpoint. Apply here. (Remote)

• Arbaaz from Graphon is hiring a founding marketer. They are building a pre-model intelligence layer Apply here. (SF)

• Sagi from Lumana is hiring a founding customer success manager. They are building a platform that transforms your camera into smart AI agents. Apply here. (Remote)

• Paul from Prevalent is hiring a sales director. They are building an AI-powered data fabric company. Apply here. (London)

• Here’s a list we made of 36 of the fastest growing companies right now.

Reminder to check out the free AI-powered talent agent that sends you personalized recommendations sourced from the Next Play network. Lots of interesting under the radar opportunities that we’ll try and match you with!

Scaling startups:

• Justin from Starbridge is hiring a GTM engineer. They have raised $50m and are building a platform to help organizations win more government and education contracts with 500+ customers. Apply here. (Remote)

• Gautier from H Company is hiring a founding forward deployed engineer. They are building infrastructure for autonomous, agentic AI. Apply here. (Austin, NYC, SF)

• Ben from Omnea is hiring a head of customer value, an AI solutions lead, and GTM people. They are building an agentic operating system for procurement. Apply here. (London, NYC)

• Alfred from Listen Labs is hiring a founding EMEA marketing lead. They are building an AI research platform. Apply here. (London)

• Nick from Rundoo is hiring a client success manager, a growth marketing manager, and a product manager. They are building a platform that empowers independent supply stores with technology. Apply here. (SF, Chicago)

• Mikey from Suno is hiring a social media community manager. They are building an AI music making platform with millions of users. Apply here. (NYC, LA)

• Anastasios from Arena Intelligence is hiring a GTM strategy and ops lead. They are building. Apply here. (SF)

• Austin from Unify is hiring a senior product manager. They are building an AI-native outbound platform. Apply here. (SF, NYC)

• Nic from Helcim is hiring a senior product marketing manager and a content manager. They just raised $53m. They are building the payments infrastructure for small and medium-sized businesses. Apply here. (Calgary)

• Harrison from Langchain is hiring for 105 roles: account managers, GTM engineers, and a head of people operations. They are building the foundation for agent engineering in the real world. Apply here. (SF, NYC)

• Shishir from Superhuman is hiring a community manager and a business operations lead. They are building an AI productivity platform that owns brands like Grammarly and Superhuman and has over 40 million users. Apply here. (SF, Remote)

• Viraj from Finch Legal is hiring salespeople and a strategy person and engineers. They are building white glove operations for personal injury firms. Apply here. (NYC)

• Ryan from Gravis Robotics is hiring a technical program manager. They are building physical AI for the construction industry. Apply here. (Zurich)

• Gavin from Etched is hiring a communications person and a finance operations person. They just raised $700m from Jane Street. They are building hardware for frontier intelligence. Apply here. (SF)

• Nicolas from Rillet is hiring a deployment lead and an account executive. They are building an accounting and finance platform, and just raised $100m. Apply here. (NYC, SF, Remote)

• Jason from Poolside is hiring an events lead. They just raised $1b from Nvidia. They are building open-weight agentic coding models. Apply here. (Remote)

• Chris from Also is hiring a content strategist and a digital product manager. They are building small EVs. Apply here. (SF)

Investing and other:

• Techstars is hiring an operations associate. Apply here. (DC)

• Northzone is hiring an investment associate. Apply here. (London)

• Capital G is hiring a growth partnerships manager to focus on startups. Apply here. (SF)

Resources and tools:

• The Next Play Job Search Accelerator is kicking off soon. It’s an online program that’ll help you land a job at a startup (and meet some interesting people) in the next four weeks. Join the Friends of Next Play Slack to get into the next cohort.

• Writing about writing: behind the scenes essays with authors of great essays.

• Tactical framework and questions for figuring out your career.

Note:

• Thanks for reading! If you have any notes, thoughts, or suggestions, please send us an email: hi@nextplay.so.

• Would appreciate if you could upvote and share this edition if you liked it. Thanks so much!

I receive multiple emails a week from people asking questions about how to get a job at a startup.

How can I make my application stand out?
How should I get in touch with the founder or hiring manager?
What type of company should I work at?
What should my compensation be?
Etc.

While we’re trying our best to answer as many questions as we can (by the way feel free to send in an email to hi@nextplay.so and we’ll get back to you!), I have a hypothesis that many people would benefit from first asking questions…of themselves.

That’s right. Asking questions of themselves. To all the people looking for a new job or are trying to find a cofounder or are just unhappy with things for whatever reason, perhaps my first advice is to start by asking yourself some questions. Reflecting.

Sit down. Ask yourself the questions. It may not take long. Maybe 30 minutes. Maybe an hour. Maybe you do it once or twice. I think you’ll be amazed by the impact.

This all sounds obvious. And you may or may not be rolling your eyes at the simplicity of this proposition. But how many of you have actually EXPLICITLY went about reflecting on your career in this sort of intentional way.

So that’s my advice, and I’ll try to make it as straightforward as possible. I invite you to try it out.

Step 1: Open a Google Doc (or your preferred note-taking application or you can even write by hand)

I think writing is more beneficial than e.g. speaking but if you prefer to speak it, consider using a transcription app like Granola or Wispr Flow. If you’re not used to writing a lot, I know it can be weird. But just stick with me.

Step 2: Copy and paste the following questions into the Google Doc

Write 3-5 sentences about each the following:

• Who do you admire in life? Why?

• What is important to you? Why?

• How are you spending your time today and how do you think you want to be spending your time? Why?

• What do you think you’re good at? What would you like to be good at? Why?

• What do you think is stopping you from living the best version of your life tomorrow?

• What do you think makes an opportunity interesting to you? What are the most important qualities? Money, fun

Step 3: Start a 60 minute timer. Answer the questions.

Try and focus on just writing. Don’t worry about editing. Just gets words out. Put on some music. FOCUS.

There are no right answers. Only answers. And they aren’t even permanent answers you’re not sharing them with anyone. Just for yourself.

Armed with the basics above, I think you’ll be more equipped to figure out what you want to do with your life. You’ll be more confident going into interviews. You’ll be smarter about your job search. You’ll waste less time on things that don’t matter. You’ll be able to ask better questions.

It’s a one hour exercise, and you can do it a few times. It’s simple. I know. But effective. Try it out and let me know how it goes.

And if you like this method, please upvote and/or comment. Helps us a lot, thanks!

We’re helping run a contest for your best and craziest side project and startup ideas.

It’s called Whale Tank.

(and it’s 100% free to enter)

You can submit your ideas here. The winner gets a few hundred dollars, and there are multiple prizes up for grabs. We suggest you enter, and also share with your friends. Both because we’re excited to see your ideas, and also because we think the world needs more great creative crazy ideas. (Even if you don’t have ideas, you’ll probably enjoy reading and voting for your favorites!)

Pitch the Whale Tank

If you need some ideas for inspiration, or you’re looking for something to work on, below you’ll find many to get your wheels turning (put together in collaboration with freeideas.net). It’s (probably) easier than ever to put together a side project…so we invite you to get to work, you never know what can happen.

Promising project and company ideas (that’ll at least make you think)

• Personal standup: Build a service that calls you every morning and asks you how yesterday went and your goals for the day. Log all the data from the calls in a simple app and beautiful dashboard with sentiment analysis.

• References as a service: Loop in a service that does a detailed analysis/reference on a candidate before you hire them. Goes and talks to their former manager and friends so you get a detailed view of their capabilities.

• Alley oop: Dating app where people in relationships make profiles for their single friends and connect with people their actual friends with to see if they can make good set ups.

• Cross country: App that connects people who want to transport their car long distances to people who want to do road trips. Ship car for free and rent car for free.

• Motivation while running/lifting: App that broadcasts to your friends when you start a workout. They can send you audio messages to motivate you that automatically get played during your activity.

• Syllabus generator: Type in a topic and the app pulls together a collection of essays, books, activities, videos, shorts, music, prompts, things etc. for you to do in order to learn ANY topic. It does this by pairing everything the app knows about you—what you like, how you learn, what you are good at, what you are bad at, etc.—with the best information on the topic to create the absolute best way to go about learning anything.

• Intern: program you get accepted to where you work 12 jobs at 12 companies, each for a month the year after college (or high school) to get a better understanding of the landscape of jobs.

Go submit your best and craziest ideas to the Whale Tank. It’s free! And you could win money. And laugh, hopefully.

• Pastabilities: Like Chipotle, for pasta. Mainly for the name.

• Hibachi for other foods: Why not like Hibachi for all types of foods where they cook right in front of you? Why just tableside guac? Give me hibachi breakfast. Tableside pancakes.

• Live Streamed company: Company that live streams all of their work publicly. Every employee has a twitch channel, too.

• Vintage tech brand swag: Sell clothing that companies gave to early employees. Apple t- shirts, google sweatshirts, etc.

• Pal: A wearable collar for your dog that uses AI to translate its heartbeat, barks, and movements into messages you can read on your phone.

• Competitor Listener: Notifies you if any of your competitors have changed anything on their website, e.g. pricing terms, features.

• Wager: App for friend groups where everyone in the group anonymously bets on milestones (first kid, first marriage, etc.) and then totals get paid out as the milestones happen.

• Posture-reminder: Wearable that buzzes you every 15 minutes reminding you to fix your posture. Could shock you physically if more effective.

• Suno for memorization: Generates a catchy song about something you want to memorize. Easier to remember song lyrics than straight up terms and definitions. Could be great for pre-med students.

• Intro finder: You type in a company, and it tells you your best path(s) to get an intro to the founder by scanning your Linkedin/Twitter connections.

• Memory palace constructor: Converts anything you want to remember (list, numbers, speech, etc.) into an AI-generated visual memory palace and walks you through it using the best known memory training techniques.

Want to find a co-founder to work with? You should check out this list:

• Your top priority: Mac app that sticks your top priority in the top right corner of your screen all the time so you are reminded of what to work on.

• Gift giving consultancy: You tell us about your target gift receiver, we curate the perfect gift.

• Partiful for weddings: Sometimes you want to coordinate flights, lodging, etc. to a wedding or other event, but you’re not sure who’s going. And it’s awkward to ask in case they weren’t actually invited. So basically Partiful but for weddings too.

• Writing hackathon: A hackathon of sorts where your objective is to produce an essay or a book in a short period of time.

• Dehydrated meal delivery service: When you do like long backpacking trips you can do dehydrated meals and just boil them. But why not turn this into a regular meal delivery service with much lower shipping costs.

• ESPN for the tech industry: Cover the hottest companies - all of their big meetings, last minute partnership deals, key signings/firings, and more. Eventually create the ability to trade talent: “I’ll trade you my CTO for 3 sales directors.”

• Paying attention filter: Zoom overlay or filter that makes it look like your eyes aren’t moving when you're not paying attention, but your camera can still be on.

• Art subscription service: for $30/mo we will mail you a print from an up and coming artist.

• Free problems: Forum where people post problems they have in the work place / their lives that a company could fix. People peruse it to get company ideas and if someone builds a company around your problem maybe you get royalties or some % of the business. Worst case your problems get solved.

If you liked this essay, please consider liking it and sharing with your friends. We very much appreciate your support!

And also a quick reminder to check out Whale Tank.

Announcement: We’re testing out launching the “Next Play Job Search Accelerator.” It’s a 4-week remote program designed to help you land a startup role you love.

Here’s what to expect:

• Figure out what you’re looking for and identify startups worth pursuing.

• Get matched with a small (hand-curated) peer group of people at a similar career stage for accountability, feedback and support.

• Learn how to position yourself and create opportunities.

We’re kicking off the next cohort on August 31st, 2026. Join the Friends of Next Play Slack to get access. We’re excited for this. Hopeful this program can help loads of people land new and exciting opportunities. Email us hi@nextplay.so if you have any questions. Talk soon.

Join here

Co-founders and people to jam with:

• Steve spent 8+ years across restructuring investment banking, real estate PE, and corporate finance, currently at RXR, also makes music and DJs. Exploring something that connects people, drawing on his finance and operating experience. Looking for people gestating ideas who need real financial advice on their venture. Reach out at stevenpsiegel@gmail.com. (NY)

• Maarten is a product builder with a background in payments (Adyen, IPO) and manufacturing, scaled and sold multiple companies. Building B2B AI-native products. Looking for co-founders with an idea or industry gap. Reach out at hello@maartenzoet.nl. (Amsterdam)

• Geoff spent 13.5 years at Salesforce leading enterprise commercial strategy for the biggest strategic-account deals, Wharton MBA, engineering background. Building enterprise performance orchestration, a “Bloomberg terminal for operators” using proprietary operational benchmarks. Looking for a technical co-founder strong in data-intensive apps, financial data, or AI SaaS. Reach out at geoffrey.r.morrissett@gmail.com. (SF)

Here’s a brand new list of people that are actively looking for a co-founder.

By the way are you hiring? Send us a quick email: hi@nextplay.so. We can help connect you to great engineers, ops people, salespeople, and more. Our community is now over 91,000+ people!

Early teams:

• Yaniv from take2 is hiring a forward deployed engineer. They are building AI agents for healthcare recruiting. Apply here. (NYC)

• Anshul from Hyde is hiring an AI builder/FDE. They are building specialist AI models for high-stakes enterprise workflows. Apply here. (NYC)

• Will from Unto Labs is hiring a marketing lead. They are building products that change how people interact with their money, like developing standards for the Thru blockchain. Apply here. (SF)

• Alex from Reflex is hiring a growth lead. They are building a full-stack development platform for Python. Apply here. (SF)

• Rui from Dimensional is hiring a FDE and a product manager and a member of technical staff (firmware focused). They are building foundation models for physical intelligence. Apply here. (SF, Shenzhen)

• Josh from Artos is hiring a growth marketing manager and a founding account executive. They are building tools that help biotech companies automate R&D documentation. Apply here. (SF)

• Grace from The Intelligence Company is hiring engineers and also have an open general application. They grew to $60m ARR and 5.5m users with a team of only 10 people. They are building DesignArena, an interface that helps generate real-world feedback and distribution for AI. Apply here. (SF)

• Langston from Vals is hiring a head of research as well as software engineers. They are building an independent evaluator of AI. Apply here. (SF)

• Ronak from Trajectory is hiring generalist engineers. They are building a platform for continual learning. Apply here. (SF)

• Antonin from River Markets is hiring a financial operations lead. They are building a prime brokerage for prediction markets. Apply here. (SF)

• Eugene from Featherless is hiring a founding business development person. They are building an open-source inference platform. Apply here. (Remote)

• Alistair from Cosine is hiring a founding head of financial services. They are building a UK-based frontier AI lab for autonomous software engineering. Apply here. (London)

• Kevin from Centari is hiring a founding GTM lead. They are building an AI platform for deal intelligence. Apply here. (NYC)

• Joe from Alloy Robotics is hiring a founding chief of staff and a growth generalist. They are building a data platform for robotics. Apply here. (Sydney, SF)

• Vaughn from Kivo Health is hiring a product manager. They are building AI-powered care for seniors with chronic disease. Apply here. (Seattle)

• Pooria from Agave is hiring a customer solutions engineer. They are building AI financial operations for contractors. Apply here. (SF, Remote)

• Here’s a new list of companies we just made that are now hiring after raising $10m-$50m.
  

Scaling startups:

• Maggie from Knit is hiring a lead product manager. They are building an AI-native research platform used by dozens of enterprise brands. Apply here. (NYC)

• Kashish from Hightouch is hiring across every department: sales, engineering, customer success, and more. They are building AI for marketers. Apply here. (Remote, SF, NYC)

• Harjot from CodeRabbit is hiring for 48 roles: product, sales, and recruiting. They are building the leading AI code review platform with over 17,000 customers and 150,000+ open source projects. Apply here. (SF, Boston)

• Igor from River is hiring a founding GTM lead. They just raised $1 billion. They are building a new stack for personal AI. Apply here. (SF)

• Mitchell from Basis is hiring a founding demand generation manager. They are building AI for accounting, and raised $100m a few months ago. Apply here. (NYC)

• Eugen from Edra is hiring AI strategists and salespeople. They are building AI models that learn how your business works and then automates it. Apply here. (London, NYC)

• Aayush from Blacksmith is hiring a startups lead. They hit $50m ARR in 2.5 years with their infrastructure platform that lets developers run CI workloads really fast. Apply here. (SF)

• Jesse from Decagon is hiring deployment strategists, product people, and engineers. They are building the leading conversational AI platform. Apply here. (SF, NYC)

• Eric from Firecrawl is hiring a head of growth marketing and a head of product. They are building a context API for AI agents. Apply here. (SF)

• Francis from PermitFlow is hiring a business operations manager and a chief of staff. They are building AI for the construction industry. Apply here. (Remote, NYC)

• Mike from Traba is hiring a head of operations, product people, and engineers. They are building labor and intelligence for the industrial supply chain. Apply here. (NYC)

• Apurva from Avoca is hiring a business operations manager and a partnerships manager. They are building the AI front office for services businesses. Apply here. (NYC)

• Brendan from Sesame is hiring a people lead and a head of sales. They are building personal intelligence via products like a smart pair of glasses. Apply here. (SF, Seattle, NYC)

• Tuhin from baseten is hiring for 72 open roles. They just raised a $1.5 billion Series F and are building a mission-critical inference platform. Apply here. (SF, NYC)

Investing and other:

• First Round is hiring a founding GTM person that embeds in their portfolio. Apply here. (SF, NYC)

• Primary Venture Partners is hiring a head of AI. Apply here. (NYC)

• Alumni Ventures is hiring a community manager. Apply here. (Boston)

Resources and tools:

• Whale Tank: A remote pitch contest where you could win $250.

• Here’s a practical system we wrote about you can use to find a job at a startup.

• Some sources to find startup ideas.

Note:

• Thanks for reading! If you have any notes, thoughts, or suggestions, please send us an email: hi@nextplay.so.

• Would appreciate if you could upvote and share this edition if you liked it. Thanks so much!

(this is a guest contribution)

What happens when the tank runs out of gas?

One moment, you’re a hopeful college senior entering the workforce. The next, you’re 10 years older and 50 pounds heavier. You don’t like your job, never really did. You may have a mild sports betting addiction. And sometimes you sit there and think: hey, this wasn’t quite the “yolo” we were all promised.

I don’t want to gatekeep stuck-ness to this archetype, though; I think feeling stuck can happen to anyone at any time. Some of the more common situations I hear when I talk to people are:

• Just graduated college but not sure what to do next.

• Used to like life but grew tired of it and want something new.

• In their 40s and working at some corporate job they hate.

Invariably, when I talk to people who feel stuck, they have the same goal:

I must figure out what I need to do.

Sure, my description here is overly simplistic and no, I do not believe it applies to everyone. But I earnestly believe that something like this pipeline is representative of many people’s post-college experiences. Of becoming “adults.” They pick a path, and at some point realize they are not so happy about that path, but they are not sure what to do about it or what to do next.

Some people might be happy about this stagnation. But for the people who wish there was a change, who want to be doing something more but just don’t know what, I feel for you. I have been you. I often am you.

I want to spend the rest of this essay being actually helpful, and to do so, I would like to start with a hypothesis. My theory is that these people who feel the need to “know what they should be doing,” these people who feel stuck, they have all been semi-brainwashed into believing an idea that is not quite true.

