People & Business Operations Lead

tl;dr we’re hiring a part recruiter / BizOps / brand strategist to own critical company-wide goals related to hiring and business operations. You will report directly to our co-founder/CEO, and have the opportunity to grow into senior people/business operations role over time. Estimate breakdown to start is 70% people ops and 30% business ops (will change over time).

Why are we hiring this role?

• We’re growing like crazy and need to release key bottlenecks to hit our aggressive growth targets over the next year+. Two key growth constraints are our ability to: (1) recruit excellent candidates to fill our open roles, and (2) handle our customer/revenue operations processes as we scale.
• You’ll work closely with our CEO, Tom, and our Ops Lead, Nicole.

Why join us?

• Early-stage, yet de-risked: we are a rare combo of being early stage (high upside) but lower risk (4XX+ paying customers, $Xm+ recurring revenue, profitable & cash-flow positive for over 2 yrs, hockey-stick growth). You get the benefits of an early stage startup without the risk you’ll have at almost any other startup. You’ll have a ton of impact, work directly with our customers, and get to work on interesting technical challenges you won’t see at bigger companies. Although we’re early stage, we’ve eliminated key strategic risks you’ll face at other startups. Like an unproven product, lack of market validation, lack of revenue, over-reliance on VC funding, co-founder disputes. We’re all young and hungry. Our team is fully in-person, tenacious, and committed - most of us moved to SF from far away (Canada, SoCal, Texas, Virginia) specifically to build Agave from the ground up.
• Team is technical, diverse, young: you'll work with a formidable founding team that's experienced, intense, and ambitious. We've worked together for 10 years, first at a startup that Amazon acquired, then at Amazon, and now at Agave. You'll learn a ton while having outsized ownership. You’ll have a front-row seat to the good and bad of building a company from the ground up. We’re also technical - all but 1 of our team (our AE!) have either majored in CS, worked as full-time devs, and/or worked in technical roles at startups and larger tech companies for 5+ years before moving into business roles at Agave.
• Huge opportunity without direct competition: startups are incredibly hard, so you want to join one that has a unique advantage. You don’t want to spend years of your life on a company in a saturated market with tons of competition. We’re seizing an opportunity that’s massive (Construction is the world’s third-largest industry) but also overlooked by most people in startup land. Most who can solve this problem aren’t aware it exists or are too distracted by tech trends (blockchain, metaverse, LLMs, etc.) to notice. These talented folks get coaxed into building products that seem cool early on, but don’t solve durable problems or aren’t differentiated enough against their many competitors to be sustainable (e.g. lots of AI products), so they end-up not going anywhere or stagnating without a clear plan to grow profitably. As a result, we have a multi-year head start against potential competitors, increasing our odds of success significantly. We’re also backed by world-class investors (Accel, YC) and Construction insiders (Procore and Autodesk executives, founders of the largest construction tech companies like PlanGrid).

Responsibilities

• Hiring (end to end): contribute & help scale company-wide hiring goals for technical and non-technical roles
• assist in planning, creating, and releasing job descriptions and announcements
• source candidates from schools, industries, and networks where skilled, ambitious people cluster
• develop creative hacks that short-circuit traditional methods and give us an edge over other companies
• partner with external recruiters to extend our network and add leverge to our hiring process
• screen candidates to determine their motivation, preferences, and fit for our open roles
• convert candidates efficiently, ensuring a thoughtful, personal touch at each step along the way
• close candidates we want to join us, working alongside the co-founders and hiring managers
• coordinate recruiting logistics, including on-site interviews
• optimize our hiring processes, tools, and systems to ensure efficiency
• Business operations: own core business operations outside of recruiting,
• ex: Marketing: help manage conference logistics, draft customer newsletters, own social media posts, update product assets (e.g. marketplace app listings)
• ex: