Founding GM
Own a vertical end-to-end — product strategy, GTM, customer delivery, and outcomes
About Pavo
Pavo is building Enterprise Superintelligence: compounding systems that take ownership of business outcomes and work with humans to deliver them.
We believe that while foundation models are necessary, they are not sufficient. The hard problem is systems intelligence: end-to-end architectures that understand a company's code, data, and decisions, and improve themselves through experience.
We are assembling a small, senior team of researchers and engineers obsessed with systems-first intelligence. Our current team consists of PhDs and ML engineers from top applied ML and coding agent companies, with a heritage of shipping systems at Spotify, ShareChat, and Sourcegraph scale.
We go to market through deep vertical wedges: personalization & recommendations, marketing & growth, fintech, and more. Each vertical is a different world — different workflows, different metrics, different buyer psychology, different trust thresholds. That's why we need you.
The Opportunity
Most startups hire GMs after product-market fit. We're hiring them to find it.
As a Founding GM, you are the CEO of your vertical. You define how Pavo shows up for a specific segment — what the product does, how we position it, who we sell to, and what “winning” looks like. You're the person who can sit in a room with a Head of Recommendations or a VP of Growth Marketing and speak their language, feel their pain, and show them — concretely — how Pavo changes their world.
Each vertical is a different PMF search, and we believe the fastest path is to put a domain-obsessed owner in the seat early — someone who can compress the cycle from “we think this segment matters” to “we have paying customers and a repeatable motion.”
This is not a strategy role. This is an ownership role. There is no team to inherit, no playbook to follow, no product to wait for. You build all of it.
What You'll Do
- →Define the Product Wedge: What does Pavo need to do, specifically, to be indispensable for teams in your vertical? Identify the first workflow to automate, the proof point that moves a metric in 30 days, and the roadmap that turns a wedge into a platform.
- →Build the GTM Motion: Identify ICP, build pipeline, run the sales cycle, close deals. At pre-seed, this means you're writing the first outbound email, building the first deck, and sitting in every demo.
- →Drive Delivery: Work directly with our engineering and applied science teams to ensure what we ship actually works in production for your customers. You're in the Slack channel. You're reviewing the A/B test results. You're in the customer's war room when things break.
- →Own the Feedback Loop: Every customer conversation, every failed experiment, every surprising win — you channel it back into product and positioning. Your vertical gets smarter every week.
- →Set the Strategy: Where does this vertical go in 12 months? What's the expansion path? Which adjacent problems do we solve next? You build the roadmap and make the case for resources.
What We Are Looking For
We are looking for domain-obsessed operators who have both technical depth and commercial instincts.
Core Qualifications
- →Domain Depth: 5+ years working in or selling to teams in one of our target verticals — personalization & recommendations, marketing & growth, or fintech. You understand the workflows, the metrics that matter, the tools they use, and the problems that keep leaders up at night.
- →Technical Fluency: You can hold a conversation with an ML engineer about model architectures and a commercial conversation with a VP about ROI — in the same meeting. You don't need to write production code, but you need to understand systems well enough to shape product decisions.
- →Shipped & Moved Metrics: You've built products or systems that moved real business outcomes — not just shipped features, but moved numbers. You understand the difference between output and impact.
- →Entrepreneurial Operating Mode: You've done something 0→1 before — started a company, led a new product from scratch, run a P&L, or operated in an environment where nobody told you what to do next. You're comfortable being the only person on your “team” for the first few months.
- →Commercial Instincts: You know how to find prospects, run a sales cycle, and close. Not because you're a “salesperson,” but because you understand the problem so deeply that selling feels like helping.
You Might Be
- →A senior IC or staff engineer at a company in the vertical who's done with pure IC work and wants to build a business around their domain expertise — e.g., a Staff ML Engineer who built recommendation systems at scale and now wants to own the whole picture.
- →An ex-founder or early employee of a company in an adjacent space who has both technical depth and commercial instincts, and is looking for a high-ownership role without the fundraising overhead.
- →A forward-deployed or solutions engineer at a vertical AI company who's been doing this informally — shaping product, closing deals, driving delivery — and wants the title and equity to match the scope.
- →A product leader or GM at a larger company who's tired of consensus-driven roadmaps and wants to own a segment from zero, with the autonomy and upside of a founding role.
What You Won't Be Doing
- →Managing a team — not yet. You're building toward that by proving the vertical and earning the right to hire.
- →Following a playbook — there is no playbook. You're writing it.
- →Waiting for product to be “ready” — you ship with what exists and shape what comes next.
- →Building beautiful decks — we need someone who can sit in a technical design review with a customer's ML team, not just present to their leadership.
Why Join Us
- →Founding Equity: Meaningful ownership in a company tackling the next layer of the AI stack. This is a founding role with compensation to match — the profile we're looking for is rare, and we know it.
- →Build from Zero: You're not inheriting a motion — you're creating one. The right person sees “GM at pre-seed” and thinks: “I get to build this from nothing.”
- →World-Class Team: Collaborate with a dense talent cluster of researchers and engineers who have shipped products serving hundreds of millions of users. You bring the domain; they bring the platform.
Pavo is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.