And that not-true idea is that you *need* to *know* what to do with your life, and that not *knowing* is the thing stopping you from taking the next step.

My opinion is that this idea is largely fake. And it’s holding you back.

Instead, consider accepting the following: you’ll never *know* exactly what it is you want to do with your life. There will always be uncertainty. It’s not like solving a problem on your middle-school math homework. Like you do some analysis and just boom…you now know what to do with your life.

I mean you could try to make decisions that way. You could also try and make music that way. Or make friends that way. Or find a life partner that way. I’m highly doubtful it’ll lead to good outcomes.

It’s not just me who thinks this. It’s probably a pretty obvious take.

And, yet, so many people seem to believe this idea. It is how people get stuck bouncing around in academia for a decade-plus while remaining unsatisfied. It is how people stay at a job they hate for a long time until they find what they believe is the perfect replacement. If you want to get yourself un-stuck, the first thing you can do is stop pretending that you need to know what to do in order to go do it.

In 2020, author Matt Haig published a book called The Midnight Library. It’s about this girl who finds herself in a purgatory-style library at night. Each book in it represents a different version of her life; a glimpse of what things could have been like if only she had made different choices. Every book she opens whisks her away into that parallel universe to see what could have been, if only.

Real life is a little bit like this library. But I do not think people who are stuck have read many of the books.

Instead, they worked two short internships before signing the next three decades of their life away to working in corporate America. They let the majority of their environmental conditioning come from LinkedIn posts and TikTok. And they kind of just let themselves drift in this boring stasis.

And when these people do decide that their current reality is upsetting? Well, they don’t walk into the library and start opening as many books as possible to see what catches their eye. That would be too hasty. No, what they do instead is run a complex calculation to figure out which book they should read next. They try to build a formula in their head. They collect data. They talk to people. They spend 100s of hours reading about which books they could read; they try to match those books to what they believe their strengths and weaknesses are. And then maybe, after years, they open a book. Maybe they don’t.

This approach only makes sense if you think that “knowing what to do” is an important and solvable problem. That it is actually useful in any way. It isn’t, though, and so I think a more useful approach to getting un-stuck is to simply walk into the midnight library and open every book you can find.

But what if you don’t like any of the books in the midnight library? In other words, what if you agree that you should be trying new things to get un-stuck but are unsure of what you should be trying?

“I don’t have many passions,” people sometimes say. Or, “none of the things I enjoy doing can make money.” Or, “none of the options I can think of sound very interesting to me.”

To me, statements like these imply that passions are some innate part of ourselves, some DNA diceroll at birth that we have no power to change. But that doesn’t seem true, though, does it?

Is anybody born with a passion for whales?

It’s true that you are probably pre-dispositioned to like some things more than others; try pickleball and squash and you will have a preference. The only way you could create a passion for either of those, though, is by trying them and perhaps even willing yourself, for a while, to continue. And it’s that part—the “trying it”—that I don’t think people do enough of.

If you ask somebody what their passions are they will tell you, and if you ask why they will give you a list of reasons. But neither of these responses tends to hold up under scrutiny. People list passions as though they are permanent traits of their being, but I find that passions are more fleeting and flexible than that. Recently I told someone I am passionate about playing the piano, but am I? I certainly enjoy it, but I have not played in months. Am I passionate about playing the piano right now? Probably not.

Describing why passions are passions is difficult, too.

• Why do you like your favorite song?

• Why do you like your favorite person?

• Why do you like your favorite food?

You could come up with all sorts of nice-sounding things to explain these things, but really you like the song because it sounds good, you like the person because of who they are, and you like the food because it tastes good. You don’t “know” why you like these things, you feel it.

It’s the same thing with figuring out how to spend your time or life. Using your life well is not about coming up with an equation that you repeat to yourself at night; it is not some memo that you write down and constantly look at to assure yourself you’re on the right track.

It would certainly be easier if spending your life was more of a formula. Easier to tell to yourself, easier to explain to other people. You could have some five-point thesis about why you do what you do. But, really? Is this the way we want to figure out how to spend our lives? At the risk of sounding a bit vague, I think that deciding how to spend your time is far more about what feels right than what sounds logical.

The way The Midnight Library ends is a bit anticlimactic: the main character decides not to live in any of these other lives and instead determines to make better use of her own. And perhaps the way this essay ends is a bit anticlimactic too, in that I do not have any grand self-help advice for you. There is not a 67-point framework just out of reach on my desk that will help you “know what to do.”

It’s the lack of that framework, though, that’s at the heart of solving the IDK, of stuck-ness. You don’t need to know what to do, actually. Put away the spreadsheet, put away the self-help books. There is no optimized calculation you can run to decide what to do with your life. Spending your time is maybe a bit more like how most of the greats write a song; they feel their way through it.

Ridding your brain of the idea that you must know what to do is the most effective escape here, I think. But if you are searching for practical steps, I would simply try a lot of new things. Try new things before you are completely convinced they are the right idea. Try them even if they are risky.

Trying new things can involve:

• New locations

• New people

• New jobs

• New media (read different kinds of books, watch different kinds of movies)

• New routines

• New hobbies

• New feedback loops

Not every new step you take needs to somehow be defining what you are “doing with your life.” The new job you try doesn’t need to be your career forever. The new people you meet do not need to be your official social circle. And these steps don’t need to be huge: a new location doesn’t necessarily mean you need to abandon your current life and post up in a cabin on one of these beaches. (Though you could.)

If you want to start trying new things…here are some quick ideas for you to try out…today?:

• Send cold emails to interesting companies you find on Next Play.

• Choose an exercise goal like signing up for a marathon.

• Start writing by joining a Writing Club.

• Try to build a project that gets 10 users in the next 10 days.

• Join an event hosted by somebody in the Friends of Next Play slack.

If you liked this essay, please do upvote and share with your friends. Really appreciate it!

Here’s a list of 28 startups hiring following a $10m-$50m raise.

Thank you to Harmonic (startup database) for helping us source this list!

1. Alta - AI GTM agents (Tel Aviv / US remote) - Careers

2. Runlayer - AI tool security platform (NYC / Bay Area) - Careers

3. Nebulock - AI threat hunting platform (US remote) - Careers

4. Taxwire - global sales tax compliance (NYC / Remote) - Careers

5. Integral - healthcare data privacy compliance (NYC / Bay Area) - Careers

6. Arca Wealth - AI-powered wealth management (NYC) - Careers

7. Allium - enterprise blockchain data platform (Bay Area / NYC / Singapore / Remote) - Careers

8. Attention - AI sales assistant (NYC) - Careers

9. Tsuga - cloud observability platform (Paris / US remote / UK remote) - Careers

10. Bespoke Labs - AI training data curation (Bay Area / Bangalore) - Careers

11. Hostie - AI restaurant communications platform (US remote) - Careers

Read more

Run a survey of 100 people in tech and ask them which are the most stereotypical words to describe a startup’s culture. I bet two words would take the crown: “ownership” and “autonomy.” These words are so widespread that I think an alien landing on planet Earth could reasonably come to the conclusion that it’s illegal to run a startup without using them.

All of this makes it a bit awkward, and perhaps ironic, to say sincerely that “ownership” and “autonomy” are the two best words to describe the engineering culture at Ashby.

But hear me out: while ownership and autonomy are used often, they are very rarely true. A startup promises a low-meetings culture but by month two you’re in Zooms all day long. A startup says there’s no red tape but then you’re babysat by a product manager, reduced to little more than a glorified LLM; you don’t even get to decide the color of a button.

It’s no surprise, then, that my software engineer friends roll their eyes when they hear another startup talking about all the ownership and autonomy they give their engineers.

Ashby, however, is a rare example of a startup (and not an early one either; they’re at Series D) where all of the promises about engineers getting to carry out their own vision seem to be actually true. Rolling your eyes at the ownership and autonomy claims, in Ashby’s case, could mean missing out on a rather unique place to work as a software engineer.

“Everyone always asks, ‘is it really true how your culture works?’” Abhik Pramanik, co-founder and VP of Engineering at Ashby, told me. “They’re skeptical. And they ask for examples. The thing we constantly have to do is to show people that this is actually how we work. Because everyone pitches these abstract principles, and the reality is when you peek under the hood, it’s not really happening [at lots of other companies].”

The remainder of this essay is designed to get into the details about what it’s really like to work as an engineer at Ashby. We’ll cover many of the questions you might have in response to reading Ashby’s career pages or marketing materials. And, hopefully, we’ll help you effectively underwrite Ashby as an interesting startup to consider joining.

Some quick background on Ashby

Due to the nature of the product, most of the Next Play community probably already knows what Ashby is. But, if you don’t: Ashby is recruiting and, recently, HR software. For years, it has been one of the main ways for startups to run hiring (posting jobs, tracking candidates, etc).

Ashby raised a $50M Series D back in July of 2025 and now has 100,000+ weekly active users and 5,000+ customers. It has just over 400 employees and is a remote company, mostly distributed across the Americas and Europe. Hopefully this is helpful context for the rest of the essay!

What does the average week look like for an engineer?

You wake up, have breakfast, and walk to your computer (or an office space you rent). You turn on your monitor. And then you spend the next 8-ish hours focused almost exclusively on one thing: building and shipping features you most likely made the product and design decisions for.

Are there a billion Slack messages coming through? No, because Slack is used “exclusively for social conversations or very urgent matters,” Inês Tavares, an engineering manager, said. “Our primary means of communication is email, which reduces the number of interruptions.”

Are there dozens of meetings on your calendar? No, because the engineering team at Ashby has “about 3 hours of meetings at most per week,” Abhik (co-founder) said. This is often hard for people to believe, which is why Ashby puts an engineer’s calendar in their job descriptions; “people don’t believe that this is actually possible or they think it’s cherrypicked,” Abhik said. “But it’s not. Our engineers just don’t have many live meetings. We write instead.”

