Founding GTM Associate

Lightspeed AI, Inc.; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Lightspeed AI, Inc. in Seattle seeks a founder-level go-to-market partner to join the founders on early conversations with customers. You will shape who we engage, what we say, and what we build next, with real ownership from day one.

You will craft opening lines, demo narratives, and follow the path from first call to signed deals, learning fast what moves customers to buy.

Qualifications

• Ability to guide first conversations and understand customer value.
• Strong written and verbal communication, with clear summaries.
• Interest in AI products, agents, evals and reinforcement learning.

Responsibilities

• Join founders on design partner and prospect calls from week one.
• Create opening lines and demos; evolve pitch based on customer feedback.
• Stay with a prospect from first call to signature, handling follow-ups and objections.
• Iterate messaging and share insights to inform product direction.

Skills

Curious about business models

Excellent communicator

Concise writer

Technical curiosity

Persistence

Honest reporter

Job description

Why This Role is Different

An early-stage company learns what it is selling one conversation at a time, and right now every one of those conversations runs through a founder. Each first call, each follow-up, each design partner check-in teaches us something about who feels this problem and what they will pay to solve it, and there are far more of those conversations to be had than three founders can have. Your mandate is to multiply them, and to make sure what we learn in each one changes what we say in the next.

This is not a role where you watch the founders sell, and it is not a role where you are sent off to sell alone. It is a founding seat with real ownership: you will start beside the founders in front of customers, take over whole stretches of the go-to-market as you earn them, and help decide who we talk to, what we say, and what we build next because of what we heard. You will not simply fill the pipeline; you will help decide what it is a pipeline for.

You will learn the craft from people who have done it. The founders have taken AI platforms from their first dollar to hundreds of millions in business, and our CEO has personally led over one hundred deals; you will be in the room for the next ones. Expect direct feedback, every day, in both directions.

The scope is designed to expand. The calls you sit in on during your first month are the calls you will run by the end of your first year, and because nobody has sold this before, the version of this role that exists in two years is largely yours to invent.

What You'll Own

First conversations. You will find the teams shipping AI who can't yet connect it to revenue, retention or cost, and get them talking to us by whatever route works. From week one you will join the founders on design partner and prospect calls; as you build context, you will run more of them yourself, until a founder joins your calls rather than the other way round.

The story. You will write the first versions of how we explain ourselves: the opening line, the demo narrative, the follow-up that gets a reply. Expect most first drafts to be wrong. Your job is to find out why from a customer, quickly, and come back with a better one.

The path to a signed customer. You will stay with a prospect from first call to signature: the follow-ups, the objections, the pilot, the paperwork. A founder is beside you until you don't need one, and along the way you will learn, deal by deal, what actually moves a design partner to pay.

The loop back. This is the part of the role that grows the fastest. What you hear in the room becomes what should change: the pitch, the audience, sometimes the product, and you will be expected to argue for it. It also becomes the raw material for our GTM AI Engineer: the ICP, the messaging and the buying signals their systems run on. And distinctly for this company: how you get the work done is yours to decide. We expect one person to cover ground that used to take a team.

How We'll Know It's Working

We run this role on outcomes, not activity. In your first few quarters, success looks like: you run 90% of our first conversations without a founder in the room, and the pitch we use at the end of the year is one you wrote, tested and rewrote.

What we're looking for

We would like to work with you if you are:

• Curious about how businesses work: You can't leave a conversation without understanding how the other person's company makes money and what they are measured on.
• At ease with strangers: Cold outreach, first calls, rooms where you are the least senior person; none of it slows you down.
• A clear, concise writer: You can explain a technical product in three sentences to someone who has thirty seconds.
• Technically hungry: You don't need to be an engineer, but you should want to understand agents, evals and reinforcement learning well enough to explain them to one.
• Faster to send than to polish: You would rather get a real answer from a real customer today than a better draft next week.
• An honest reporter: You tell us what the customer actually said, especially when it isn't what we hoped.
• Persistent without being a pest: You can follow up a fifth time and still be someone they want to hear from.

Strong Pluses

• Time at a company small enough that your job title didn't cover what you did.
• You find a more creative way to get a conversation with us than directly applying below.
• Time close to an AI product: building it, buying it, or supporting the people who use it.