Senior Analyst / Founder Coach

Young Founders School; New York (NY); On-site; USD 360,000 - 420,000; Full time

Job summary

Founders School is seeking a Senior Analyst / Founder Coach to partner with Nat Eliason and Cameron Sorsby, coaching a portfolio of high-potential student founders and helping shape the fund as it grows.

You will design coaching doctrines, run 1:1 coaching, lead workshops, and push teenagers toward $1M+ revenue while maintaining warmth and tough feedback.

Qualifications

• Exceptional people skills with teens
• Experience coaching early-stage founders is a plus
• Ability to design coaching doctrine and scale processes

Responsibilities

• Coach a portfolio of up to ~20 student founders with regular 1:1s and async feedback
• Help founders choose big bets on market, edge, and speed to revenue
• Coach the hard moves: positioning, pricing, GTM, first hires, partnerships
• Monitor portfolio health and flag breakthroughs or bottlenecks early
• Contribute to investment-memo style due diligence and fund structure discussions
• Coordinate with mentors and run workshops and office hours
• Show up in person for campus events, Build Weekends, and immersions
• Build scalable coaching doctrine that can reach 10,000 students and beyond
• Use AI daily for prep, notes, portfolio tracking, and market research

Job description

Founders School is the high school where every student aims to build a million-dollar company before graduation. We pair Alpha's elite academics with real companies, world-class mentors, and a culture built for ambitious teenagers. Our north star is bigger than one campus: develop 1 million+ youth entrepreneurs across all Founders School initiatives.

We're building a soon-to-be-announced fund inside the Alpha and Founders ecosystem — capital and coaching behind the highest-potential companies our students are already shipping. We're hiring the fund's first Senior Analyst / Founder Coach.

This is not a coverage seat. Above all, you are a great business coach to teens — high bar, real warmth, zero condescension. You can push a 14-year-old running real revenue and leave them more capable, not smaller. Exceptional people skills are a hard must: reading the room, earning trust fast, giving hard feedback that sticks, and holding a relationship through the messy middle.

You work with the most ambitious teen entrepreneurs at Founders School: founders already building high-potential companies who need serious support now. Year-one bar: coach multiple student founders to $1M+ net profit, and push companies with trajectories well beyond the school's baseline — toward $1M–$1B outcomes.

If you've spent the last few years at a top firm or accelerator seeing hundreds of early-stage companies, and you know the patterns cold, this is where that judgment compounds — on teenage founders, with Nat Eliason and Cameron Sorsby as partners, not distant GPs.

The Role

You own coaching for a curated portfolio of the highest-potential Founders School companies. Triage is intentional: you do not coach the whole school. Guides and the core program own everyone else. You take founders already shipping who are ready for operator-coach intensity.

The job is business coaching for teenagers, not adult founder advising with soft edges. Strategy and people skills travel together: you help each founder decide what to work on next, then coach positioning, pricing, go-to-market, first hires, partnerships, and when to kill something they love — in a way a teen founder can actually hear and run with. Curriculum and tools carry what they can. You own the judgment calls they can't — the ones that turn a strong teen company into a $1M+ business.

You also help design the coaching doctrine others will run as we scale — toward 10,000 Founders School students in 10 years and 1 million+ youth entrepreneurs through additional offerings. This seat is portfolio coaching plus playbook ownership, not just a personal caseload.

You report to Nat and Cameron. You're in the room as the fund takes shape: what it backs, how it invests, and what a portfolio company needs from us.

What you will be doing

• Coaching a small portfolio of highest-potential student founders (up to ~20 in year one) with regular 1:1s and fast async feedback — operator intensity, not volume coverage

• Helping founders choose bets that can get big: market, edge, speed to revenue, and whether this can become a $1M–$1B company

• Coaching the hard moves: positioning, pricing, go-to-market, first hires, partnerships, and clear nos

• Keeping a live read on every company in the portfolio: stage, revenue, bottleneck, next milestone; flag breakouts and stuck founders early

• Pressure-testing companies the fund may back, with investment-memo rigor

• Partnering with Nat and Cameron on fund structure and how a fund built around student companies should work — with the Alpha and Founders ecosystem behind it (EIRs, mentors, tooling, campus)

• Pulling mentors into specific student companies through workshops and office hours, not firesides

• Showing up in person: campus, Founders / Build Weekends, and elite immersions

• Building the coaching doctrine: what works, what doesn't, and what the next analyst or guide should run as we scale

• Using AI daily for prep, notes, portfolio tracking, and market research

What you will NOT be doing

• Running the fund. Strategy, raising, and final investment calls sit with Nat and Cameron. You're the first analyst, not the GP.

• Coaching the whole school. Triage is real.

• Installing your own playbook over ours. You coach inside the system and improve the doctrine.

• Life coaching dressed up as strategy. You're here to make the business better.

• Building the companies for them. Students are the founders.

• Remote-only desk work. Face time with founders is part of the job.

What this looks like in practice

Choosing the next bet. A founder has three expansion ideas and a real pipeline. You pressure-test each against her edge and the size of the opportunity. She leaves with one bet, a 30-day test, and the kill criteria.

Repricing a bigger deal. A founder gets inbound from a multi-location buyer and wants to quote like a solo practice. You rework the structure, role-play the call, and she runs it that week.

Coaching the gap. Demand is up, quality is slipping, hours are broken. Tools flag the bottleneck; you make the hire / raise prices / fire clients call with him, then feed the pattern into the doctrine.

Friday portfolio review. You walk Nat and Cameron through the portfolio in 15 minutes, flag the breakouts, and make the case for where early checks should go.

What success looks like

1. $1M+ outcomes. Multiple portfolio founders hit $1M+ net profit in year one; some are clearly on larger trajectories.

2. Right bets, fast. Every founder in the portfolio is on an opportunity that can get big.

3. Doctrine that scales. What you learn becomes the playbook for 10,000 students and a much larger youth-entrepreneur machine — not locked in your head.

Why this seat

You help own the coaching doctrine for teenage companies aiming at $1M–$1B, at the start of a 10,000-student Founders School and a path to 1 million+ youth entrepreneurs. You get Alpha and Founders ecosystem access — EIRs, mentors, tooling, weekends, immersions — that a normal analyst seat does not. And you help build a world-class fund around founders who need support today, without waiting on a branded announcement to start.

Compensation

$400,000 USD/year. Fund participation is to be determined as we develop the fund; we cover structure and economics in candidate conversations, not on this page. Relocation support is available for non-local candidates. A larger role in the fund is earned by your calls on the portfolio.

What this becomes

At 6 months: You know every company in the portfolio cold. Multiple founders are on clear $1M paths. Nat and Cameron trust your read on who's breaking out. The coaching doctrine has a real first draft.

At 12 months: Multiple student entrepreneurs have hit or clearly cleared $1M+ net profit. Your read is part of every investment conversation. The doctrine is sharp enough to scale. The fund is live, and this seat has grown with it.

At scale: Founders School at 10,000 students. Additional offerings reaching 1 million+ youth entrepreneurs. The coaching and capital machine you helped build is how the highest-potential founders go from ambitious teenager to category-defining company.

Who we're looking for