Ashby takes this rather unique approach to product engineering (where engineers are autonomous and responsible for features from defining product and design requirements to shipped) because they believe it is more effective. Sure, they could choose to put their engineers on calls for half of the day and have PMs and designers handholding every step of the way. But that, in Ashby’s view, is a less productive way to build product. Instead, engineers focus on doing great work and basically nothing else.

There are PMs at the company, but they spend most of their time talking to customers and defining the strategy for their area. “When I was a PM at past companies,” Abhik told me, “I was babysitting engineers… They would come and ask ‘hey should I make this button blue,’ or ‘hey where should this button go,’ and I didn’t want to deal with that. I felt like the engineers should know the right answers.” In other words, PMs at Ashby aren’t Jira jockeys; they are actually managing the product.

Lots of engineers at other companies feel helpless, Abhik said, because they’ve been in the kinds of organizations where they have to run every single decision by a designer or product manager or both. “At Ashby, you don’t have to do that,” he said. “In fact, you shouldn’t.”

One other benefit of this high-ownership, autonomous approach is that it’s more conducive to people who have responsibilities in real life. “As a female engineer and a mom,” Mujda Alamzai-Oh said, “I feel like I’m always trying to decipher from vague statements and hand-wavy promises whether a company is going to be a good place for me to work. I can say that Ashby is a great place to be a mom… No one bats an eye if I have to take my kid to a doctor’s appointment or have to work weird hours because childcare fell through.”

Your average week at Ashby, then, is in some ways up to you. Decide what to work on. Do a great job at it. Be effective. And the rest should fall into place.

How do things actually ship?

If I know engineers, then the answer to the previous question was probably not enough to visualize exactly how stuff gets done at Ashby. There are questions you may have: who writes the product specs? What is the roadmap like? The Jira tickets? Who updates who? And so on.

The basic structure is rather straightforward: every feature usually has one engineer, and this engineer works on the feature from product spec to ship. This means that engineers are “responsible not only for the technical implementation but also for most product decisions and the entire project management, including timelines,” Inês Tavares said.

And generally speaking, there are no:

• Jira tickets

• Deadlines

• Estimates

• Standardized playbooks for organizing work

“Each engineer is trusted to put their best work forth and organize in the best way they see fit,” João Carvalho, a site reliability lead, told me.

You also won’t find frequent check-ins from management as you work towards shipping. As opposed to most companies, which have a ‘pull’ model (e.g. daily standups, 1:1s, sprint planning, constant nudges and progress updates), Ashby has a ‘push’ model. “The expectation is that you are going to do what it takes and will push out information as needed,” Mujda Alamzai-Oh told me. Update people when it’s time to update them; it’s that simple.

Downstream of this philosophy is that there is no formal roadmap. “Our belief is that long-term roadmaps are often used as a crutch to placate customers,” Mujda said. “Sales can then point to a roadmap in order to close deals. At Ashby we focus on product velocity.”

This flexibility has paid off in practice. When remote work and generative AI caused companies to get a flood of fake or spammy job applications, “our flexibility allowed us to solve this fast,” Arjun Nayini, a product manager who started as a product engineer, told me.

How do engineers know they’re doing a good job?

Perhaps there is an elephant in the room… How does any of this get enforced?

You can imagine a lazy and/or mediocre engineer with 40 free hours per week to do as they wish, and then “as they wish” is distracting themselves with Slay the Spire 2 and not being particularly productive towards any of their actual goals. But Ashby is a successful company with a popular product and their engineers ship fast, so this doesn’t (usually) happen. How?

One answer is Ashby’s hiring bar. It is not easy to get a job at the company. But that’s not a super practical explanation. As for how engineers at the company know they’re working on the right things, the answer is that engineers at Ashby get a lot of feedback, mostly written.

Most companies need to have layers and layers of process because “they don’t have a strong feedback culture,” Abhik said. You can get “reasonable outcomes” this way, he told me, but not “exceptional ones. With us, we rely on engineers to make their own decisions.”

When you join, there are 30/60/90 day reviews and then annual reviews afterwards. “But we also give frequent feedback outside of those occasions,” Inês said. “We have an unusually high frequency of feedback.” Multiple engineering managers at Ashby told me that they view their job as being a coach of sorts; lots of this coaching comes in the form of frequent written feedback.

What kind of engineer doesn’t work out at Ashby?

In the early days, more than half of the engineers Ashby hired didn’t work out (!). But today, Abhik said, it’s a lot less, “probably less than 25%.” The number is still not that low, and it is admittedly difficult to be a successful engineer at the company. The main reason you might not work out is if “you can’t take on the ownership,” Abhik said.

It is not easy to go from a ticket-churning workplace to one where you all of a sudden have all of this time and autonomy to decide what to work on and how to work on it. If Ashby’s description of ownership scares you, there is a chance you won’t be a good fit. I’d anticipate more of a “FINALLY!” reaction from the kind of engineer who would thrive in this kind of environment.

The other strength you need to have (or learn fast), which is not often a default for engineers, is great written communication skills. “A lot of the people who don’t work out just kind of go off into a hole, build something, and then it’s three weeks too late that we heard you made this decision, and we have to unwind it.” The cost of working in a culture where people aren’t bothering you all the time is that you need to be proactive about knowing when to communicate and how.

The third most likely failure mode I can think of is if you are the kind of person who needs or wants a lot of face-to-face social interaction. Because Ashby is remote and engineers don’t have many meetings, you will spend most of your time working, literally, alone. You may only talk to your coworkers live once or twice a week. You’re not going shoes-off in a buzzing NYC office that looks like a European designer’s living room. Where you work and who you talk to is up to you! For some people this is wonderful and promises the opportunity to be highly productive without distractions; for other people it takes away an important part of going to work.

What is the social culture like?

I don’t want you to get the impression that Ashby does nothing to build camaraderie among teammates. Because they do! Quite a lot, actually, for a remote company.

The company runs two week-long retreats per year; everyone is invited. This year, that happened in Lisbon, and the annual Cancun retreat will happen soon too. “All 500 people will be in Cancun this year,” Abhik said. “And then generally we do coffee chats on a weekly basis in each region. So we have an Americas coffee chat and a Europe coffee chat.”

Individual teams can also set up their own social functions and culture. What marketing does might be different from sales, which might be different from engineering, which might be different from specific parts or geographies within the engineering organization.

Cultural fit is a pretty important thing at Ashby. “There were a lot of firsts for me,” Graham Murdoch, a design engineer, said. “Remote, async, spec-driven. Very low drama. In six years I’ve never had any sort of interpersonal issue. We hire for culture as much as engineering skill.”

Why should you join now?

Ashby is a Series D startup; sometimes this is when tech companies peak. (Loom, for example, sold to Atlassian not long after their Series D and at a lower valuation than said funding round.) And if Ashby were to maintain a narrow vision of strictly recruiting software, it’s possible that the remaining TAM would not be huge. But that’s not what Ashby is doing.

“Today we’re just doing recruiting software,” Abhik said, “but we are now expanding our TAM to be fairly massive… [for example] with a product we just launched called People Workflows. If you look at Workday today, it’s like a $30B company. It was more than $60B. We believe that this is a $60B market.”

“We’re growing revenue by well over 100% YoY,” he said, “and our growth rate is actually increasing. Our software is used by the fastest-growing companies (e.g. OpenAI, Linear, Notion), and our metrics—from NRR to gross margin—are best-in-class for B2B SaaS.”

Growth so far is great. And if Ashby does what they’d like to do, their market will expand from recruiting (a few billion) to HR software (possibly well over $60B) and beyond. Lots of room.

Of course, if you are an engineer deciding where to work, you may care more about the near-term details than the long-term plan. So another reason you might join is that Ashby already has more than 100,000 weekly active users who will actually use the products you build. “You ship a product and get feedback the next day,” Abhik said. You don’t get that experience at much earlier startups. “You might not even get a user at all.”

There’s not a real desperation to exit, either. “We’re not chasing the next jump in valuation or looking to cash out ASAP,” Graham Murdoch told me. “From the start we’ve been trying to create a company that we want to work at. So that’s meant being more conservative in certain situations, or not overreacting to industry trends.”

Finally, I’d encourage you to be thoughtful about everything you’ve read so far and self-scout a bit; do you think you would be a good fit here? Do you think you could handle the autonomy well (and/or have you done so in the past)? Does the high-responsibility, mostly written, remote culture sound like a place you could go do great work?

If so, I’d encourage you to check out Ashby’s open roles here.

You can also read some of their internal documentation about how they work here (personal deadlines), here (writing specs), and here (engineering excellence) to get a feel for things.

Thanks to Ashby for supporting Next Play and making this essay possible.

* * *

Big win last week from community member Natasha:

Excited to see even more of this. Do what you gotta do this week! Send the email.

And if you want some extra encouragement join the Friends of Next Play Slack.

Join Friends of Next Play

Co-founders and people to jam with:

• Andrew Teper is an M&A professional and current UChicago Booth MBA student. Exploring entrepreneurship through acquisition. Looking for operators with strong ops experience to buy a company together. Reach out at andrew.tepper@chicagobooth.edu (Chicago/NYC)

• Andy is building a micro SaaS for a problem from his previous startup. Building micro SaaS for B2B onboarding. Looking for sales, marketing, and GTM. Reach out at andy@ramply.org. (Austin)

• Marwan Safi was employee #3 at a media startup he grew from 2 to 15 clients and £1M ARR, then spent two years at a deep-tech VC firm. Building an agentic tool that turns anyone into a market expert in 30 to 45 minutes. Looking for technical, systems-oriented builders who execute fast. Reach out at marwansafi96@gmail.com. (London)

Find more co-founders here.

