Rainmaking Apprentice

Liminal; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 30,000 - 42,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stipend

Job summary

Liminal in Boston is seeking a Rainmaking Apprentice to open doors founders can’t reach alone and to close deals founders don’t have time to chase. You’ll build relationships that turn potential into contracts, work across ventures, and represent the firm in important rooms where reputations are made.

You’ll source repeat founders, courtiers partners, and structure early collaborations while cultivating downstream investors, all in a paid twelve-month apprenticeship embedded with seasoned

Qualifications

• Ability to read a room and sense unspoken commitments.
• Proven persistence to nurture long-term relationships over months.
• Understanding of where value is created and captured in deals.
• Clear, persuasive writing and speaking tailored to different audiences.
• Willingness to challenge assumptions and push for open debate.

Responsibilities

• Originate founder and deal opportunities, opening pilots, design partners, and channel deals.
• Build and manage a broad network of investors, operators, corporates, and experts.
• Structure early partnerships so they ship value and are durable.
• Cultivate downstream investors and lead relationship-building ahead of rounds.
• Represent the firm in conferences, dinners, and key forums with credibility.

Skills

People intuition

Closing discipline

Commercial instinct

Sharp communication

Contrarian thinking

Job description

Rainmaking Apprentice

Rainmaking Apprentice

The Short Version

You open doors founders can't open alone, and you close deals founders don't have time to chase. Pilots, partnerships, distribution, downstream capital. The relationships that turn a promising company into an inevitable one.

What Liminal Is

A Founders' Studio. We co-build with repeat founders, many of them unicorn founders, providing build expertise, capital, and unfair access from founding to Series B. We call ourselves a Founders' Studio because "venture studio" undersells what we do and oversells what most of them deliver.

What This Role Actually Is

Rainmaking is the oldest profession in business, give or take. It's the art of getting the right people in a room and the right ink on a page. At Liminal, it means our founders spend their hours building product while you spend yours building the relationships that make the product matter: the first design partner, the pilot that becomes a contract, the corporate that becomes a channel, the investor who leads the next round before the deck is finished.

You'll work across our ventures and on behalf of Liminal itself: sourcing founders worth backing, courting partners worth keeping, and representing the firm in rooms where reputations are made or quietly lost.

The Work

• Founder and Deal origination. Bring Liminal the repeat founders and venture concepts worth our conviction and capital. Find and open the commercial relationships a venture needs to survive contact with the market: pilot customers, design partners, distribution, channel deals. You turn a founder's "we should really talk to them" into a meeting on the calendar.
• Network building and management. Build and tend a working network of investors, operators, corporates, regulators, and domain experts. A rolodex is a liability if you never call it. You call it.
• Partnership structuring. Shape the terms of early collaborations so they're worth signing and worth keeping. You know the difference between a logo on a slide and a partnership that ships value both ways.
• Capital relationships. Cultivate the downstream investors who lead our founders' next rounds. Warm the room long before the raise, so the term sheet feels overdue rather than premature.
• Representation. Carry the Liminal name into conferences, dinners, and the occasional awkward cocktail hour. Be the person others remember for substance, not volume.

You Should Have

• A feel for people. You read a room, a silence, and a non-answer. You know when someone is a yes who hasn't said it yet, and when a polite maybe is a no in a good suit.
• The patience of a closer. Big relationships compound over months, not minutes. You can hold a thread for a quarter without dropping it or smothering it. Persistence without neediness is the whole craft.
• Commercial instinct. You understand where value is created and captured, who pays for what and why. You can scope a deal that serves both sides, because the lopsided ones don't last and don't refer.
• Sharp communication. A well-placed three-line email moves more than a forty-slide deck. You write to be answered. You can pitch the same venture to a regulator, a retailer, and a Series B fund in three registers, each calibrated to what they actually care about.
• A contrarian streak. Independent thinker. Arguments from first principles. Unafraid of unpopular positions, including telling a founder the partner they're chasing is the wrong one. You believe the best deals survive open debate. You know how to disagree and commit.

Unicorn Points If

You came to deal-making from somewhere unexpected. A BD lead who got tired of selling other people's mediocre products and wanted to open doors for things worth selling. A former banker or investor who realized the relationships were the asset, not the spreadsheets. A diplomat, fundraiser, or talent agent who already does this in a different costume. If you can tell us about a relationship you built that paid off years later, we'll notice.

This Is an Apprenticeship, Not an Internship

Twelve months. Meaningful stipend. Embedded alongside experienced builders and the founders they back, opening real doors for real ventures, not shadowing someone who does. If you've been looking for a place where your network is treated as the asset it is, and where you learn to make rain instead of waiting for weather, this is the door. It doesn't have a handle. You have to know it's there.