Special Projects: New Markets

Lightfield; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Meaningful early equity

Health insurance

3 weeks of PTO

11 paid company holidays

3 months of paid family leave

Wednesdays work from home

Regular team dinners and offsites

401k plan

Commuter and lunch stipend

Job summary

Lightfield is seeking a strategic market-entry lead to define and validate mid-market segments. You will own the thesis per segment, open doors, generate pipeline, and guide deals through close, reporting directly to the CEO. You’ll also implement the thesis into a scalable playbook and build a team around proven segments.

You should be adept at rapid hypothesis testing, written communication, and shaping GTM strategies for an AI-native CRM with rapid growth potential in the US market.

Qualifications

• Must be able to segment a market rigorously and write concise, falsifiable theses.
• Strong written communication and ability to craft credible market stories.

Responsibilities

• Map the mid-market segments by vertical, incumbent stack, and sales motion.
• Write a thesis per segment: buyers, displacement, timing; make it falsifiable.
• Lead the market-entry process end-to-end and drive deals through to close.

Skills

Market segmentation

Hypothesis-driven approach

Direct outreach execution

Written communication

Job description

About Lightfield

Lightfield is an AI-native CRM that assembles itself from your email, calendar, and meetings. It captures every interaction and turns it into organized context: accounts, tasks, follow-ups, and insights, so nothing slips through the cracks.

About Lightfield

Lightfield is an AI-native CRM that assembles itself from your email, calendar, and meetings. It captures every interaction and turns it into organized context: accounts, tasks, follow-ups, and insights, so nothing slips through the cracks.

We’re rethinking CRM from first principles. Instead of forcing teams to maintain rigid systems, Lightfield learns from how companies actually work, adapting, automating, and surfacing the insight that drives growth. We’re building the CRM platform we always wished existed: fast, intelligent, and genuinely helpful.

The market agrees. Over 5,000 companies have used Lightfield since we launched in November, making us the fastest‑adopted product in our category. We are backed by Greylock, Lightspeed, and Coatue, and our founders previously built Tome, a generative AI presentation product used by over 25 million people. Before Lightfield, our team worked on Llama, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Pinterest, Google, and Salesforce.

The role

Most strategy work ends at the recommendation. Someone else decides whether it was right, usually years later, usually without telling you.

This role compresses that loop to a quarter. You’ll pick a segment of the mid‑market, write down why Lightfield should win there, and then find out whether you were right the only way that produces a real answer: by getting companies in that segment to buy.

Here’s the underlying problem. Every generation of CRM invented its own way into the market. Siebel had enterprise sales, Salesforce had the cloud, HubSpot had inbound. AI‑native CRM will have its own route, and nobody has mapped it yet. The mid‑market is where that map gets drawn, and it isn’t one market. It’s fifty, cut by vertical, by incumbent stack, by how each company sells and who signs. Each segment has a different buyer, a different displacement story, and a different reason to move now.

You will carve it up and run market entries, end to end. Form a thesis about a segment. Open the doors yourself. Run the deals through to close. Own the implementation so the thesis survives contact with reality. When a segment works, codify it into a playbook, hire account executives to run it at scale, and move to the next one. When it doesn’t, kill it in writing, with evidence, and redeploy.

You’ll report directly to the CEO and work out of the same deals. You’ll be measured on logos: named accounts closed in new segments, because early on the question is whether a segment works, not how big the first checks are.

We want to be precise about the shape of this, because the failure mode is obvious from both sides. This is not a strategy seat producing analysis for other people to act on, and it is not an account executive role with a new title. It’s the job of proving markets exist, where the proof is commercial. You will write the segmentation memo and you will also send the first hundred emails into the segment. Both halves are the job. Neither is beneath it.

The arc of the role is the arc of a business: thesis, proof, playbook, team. The person who does this well two or three times hasn’t done a rotation in sales. They’ve built our mid‑market business from a blank page, and the natural next step is to run it.

What you’ll do

• Map the mid‑market: segment it by vertical, incumbent stack, and how each company sells, and make the case for where we enter first
• Write one thesis per segment: who buys, what we displace, why now, what a won deal looks like. One page, falsifiable
• Test it in market: build the target list, generate your own pipeline, and run deals through to close, with the CEO alongside you
• Own implementation for what you sell, because a thesis that dies in onboarding was never true
• Codify what works into a playbook a new account executive could run without you in the room
• Kill what doesn't, fast, in writing, with evidence rather than vibes
• Hire and ramp the team that scales what you proved

Who you are

• 2 to 5 years at a top investment bank, consulting firm, or investment firm, or an MBA from a top program on top of that record. You’ve owned work that real money moved on
• You’ve noticed that the operators you advise or finance are playing a more interesting game than you are, and you want in at the point of maximum leverage
• You understand that in this job, selling is the research method. You want to do it yourself, not delegate it, and you can explain why
• You think in hypotheses and you write clearly. Your one‑pagers get read
• You’re structured enough to segment a market rigorously and scrappy enough to cold‑email your way into it
• You’re comfortable when there’s no playbook, because writing the playbook is the job
• You’d rather be judged by the market than by a review committee
• Competitive drive that shows up somewhere verifiable

Nice to have

• You’ve sold something before: a company, a fundraise, a side business, anything where a stranger said yes to you
• Covered software or worked with SaaS companies as a banker, consultant, or investor
• Time at an early‑stage startup, or a founder attempt of your own
• Enough familiarity with CRM and GTM tooling to have an opinion in front of a VP of Sales

Benefits & Perks

• Competitive salary
• Meaningful early equity
• Health insurance (medical, dental, vision)
• 3 weeks of PTO
• 11 paid company holidays + we enjoy a winter holiday break
• 3 months of paid family leave
• Wednesdays work from home
• Regular team dinners, events, offsites, and retreats
• 401k plan
• Other perks include: commuter and lunch stipend

Compensation Range: $170K - $200K