By the way are you hiring? Send us a quick email: hi@nextplay.so. We can help connect you to great engineers, ops people, salespeople, and more. Our community is now over 91,000+ people!

Early teams:

• Noah from Multiplier Holdings is hiring a finance manager and a product manager. They are building a VC-backed startup that acquires and scales professional services firms using AI. Apply here. (SF, UK, Remote)

• We’re considering hiring someone to run a video show for Next Play. Ideal candidate would be able to handle the whole show. Reach out to hi@nextplay.so if you’re interested. (NYC, SF, Remote)

• Jeff from Discovery Loop is hiring a founding team. Jeff and his team were some of the lead engineers at Google for the past several decades. They are building AI to automate experimental loops. Apply here. (SF)

• Brendan from Holly is hiring a founding product manager, a deployment strategist, and a founding data engineer. They are building a classification and compensation platform for government HR teams. Apply here. (NYC, SF)

• An anonymous writing/content agency for startups is hiring salespeople and writers. Reach out to hi@nextplay.so and we’ll connect you. (Remote)

• Maggie from Saige is hiring a founding engineer. They are building a science-backed platform that helps consumers find non-toxic products and make more informed choices about their health. Reach out hiring@livesaige.com. (NYC)

• Aman from Unsiloed AI is hiring a founding GTM lead. They are building an API to parse unstructured data. Apply here. (SF)

• Todd from Cranes Intelligence is hiring a founding head of GTM. They are building autonomous decision systems for businesses operating in high-stakes spaces. Apply here. (NYC)

• Alex from Lorica is hiring founding engineers. They are building AI-enabled services for energy and data centers. Reach out: alex@getlorica.com. (NYC)

• Kathryn from Telluscope is hiring a founding CTO. They are building a platform that detects contamination in soil and groundwater. Apply here. (SF)

• Eugene from Featherless is hiring a chief of staff. They are building an AI inference platform. Apply here. (SF, Remote)

• Phil from Linkup is hiring a founding marketing lead and a founding salesperson. They are building a production grade web search API for AI. Apply here. (SF, Paris)

• Arvind from Fresco is hiring a sales development rep. They are building an AI assistant to supercharge construction estimators. Apply here. (SF)

• Zane from Nox Metals is hiring a founding GTM person. They are building metal as a service. Apply here. (Detroit)

• Nick from Vector is hiring a salesperson. They are building a more efficient way for marketing leaders to buy ads. Apply here. (Boston, Remote)

• Anis from Gutgutgoose is hiring a founding growth person. They are building a personalized probiotics product. Apply here. (SF)

• Here’s a list we made of 36 fast-growing startups hiring right now.
  

Scaling startups:

• Ilan from Sapiom is hiring a chief of staff. They are building a platform to help you ship agents faster. Apply here. (SF)

• Mackenzie from Ambrook is hiring talent people and a product ops person and a product manager. They just raised a $30m round, and are building financial tools for bookkeeping, payments, and business insights. Apply here. (NYC, Denver, Remote, SF)

• Jesse from Decagon is hiring a product manager focused on their agent platform. They are building a conversational AI platform. Apply here. (SF)

• Oliver from Firmus is hiring a head of strategic accounts and a customer success manager. They just raised $2 billion to build the most efficient AI infrastructure. Apply here. (Sydney, SF, Singapore)

• George from Monk is hiring an engineer and account executives. They are building an automated accounts receivables platform. Apply here. (NYC)

• Elad from Faye is hiring a head of partnerships and a customer experience team lead. They just raised $50m. They are building a modern travel insurance offering. Apply here. (Remote, Tel Aviv)

• Jamie from Convex is hiring a GTM engineer and a head of marketing. They are building a reactive backend platform. Apply here. (SF)

• Ricard from Volta is hiring for 101 roles across marketing and people and product and more. They just announced a $10b deal, as they build out AI infrastructure. Apply here. (SF, London)

• Jennifer from Scribe is hiring a marketing person and a people ops generalist and a head of GTM enablement. They are building a specialized intelligence platform that has 7 million users across 600,000+ businesses. Apply here. (SF)

• Aidan from Cohere is hiring a marketing chief of staff. They are building a security-first enterprise AI platform. Apply here. (Remote)

• Pablo from Happy Robot is hiring deployment strategists, FDEs, and a chief of staff. They are building infrastructure for enterprises to build and orchestrate AI workforces. Apply here. (SF)

• Ladi from Moove is hiring for 50 roles across ops and engineering. They just raised $250m to scale their mobility infrastructure platform. Apply here. (US)

• Shayne from Polymarket is hiring growth, finance, and marketing people. They are building one of the world’s largest prediction markets. Apply here. (NYC, Remote)

• Fernando from Arq is hiring a special projects lead. They are building a modern finance platform. Apply here. (London)

• Grant from whatnot is hiring for dozens of roles: customer success, sales, engineering, etc.. They just raised $545m. They are building the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy and sell things you love. Apply here. (LA, NYC, London, SF)

• Jordan from Vapi is hiring a head of people and a chief of staff. They are building an advanced voice AI platform. Apply here. (SF, NYC)

• Here’s a list we made of 36 startups now hiring after raising $50m-$100m.

Investing and other:

• Equal Ventures is hiring a chief of staff. Apply here. (Remote)

• Bessemer Venture Partners is hiring an associate to focus on AI. Apply here. (SF)

• Sound Ventures is hiring a chief of staff and biz ops person. Apply here. (LA)

Resources and tools:

• Reminder to check out the AI-powered Next Play talent agent that sends you personalized job recommendations.

• Here’s a system you can use to land a job at a startup.

Note:

• Thanks for reading! If you have any notes, thoughts, or suggestions, please send us an email: hi@nextplay.so.

• Would appreciate if you could upvote and share this edition if you liked it. Thanks so much!

Finding someone to work with is a lot of work. That’s why we put together this list of people open to meeting someone to build a company or project with. You’ll find a range of people including software engineers, salespeople, former founders, and many more.

Remind you to be respectful in your outreach. But hope it works out!

Read more

I meet a lot of people who tell me they want a new job but are not really doing anything about it. They are unhappy. They complain. They yearn for more.

And yet, when you look at their actions…when you look at how they actually spend their time…it looks like they are barely even trying. Sure they are filling out a few job applications a week but it’s the quality of their life we’re talking about here, surely they could be doing more.

You probably know these people too. In fact, you may be one of these people.

Part of me is frustrated. Frustrated because I believe in people, and believe that people should be trying harder to take control of their lives. Less complaining. More doing. More getting results.

But another part of me totally gets it. Finding a job is hard. It’s lonely. It’s a lot of denial. It’s a lot of unknowns. It’s not like you were taught how to handle this situation. Not some course you took in high school. And most advice you see on the internet or get passed down isn’t exactly helpful. In fact, a lot of it can be pretty hurtful and lead to tons of wasted time and damaged reputations.

I do not profess to have all the answers, but I do think that if you follow the (rather simple) system I’m about to describe, and follow it consistently, you’ll get results. You can start today. Stick with it, and I believe, truly, that you’ll get a job offer.

If you have questions, please do email me hi@nextplay.so. I’m here to help the best I can.

And if you rather not go through this journey alone, be sure to join the Friends of Next Play slack group.

A system for landing a job at a startup

Choose an objective

Like any project, you should start with defining an objective. I’m using the term objective in a kind of fuzzy way - it can be very quantitative like “get a job at a remote startup that’ll pay me $150k/year in cash” or more abstract “get a job working with people I like.” It can be very comprehensive, like “the company must be in the biotech sector, based in Boston, less than 20 people, having great health insurance, etc.” or very very open: “land 3 roles in the next 30 days, then revisit.”

The more specific you make the objective, the easier it’ll be to tailor your system and make it more efficient. Clarity will make this whole process that much easier.

But that may be hard to do. Because, a lot of the time, you don’t actually know what you want to do with your life. “To be or not to be” type question going on here.

It’s reasonable to not have a crystal very clear idea of what will make you happy (or if happiness is even what you care about). Even as an adult.

I find a lot of people get super stuck at this stage (yup the very first stage!). Either they want the perfect goal that perfectly captures what they want to do so they obsess over all the details or they have no idea where to even go and as a result get frozen. Afraid to take the first step.

My suggestion here is to just choose anything, while holding the idea in mind that you’ll revisit this in the next 30 days. This is not a permanent commitment. This is just an interim goal just for yourself, if anything to help you shape your system. A way for you to start to build some momentum. To start training the muscle. To start the process.

Build an organizational home

Before you go off sending outreach, pause. Get organized. Somewhere to keep track of what you’re doing.

When most people hear this, their brain immediately goes complicated. I don’t know why. I don’t think you need a fancy CRM. You don’t need a ticket tracking tool. You don’t need advanced analytics. You don’t need to vibe code some custom tracker.

I mean you could. You could do all of those things.

But I am not sure they will actually help you. I am not sure they will actually lead you to landing your objective.

What I look for in my organizational home…the number one criteria? I look for something I’ll actually use.

The biggest mistake people make in setting up an organizational home is that they create some fancy thing or launch some application that they never use. Why don’t they use it? Maybe it takes too long to open the app. Seriously. Or maybe it’s too rigid and their random one-off job application doesn’t fit into it. Or it’s just annoying to fill it out.

My advice is to make a super simple spreadsheet. Google spreadsheet will do or your favorite notes file.

It can be as simple as this:

Clean up your personal profiles

One thing you can do is try and make your online presence stand out. You can definitely do this. Start a blog. Start posting. Etc.

But another thing you can do is simply clean up your online profile. Building a brand can take time. And perhaps you want to do that. In the meantime, however, I strongly encourage you to simply audit your profile for red-flags. Get rid of the ai-generated slop. Just have a clean profile. Maybe a clean personal website. In this case, simple will be better than something super “advanced”.

