Founder's Associate

Overview

At Upsolve AI, we serve as the catalyst and facilitator for high-growth technology companies and startups. Our mission is to ensure that a business's aspirations are never hindered by their analytics capabilities. We empower them to swiftly deliver customer-facing analytics and reporting, enabling them to focus on their core offerings and the essentials of their business. With our AI technology, we provide instant answers to data queries for our customers' users. We’re the defacto conduit between data and decisions.

As a Y Combinator-backed (W24) early-stage tech startup, Upsolve AI boasts support from unicorn founders such as the co-founder of Airtable and Handshake, alongside leading venture investors like General Catalyst, Samsung Next Ventures, Soma Capital, and others.

We are a lean, scrappy and committed small team with a flat structure and collaborative culture. Our team brings together a wealth of experience from top-tier tech companies including Palantir, Hubspot, Codat and Peckwater, and universities including Harvard, Brown, and Cambridge. With team members from three different continents, we embrace multiculturalism and diversity.

Having successfully launched our beta version to our initial customer base, we're now in the process of expanding our product to meet the needs of our growing customer list. Come join us as we continue to push the boundaries and expand our product offerings and customer base at a rapid pace.

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The Founders

Ka Ling Wu, Co-founder & CEO of Upsolve AI, led product solution development at nPlan, a Series A AI & Construction tech startup, before founding Upsolve. Her tenure at nPlan focused on client expansion. Prior to that, she spent four years at Palantir where she managed client engagements, stakeholder relationships, and spearheaded the creation of Palantir's HyperAuto product as well as the opening of Palantir’s Korea market. Outside of Upsolve, Ka Ling plays rugby and does Crossfit. As a fun fact, she represented the Swiss rugby team. She claims to speak 6 languages, but none perfectly.

Serguei Balanovich, Co-founder & CTO of Upsolve AI, spent seven years at Palantir before co-founding Upsolve. Serguei pioneered early Supply Chain and Manufacturing commercial work and later productized this work into Palantir HyperAuto. Besides software, Serguei enjoys puzzles, board games, and teaching.

Together, we have over 15 years of experience in data engineering and analytics. We took Palantir's Hyperauto from inception to launch, scaled the product to serve more than 50 enterprise customers in less than 2.5 years, and generated eight figures in revenue. We started building Upsolve AI in October 2023 and have recently graduated from Y Combinator W24.

The Opportunity

As a Founder’s Associate at Upsolve AI, you'll work alongside our CEO and co-founder Ka Ling. What you will specifically work on will change week-to-week, and that’s where the fun comes in. Some current or recent projects that a Founder’s Associate could work on include:

• Sales
  • Define and execute go-to-market strategy for a new market or customer segment.
  • Handle outbound sales, including prospecting, contacting potential clients, and moving them through the sales funnel.
  • Create dedicated product demo sales deck to aid in sales conversation and conversion
• Marketing
  • Identify and showcase successful customer use cases on social media.
  • Write and send out updates and information about Upsolve AI’s products.
  • Work with our SEO consultant to improve our website and app, and lead the effort in creating blog posts to boost our SEO.
• Product & Customer Success
  • Analyze customer and prospect data to inform product decision making
  • Engage with customers and users to ensure we are delivering the maximum values to them, and to communicate product updates and progress.
  • First-line of support to help users debug product issues
• Others
  • Organize full-team offsite and activities
  • Scale Ka Ling, including behind the scene operations and admin tasks like accounting, filing taxes, shopping for offices or supplies, and scheduling
  • Any other project that is impactful to Upsolve AI! The ethos is that no task is too small or too big!

What you bring to Upsolve AI:

• Have a technical background & can solve quantitative problems, for example (but not limited to) majored in a technical degree, worked as a software engineering or a data scientist, comfortable working with data & basic code. Upsolve AI is a very technical and data-centric company, so we believe that even our Founder’s Associates should be fluent in data!
• Comfortable in ambiguity. Work via first principle, break down ambiguous and complex problems into simple components & frameworks. Make decisions in a structured and evidence-based way.
• Communicate effectively with anyone, ranging from our own software engineers, Upsolve AI customers to an external investor — this not only includes verbal communication, but also written communication (e.g., strategy memos) and presentations (e.g., investor pitch deck)
• Analyze data (SQL, spreadsheets), maybe even automate tasks (e.g., python)
• A can-do attitude and have a mind of steel that plough through any obstacles and get things done. Possess a strong work ethic, execute tasks independently.
• Growth mindset. Learn even unfamiliar areas of the business rapidly
• Promote an outcome-focused, low-bureaucracy team culture

What we value and what’s in it for you?

• At Upsolve AI, we operate like a high-performance sports team. We embrace the reality that hard work is required for success. However, when we sprint together, not only do we win games, but we will also go far and win championships. And when we win, we all share in the prize.
• We despise bureaucracy and redundant processes. Everyone at Upsolve AI is a builder. We all roll up our sleeves, get our hands dirty, and make magic happen daily.
• We value ownership and trust. We believe the person closest to the problem should have the greatest authority to solve it. Consequently, when you identify a problem, you define the solution and build it. This approach allows you to work directly with the founders, and the only limit to your growth is the one you set.
• We believe each team member possesses a unique strength. We form our team based on how these unique spikes from each member compound. As a result, we strive to ensure you work on things that you not only excel at but also highly passionate about.

Additional:

• Salary range of £35k-45k / 0.05-0.1% equity (depending on experience and salary/equity package).
• Opportunity to work with an elite team of entrepreneurs and engineers.
• Take-what-you-need holiday policy. We know building a startup is hard work and can be intense. We want you to have the full agency to take breaks and rest when you need to, and to maintain a work-life balance.
• In-office gym subscription. Health is important and we want to make sure you can take great care of yourself. We cover your office gym subscription so you could exercise and keep your mind sharp.

Location: Our office is right next to Hoxton Station in London. We prefer to all work together face to face when possible because we believe that’s how magic happens. We do highly value flexibility and understand there are times in which working from home is preferred. With that said, we don’t mind if you work from home one or two days a week every now and then.

The interview process involves 5 steps:

1. Introduction (~20min) - For us to tell you more about Upsolve AI, the role and expectation. For you to tell us about yourself, and what makes you interested in this role. After this stage, both sides should have good understanding whether we should move forward with the process.

2. Background & Professional Experience Deep Dive (~30min) - We'll drill down on your background and past professional experiences, and the reasons these would make you a good fit for the role.

3. Interview Tasks (timeboxed ~3-4 hours) - You'll be tackling a few tasks/case challenges that imitate the actual tasks that you'll take on on the job.

4. Task discussion & feedback (~30 min) - We'll have a discussion on the output of your tasks and offer feedback. We'd like to use this to understand your thinking process behind your execution.

5. Cultural Fit Interview - We'll use this opportunity to understand your motivation and guiding principles. This allows us to gauge if you would be a good fit for our team. You'll also get to meet the rest of the team as well.

Note. At least one of the stages will be onsite.