Make a list (and increase your surface area)

It’ll sound so obvious. And I’m going to spell it out for you as “simply” as I can. But I bet most people won’t take this step. I’m not precisely sure why. But they won’t.

In the next 10 minutes, you can do the following: create a list of 50 startups you find at least a little bit exciting. Note: they do not have to be hiring for any particular role.

To create the list, you can read any recent Next Play article:

What should you put on the list? Well that’s really up to you. Be open-minded. Follow your curiosity. And build your list.

Your list should be a living thing. Something you add to whenever you hear of an interesting opportunity. When you’re scrolling on Twitter and you see an interesting startup, add it. When you are talking to a friend who just found this cool company, add it. For this system, your list should be pretty large. Larger than just 3-5 companies. I don’t think this strategy is set up to work well with very small numbers (disclaimer I think that there is a more concentrated strategy you could try out but it’s riskier and I’ve not yet seen to be more effective particularly for people looking to work at a startup).

Find emails to reach out to

Now you’ll want to find the email addresses of the hiring managers. For companies less than 100 people, I suggest finding the email address of one of the founders. If you’re applying for a technical role, you can email the CEO or the CTO. If you’re applying for something non-technical, I recommend emailing the CEO.

There are many tools you can use to find email addresses. You can check out something like contactout - but you can also simply email firstname@companydomain.com and most of the time that’ll work, especially for the founder.

Write cold emails

My best thoughts on writing cold emails are probably here:

If you want the TL;DR, though, here it is:

Perhaps more important than what you should do in a cold email is what you shouldn’t do. I think a lot of the existing cold email advice out there, like ‘send an email people want to read!’ falls flat because everyone has different definitions of what ‘an email people want to read’ is. My goal with this section is to establish some consistency; some ground rules.

Do not write an email more than ~200 words long.

Do not use fancy words.

Do not send an email without an ask.

Do not be vague.

Do not be spammy or dishonest.

In your email, say: Who you are. Why you are reaching out. Why they should care.

You can have a template. Something like this:

“Hey Ryan - [product] is so good. Used it last week for [reason] and was impressed (especially by how good the notification selection/timing is).

Question: how are you doing on copywriting at the moment?

Asking because I write for startups.

Don’t want to blast you with a wall of text so re: work background, that’s mostly on the site in my email address. Happy to share a bunch of past work if it would be helpful.”

But make sure you personalize it. In your email, prove to the recipient that you’re a real person and not some AI.

If it’s slow at first, realize you’ll get faster. It’s like a muscle. A sport. Practice, and you’ll improve.

It may sound a bit crazy but consider timing yourself. See how much you can improve in a short period of time. More emails.

Add value

I’ll say this before and say this again: the easiest way to get a job at a startup is to simply start helping them before you’re actually employed.

Get them leads. Rewrite their job descriptions. Interview potential customers. Just start doing useful stuff. Show you actually care.

Here are a bunch of real examples for you to look at for inspiration:

Email them your learnings. Or bring them up in an interview. Prove to them you’re so valuable that they cannot afford to not hire you. That’s gotta be the mentality.

Stay consistent

Now you’ve got the “system.” But it’s not now magically going to get you a job.

A big part of the system’s success is you actually using it. And to do that, my suggestion is to spend 30 minutes a day. At least. 30 minutes a day finding opportunities and sending outreach. I believe in that time you can send something like 10 emails a day (at least).

Without knowing you at all, I think your response rate will be something like at least 10%, so 1 response per day. I think most of those opportunities won’t actually turn into jobs…but if you’re consistent, you’ll eventually have multiple opportunities to choose from.

By the way, even the “Nos” may be worth cultivating. Stay in touch with people. Keep them in mind. You never know what it can lead to.

And during this whole process, you’ll be learning and building momentum. You’ll iterate on your messaging. You’ll talk to companies be like oh I’m actually not interested in those types of roles. Let me adjust this. Etc. Etc. Treat it like you’re building a product almost. You’ll learn from the market and adapt.

I have seen this actually work countless times now. If you need encouragement, consider this essay my encouragement. You got this!

And if you rather not go through this journey alone, be sure to join the Friends of Next Play slack group.

Thanks for reading! If you liked this essay please upvote and share with friends.

Here’s a list of 33 companies currently hiring after raising over $100m.

Thank you to Harmonic (startup database) for helping us source this list!

1. nesto - digital mortgage platform in Canada (Montreal / Toronto / Vancouver / Canada remote) - Careers

2. TensorWave - AMD-powered AI cloud infrastructure (Las Vegas / Remote) - Careers

3. PsiQuantum - photonic quantum computer developer (Bay Area / DC / Brisbane / Daresbury / Remote) - Careers

4. Standard Bots - AI-powered industrial robotics platform (NY / Bay Area / Seattle) - Careers

5. ICEYE - SAR satellite imaging and monitoring (Global) - Careers

6. Helsing - AI software for defense systems (DC / Europe) - Careers

7. Black Forest Labs - generative AI image models (Freiburg / Bay Area) - Careers

8. Beacon Software - operating platform for vertical software (Toronto / NYC / Bay Area / North America remote) - Careers

Read more

When AI tools went mainstream in late 2022, there was a flood of sci-fi excitement. People talked about how AI was going to take over all of knowledge work. How every company would have many AI employees for each one human. Founders pitched grand visions of billion-dollar companies run by a single person. There was talk of company-wide AI generalist agents.

Much of the hype has described the average person’s vision for AI a decade or two ago: a movie-esque future where companies have armies of hyperintelligent, hypercompetent AI beings (wizards, almost) that can do anything you ask them to.

But… If you look at the suite of AI products available today, you’ll realize that the industry has mostly not gone in that direction. The vast majority of AI products today are basically AI-enhanced tools; software products that now use AI so they can be more effective. On Next Play, we have written about AI insurance tools and AI sales tools and AI finance tools and more. But we haven’t written as much about that sci-fi pitch for AI: the hypercompetent generalist employee that can do whatever you want, whenever you want, with just one message.

Today we are writing about one of those companies. We are writing about viktor.com.

The company, which builds a generalist AI employee (“not a tool”), launched publicly in February of this year and recently crossed $30M in ARR; they raised a $75M Series A from Accel (and angels incl. the founders of Lovable, ElevenLabs, Vercel, Deel, Framer, and many more) just three months later. Companies and investors are clearly on board so far.

I sat down with the viktor.com team to learn more. What does the product do? Is this the right fit for someone looking to join an AI startup? What kinds of people thrive? What is the culture like? What is the strategy; how will Viktor win?

Those answers, and more, below.

The product

Imagine your company hires a new employee. You are this person’s manager. On their first week, you ask them to build a dashboard to track certain revenue metrics. But, instead of building the dashboard in a useful way, they respond with 1,000+ words and a prototype. What you wanted was for them to build a real dashboard from start-to-finish and deploy it live; what they did was build a context-less preview and accompany it with a wall of text.

(You’ve probably had a coworker or two who worked something like this.)

That approach wouldn’t be very effective, would it? And yet, at many companies, it’s the primary way people interact with AI: they open a context-less chat window and describe what they want. Maybe the AI helps, sort of. Maybe it’s just a distraction. But what I think we all can agree would be more useful is if there was one AI employee that had both context and access. And if you could, I don’t know, tag it directly in Slack (like a normal teammate!) and then watch it come back in a few minutes with completed work, live, ready to use. Wouldn’t that be nice?

That is, more or less, how Viktor works.

Viktor installs into your workspace (like Slack or Teams), and from then on you treat it like a colleague with infinite time and resources. You tag it in a channel and give it a task, like:

• Create a useful dashboard so the content team knows what’s performing

• Summarize yesterday’s #sales thread

• Build an internal app where reps submit discount requests and managers approve

• Audit our Meta ad spend over the past 30 days

And virtually anything else!

Viktor connects to over 3,200 tools, and it can custom-write integrations to the ones it hasn’t connected to yet. When it’s done working, it posts the deliverable back in the thread like a normal coworker would. If it needs approval for something, it’ll ask.

You can also have Viktor do recurring work, like pulling data before a meeting. At viktor.com (the company), Viktor (the employee) pulls data on revenue, signups, and ad performance before the weekly growth meeting. “The data is straight from Stripe, Posthog, and the ad platforms. So we don’t spend the first fifteen minutes of the meeting assembling a picture or arguing about whose spreadsheet is right,” Matt Swulinski, Head of Growth, told me.

Sensitive actions like moving money or emailing customers wait behind approvals in Slack, and admins control permissions per person and per integration. viktor.com charges for usage rather than per seat; this is a learning from a previous product, Jace, where flat pricing killed margins.

You hire Viktor. You ask him to do work. And he does it. That’s a rather exciting, and simple, pitch. So how big do its founders think this can get?

The strategy

According to Fryd Wiatrowski, viktor.com co-founder and CEO, every company standup opens the same way. From a recent meeting: “Today is day 1,064 of our mission to automate all knowledge work for humanity. We are 0.014% there.” The counter goes up every week.

I don’t think the long-term vision could be any clearer. But, if you are considering joining viktor.com, you may also be interested in the company’s priorities over the shorter term. Like the next few years. “Most digital work performed today will be done by AI within roughly five years,” Fryd said. “[And] not just individual tasks. Entire companies will become increasingly automated.”

That sci-fi pitch, that world where one person could run a billion-dollar company and teams are increasingly filled with AI employees… It’s approaching soon, according to viktor.com’s founders. And, if viktor.com succeeds, it will sit at the center of that revolution for millions of companies.

“We are building for AGI, not for what’s possible today,” said Peter Albert, co-founder and CTO of viktor.com. “We are directly taking on the big AI labs on their core goals, and believe we can win.”

The big AI labs, by the way, are probably one of the main reasons why you might be skeptical of Viktor. Just a couple of months ago, in fact, Anthropic announced Claude Tag: a version of Claude that acts as a team member in Slack and can accomplish a lot of the same work that Viktor can. So why put your faith in Viktor? Why won’t the big dogs win this one?

I can think of a few reasons you might bet on viktor.com. For one, it’s not immediately obvious that because AI labs produce the ‘engine’, so to speak, that they will produce the ‘car’. “Engine producers are rarely the best car producers,” Antoni Olendzki, whose role at Viktor is to ‘make the number go up,’ told me. I am a bit skeptical of the claim (which I hear often!) that because the big AI companies can make something, that they will be the best at making it.

Another reason is the models themselves; Viktor is model-agnostic. When you ask Viktor to do some work, your request is routed to the model that is most efficient and effective for that particular task. But when you tag Claude, well, you’re using Claude. So you could reasonably argue that Viktor’s incentives are more closely aligned with their customers’: they simply want to produce the most effective work outcome with any combination of models.

“We sit inside the customer’s actual context, their Slack, their tools, their memory of past work,” Fryd said. “A lab can copy the product. It can’t copy three years of your company’s context.”

The growth

If you look at Viktor’s public launch timeline and numbers… You might walk away confused. Wait, they launched in February of this year and raised a $75M Series A just three months later? They just crossed $30M in ARR? How?!

Fryd and Peter left Meta, where they met, in 2023, and spent two years on AI products that (mostly) didn’t succeed. The product they built right before Viktor, Jace, was an email agent which worked but whose flat monthly pricing broke against real-world compute costs. When Viktor launched in February, it looked like an overnight success; it was really the first truly successful attempt of a company and a team that had been shipping since 2023.

The launch itself was mostly a video. “We tried walking around offices in-person and telling them to install our agent,” Fryd said, “but no one wanted it. Then we launched a demo video on X, which did 2.5M views in the first week, and growth since then has been mostly self-serve.” At the time of their Series A, Viktor was only about 15 people. The company has now grown to 35.

The ARR is nice, but I think Viktor’s net dollar retention (350% in the first 30 days) is more impressive. A customer who starts at $1 is paying $3.50 a month later, which means that a lot of Viktor’s growth is coming from existing customers delegating more as they realize just how useful Viktor can be. Most of that revenue is coming from the U.S. (Viktor is based mostly in Warsaw and Munich), and they’re opening a New York office soon to operate as a commercial sales/success hub run by Robbie, Viktor’s new CRO.

These are good metrics. But, if you were going to underwrite Viktor as a company to consider joining, I think you’d also want to look at their team and culture. Would you be a fit here?

Team and culture

The resumes at viktor.com are impressive. Fryd studied math at Oxford and worked in high-frequency trading before he joined Meta. Peter was a self-taught engineer who ended up on the core team behind Llama 2. Robbie O’Connor, the new CRO, built Notion’s EMEA business from ~$13M to ~$230M ARR - about 38% of Notion’s global revenue - after doing the same job at Asana. Matt Swulinski led growth at Wispr Flow from 0 to $2B valuation. And the investors include both founders of Slack, which is an especially nice signal considering Viktor lives inside of Slack.

So the fancy stuff is there, if that’s what you’re looking for. But I don’t want you to come away with the impression that viktor.com has a culture that cares a lot about a pretty CV; according to one person on their team, “some of our best people never even finished high school.”

Succeeding at viktor.com, rather, is all about slope. “I don’t care about experience,” Fryd said. “I expect everyone to grow very fast, and there’s no ceiling here. I only hire people who are smarter than me, and if you’re great I’ll do my best to learn from you.”

Lots of startups say stuff like this, of course. Is it true? I don’t know, but you could ask Rafał Szlendak, who is a software engineer at viktor.com. “There was just one small problem [when I interviewed for the job] — I could barely code. I ended up passing the interview and getting the offer. But the expectation was that I learn extremely quickly, or else, I get kicked out.”

This is a company that isn’t afraid to take chances on people they think will learn fast (high slope!), even if those people do not currently possess the full skillset needed for the role. That’s encouraging if you’re young or new to the industry, and it’s also encouraging if you’ve been looking to switch roles (e.g. from PM to software engineer). Viktor might take a chance on you.

On the ground in viktor.com’s offices, the sense is that of extreme urgency. “It’s never ‘let’s schedule a call for Wednesday’,” Fryd said. “If it can be done today, do it today.”

Describing Fryd, Rafał told me that “he wants to know everything… And he wants to know it NOW — doesn’t matter what you’re doing… And his sense of urgency is contagious.”

The other thing you notice is that the company actually runs on Viktor. New hires get the product on day one. It sits in the weekly meeting. Robbie O’Connor told me he was “operational in a matter of hours” because Viktor onboarded him. Joining an AI company that does not run on its own AI, one employee told me, “is like joining a restaurant where the chefs order delivery.”

If you take away only one thing, let it be that the team is ambitious. “From my VC days,” said Kacper Zambrzycki, who runs talent, “I met hundreds of founders, and most of them say they wanna build something big, but they say it because this is how you fundraise... Fryd says he wants to build a trillion-dollar company, and the more I get to know him, the more I believe this is the case.”

Should you join Viktor?

viktor.com could be a rather unique company to join for a few reasons. One is that it’s one of the few-ish companies building a truly generalist AI employee; the founders are openly building “for AGI” and don’t intend to silo the product into a narrow tool. If you want to go build the version of AI that shows up in optimistic science fiction, then Viktor might be a company to consider.

There’s also the rapid growth and gigantic Series A, both of which point to viktor.com being a rather ‘hot’ startup right now on a positive trajectory. The company is still early and the team is still small, so you’d be getting onboard far before viktor.com exits ‘exciting early startup’ mode.

You might also make a positive impact on the world. “Some of the smartest people in the world spend their careers doing work that machines should be doing, while the hardest problems remain unsolved: hunger, diseases we still cannot cure, poverty, and children who never receive a real education,” Fryd told me. “We are building the AI worker so people can spend their time solving problems like these instead.”

The most useful advice about who should not join came from Matt Swulinski (growth): “You’re expected to build your own tools. Not adopt them. Build them… And there is no playbook. No process. If that sounds like overhead rather than leverage, this isn’t the place.”

If you do want in, the bar for applications is low (you can cold email) and the bar for effort is high (it better be good). Fryd’s Founder Associate, Filip, got hired by cold email. “He emailed me, I didn’t reply, and he kept emailing. Instead of asking for a call again, he looked at what was hurting us most at the time, which was hiring, and he sent me his solution to it, already built. We hadn’t even spoken yet. By the time we did, he’d basically started the job, so I let him keep it.”

So, if you do apply, take some of that advice (or this advice) to heart.

viktor.com is currently hiring across all departments for their offices in Warsaw, Munich, Dublin, and New York. You can browse their open roles here.

Thanks to Viktor for supporting Next Play and making this spotlight possible.

Here’s a list of 36 startups that are hiring after raising $50m-$100m.

Thank you to Harmonic (startup database) for helping us source this list!

1. Prime Intellect - decentralized AI model training platform (Bay Area / Remote) - Careers

2. XDOF - general-purpose robotics automation platform (San Mateo) - Careers

3. Nagish - real-time phone call captioning (Tel Aviv / NY) - Careers

4. Radical Numerics - AI models for generative genomics (Bay Area / Tokyo) - Careers

5. NewCore - identity security for humans and agents (US / Tel Aviv) - Careers

6. Ent - end-to-end enterprise AI platform (Bay Area / Remote) - Careers

7. Sail Research - AI inference platform for background agents (Bay Area) - Careers

8. Niural AI - global payroll and HR platform (NY / Bay Area / Nepal) - Careers

9. Arcade.dev - secure tool access for AI agents (Bay Area) - Careers

10. Conduct - AI analysis for SAP systems (London / NYC) - Careers

11. Scaled Cognition - controllable conversational AI platform (Bay Area / NYC) - Careers

12. Collate - AI documentation for life sciences (Bay Area) - Careers

13. Adaptive Innovations - AI-powered home healthcare operations (NY / Richardson, TX / Remote) - Careers

Read more

Friendly reminder that you can get access to loads of discounts to useful AI products like Replit, Granola, Clay, Ramp, Lovable, Superhuman, Linear, Gamma, Flow, Airtable, Notion, and many more just by signing up for Friends of Next Play.

Join Friends of Next Play

Co-founders and people to jam with:

Here’s a list we curated of dozens of talented people looking to find a co-founder, and here are some examples:

• Mitch is a founder with an Intuit exit and product leader at Airbnb, TurboTax, and Bain, launched product lines from 0 to $20M+ and owned a $300M P&L. Building subscription home maintenance, property management for your own home. Looking for co-founders and collaborators. Reach out at mitchellwfox@gmail.com. (SF)

• Vineet studied CS at Michigan, then VMware and Capital One, bootstrapped a generative media app from 0 to $500K in under 6 months and sold it. Exploring consumer apps in health, wellness, and faith. Looking for co-founders who have built a successful app, strong in engineering or distribution. Reach out at vparv@umich.edu. (SF)

• Nikhil is a consultant in EY-Parthenon’s venture building practice, leading product for an AI-native care navigation platform and building LLM evaluation processes. Exploring the startup ecosystem and early-hire opportunities. Looking for founders and early operators at AI-native startups. Reach out at nikhil.agrawal26@gmail.com. (NYC)

Read the full list here.

By the way are you hiring? Send us a quick email: hi@nextplay.so. We can help connect you to great engineers, ops people, salespeople, and more. Our community is now over 91,000+ people!

Early teams:

• Max from Pangram is hiring founding salespeople. They are building an ai detector which helps stop cheating and plagiarism. Apply here. (NYC)

• Sanjeet from Decimal is hiring a founding SDR and an account executive. They are building a product truth platform for technical customer issues. Apply here. (SF)

• Scott from Throne is hiring a senior backend engineer. They are building a smart toilet that tracks and reads your activity. Apply here. (Austin)

• Balazs is hiring a founding full-stack engineer. They are building a brand new GSIB bank. Reach out: balazs@terminus.ventures. (NYC)

• Raghav from Terminal is hiring a founding product marketing lead and a founding customer success manager. They are building a platform that provides telematics data for the commercial fleet industry. Apply here. (Toronto)

• Ariel from Bloom is hiring founding team members across the board. They are building endpoint security designed for AI-work. Reach out: joinus@bloom.security. (Tel Aviv)

• Naveen from Build Forever is hiring a social growth lead. They are building new consumer products that feel more personal and human. Apply here. (NYC)

• Arpan from Kin is hiring a social content creator and a head of AI. They are building a platform to record what your doctor is saying. Apply here. (LA)

• Harry from Antioch is hiring a “general application” and a simulation engineer. They are building an autonomy simulation platform. Apply here. (NYC)

• Philipp from Telli is hiring salespeople and a deployment strategist. They are building a voice AI platform that already handles millions of support and sales calls. Apply here. (Berlin)

• Daniel from Sent is hiring a content person and a VP of marketing. They are building an API that lets you send messages across channels like text and WhatsApp. Apply here. (NYC)

• Sammy from Henry is hiring a BDR and a customer growth manager. They are building a context engine for commercial real estate. Apply here. (NYC)

• Ali from Raylu is hiring an account executive. They are building an AI origination engine for private markets. Apply here. (NYC)

• Ori from OffDeal is hiring a founding content lead. They are building an investment bank for small businesses. Apply here. (NYC)

• Nitzan from Harmony is hiring a product manager and a salesperson. They are building agentic enterprise service management. Apply here. (Tel Aviv)

• A stealth, profitable healthcare startup is hiring a staff software engineer. Reach out: jobs@viewtechsys.com. (Remote)

• Vladimir from Lio is hiring for the office of the CEO. They are building a multi-agent system for procurement. Apply here. (Munich)
  

Scaling startups:

• Reminder that we run a small (human-powered!) matching service connecting talented people with roles. Right now, we’re connecting lots of chief of staff/deployment strategist/biz ops type people to hot startups. Fill out this quick form and we’ll try to make some connections (can’t promise to everyone but will try our best!).

• Carl from Stepful is hiring a Chief of Staff. They just raised $55m to scale their healthcare training platform. Apply here. (NYC)

• Jamie from Pace is hiring an agent PM, an FDE, and a member of technical staff. They are building an AI operations partner for the world’s leading insurers. Apply here. (NYC, London)

• Ross from Wordsmith is hiring salespeople and a product manager. They are building a software platform to speed up in-house legal counsel. Apply here. (NYC)

• Anton from Lovable is hiring for dozens of roles in every department. They are building an AI app and website builder used by millions of people. Apply here. (SF, Boston, NYC)

• Samir from Highbeam is hiring a product manager and an AI implementation associate. They are building a bank designed for consumer brands, and have raised $42m. Apply here. (NYC, Toronto)

• Christopher from Granola is hiring a revenue operations lead and salespeople. They are building an ai-powered notepad for busy people. Apply here. (SF, London)

• Rissa from Fish Audio is hiring a senior BDR and a marketing analytics person. They are building a voice layer for AI. Their open source models have over 100k+ Github Stars. Apply here. (Remote, SF, Tokyo)

• Kevin from Spur is hiring a content marketing manager and an events person. They are building an intelligence platform to help teams identify fraud and risk. Apply here. (Remote)

• Dvir from Encore is hiring a country manager and salespeople. They are building AI that engages like your best salespeople. Apply here. (UK, Remote, Spain, Finland)

• Shahar from groundcover is hiring salespeople and a talent partner. They are building an observability platform for agents. Apply here. (Boston)

• Maxim from Onyx is hiring salespeople and a product manager. They are building a secure control plane for AI agents and models, and recently raised $113m. Apply here. (Remote, Tel Aviv)

• Joon from Simile is hiring a deployment strategist and a member of their data staff. They just raised $200m to scale their simulation platform. Apply here. (NYC, SF)

• Ben from Zenity is hiring salespeople and a customer success manager. They just raised $125m to secure the era of AI agents. Apply here. (Remote, Chicago, Austin, Dallas, NYC)

• William from Chipagents is hiring a customer success manager and an accountant. They just raised $60m and are building a platform to design chips faster. Apply here. (SF)

• James from Olix is hiring an executive assistant to report directly to the COO. They are building infrastructure for frontier AI. Apply here. (London)

• Isaiah from Valar Atomics is hiring across business, engineering, and people. They just raised $1b. They are scaling nuclear energy. Apply here. (LA)

• Here’s a new list we just made of 36 of the fastest-growing startups right now.

Investing and other:

• Redesign Health is hiring an applied ai engineer to help incubate new ai-powered healthcare companies. Apply here. (NYC, SF)

• Village Global is hiring an investor. Apply here. (SF)

Resources and tools:

• Judge a Book: A game that’ll make you think.

• Consider the opposite: an approach for figuring out what to do.

Note:

• Thanks for reading! If you have any notes, thoughts, or suggestions, please send us an email: hi@nextplay.so.

• Would appreciate if you could upvote and share this edition if you liked it. Thanks so much!

This is a guest post.

People love best practices.

What’s your first step if you want to travel to Italy? Or decide which career path to take? Or learn your favorite song on the piano? Or decide which company to join? Or manage your team effectively?

You ask someone. You Google. You Google again but this time with “reddit” at the end of your query. Sometimes you don’t even have to ask around: social media algorithms figure out what you want and serve you content about it. People in your life hear about your interest and start offering confident unsolicited advice.

The answers come fast and loud and clear. Go to Rome and Tuscany. Choose a career that’s stable and pays well. Don’t try learning your favorite song just yet—instead pay a teacher and begin by learning theory. Join the popular fast-growing company that just raised a Series C. Set lots of OKRs.

Often these best practices don’t offer much room for disagreement. People use words like must and need and have to. They may even make you feel silly for not following their advice.

Our crazy-sounding but totally reasonable idea when people give you advice is to consider the opposite.

Literally, consider the opposite. Anytime somebody gives you a recommendation, or a piece of advice, or tells you that you need to do something, ask yourself—what would the complete opposite of that be?

How to consider the opposite

The key word here is consider. Not necessarily do. But consider. Here’s what that may look like.

• Someone says you can’t do X without Y prior experience → what if you tried it anyway?

• Someone says you need to do quarterly planning → what if you just did daily check-ins?

• Someone says you need to live in NYC or SF when you’re in your early 20s → what if you moved to Tokyo, or Seoul, or some random village in southern Argentina?

• Someone says you need an internship at a particular company during your sophomore year in college → what if you used that time to find a beach in South America and write a book?

• Someone says you need to visit one place on your vacation → what if you went to a completely different region of the country that’s hundreds of miles away?

• Someone says you need to pay an instructor to learn something → what if you learned on your own?

• Someone says you need to read one specific book → what if you found an old, random, niche book in a totally different genre and read that instead?

• Someone says you should only visit a country during XYZ months → what if you visited during the complete opposite time of year?

You could even apply it to this essay. What if you didn’t consider the opposite? (We don’t recommend that, but you should consider it!)

We think this is important because, if you follow the median advice, you will probably end up with median outcomes. Sometimes that might be what you want. If five of your friends are great at guitar and they all give you the same advice about learning, following that advice might also help you to become great at guitar.

In general, though, we think the common outcomes for people in life are not all that inspiring. And so we are suggesting that you consider the opposite.

Advice for not becoming Well Actually personified

There’s a funny clip on YouTube of Neil deGrasse Tyson on Joe Rogan explaining why he doesn’t put a case on his phone. His point is that not having a case on his phone makes him more aware of the fact that he shouldn’t drop it. He compares it to carrying around expensive pens, which he claims he doesn’t lose because he knows they are expensive. The clip is a great example of why this essay’s title is “consider the opposite”, not “do the opposite and then brag about it on Rogan.”

Just because the opposite exists doesn’t mean it’s a good idea, or that you should do it. Most times you should not even say the opposite in conversation: being a constant contrarian is annoying and not useful.

Considering the opposite, however, is helpful. Even if you end up making the decision that everyone told you to make, at least you didn’t follow the herd by default. You thought about what you could’ve done instead. It’s a good feeling, and it can help you minimize regret about the decisions you make.

Ready to put this into practice? Okay…

You definitely should not (at any cost!) drop your email in the box below or share this essay with your friends.

If you liked this essay, please like and share with your friends.

Here’s a list of 36 fast-growing startups hiring now.

Thank you to Harmonic (startup database) for helping us source this list!

1. Fleet Artificial Intelligence - AI agent simulation environments (Bay Area / NYC / Remote) - Careers

2. Inertia - laser-driven fusion energy (Livermore) - Careers

3. Harper - commercial insurance brokerage (Bay Area) - Careers

4. Aria Networks, Inc. - AI-optimized networking switches (Bay Area / Kerala) - Careers

5. Lio - AI procurement automation (Munich / NYC) - Careers

6. Cursor - AI coding platform (NYC / Bay Area / Europe / APAC) - Careers

7. Skild AI - robotics foundation model (Bay Area / Pittsburgh / Bangalore) - Careers

8. Conveo - AI qualitative research platform (Antwerp / London / NYC / Bay Area) - Careers

9. Fundamental - predictive analytics for enterprise forecasting (Bay Area / Barcelona / Japan / Europe) - Careers

10. spektr - compliance automation platform (Copenhagen / London / Iași) - Careers

11. Monaco Inc - AI revenue platform (Bay Area) - Careers

Read more