Founding Business Development Representative

First Round Capital • San Francisco, CA

2d • $95,000 - $120,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

First Round is a venture capital firm that works with founders exclusively at the earliest stages of company building. This role is First Round's embedded, interim "founding GTM" for our portfolio. You'll work across 3–5 portfolio companies at a time, dropping into each one as if you were their first outbound hire — clarify ICP, figure out the right outbound strategy, build a target list, run and iterate on campaigns to book meetings for the founder to take from there. This role is one of the best apprenticeships for future founders or Sales Leaders, offering the chance to work with top founders, learn from experienced GTM leaders, and potentially secure founding GTM roles at First Round companies after 18 months.

Requirements

• 1–3 years in a high-performance environment successfully doing outbound/BDR motions at a startup, ideally as a founding or early BDR who built the pipeline engine.
• Comfortable with ambiguity, continuous iteration and imperfection.
• Ability to combine the right channel, prospect, messaging hook to get the conversion.
• Exceptional urgency and extreme autonomy; ability to go from defining ICP to campaign launch in a few hours without hand-holding.
• Deep fluency in AI-native prospecting (signal/intent-based targeting, enrichment waterfalls, using LLMs for research).
• Fluency in modern outreach tools and approaches including Claude, Clay, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Instantly/Lemlist/Apollo, Ploy.ai, HubSpot/Salesforce or similar CRM.
• Very strong written communication skills, comfortable being the outbound voice for several different companies and ICPs in the same week.
• A sharp editorial eye for AI output; ability to spot and edit out "AI slop" instantly.
• Extreme organization; able to run 3–5 concurrent outbound engagements without dropping details.
• Genuine excitement to work on the front lines of early-stage startups.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and fast context-switching between very different products, ICPs, and founders week to week.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the embedded founding BDR for 3–5 portfolio companies simultaneously, each at a different stage of building out their own outbound motion.
• For each company, define the ICP with the founder, build and continuously refine and enrich target account/contact lists and launch multi-channel outbound (email, LinkedIn, phone) under that company's brand and voice.
• Write and iterate outbound messaging and sequences per company, treating messaging as a live experiment to test hooks, subject lines, and CTAs.
• Keep CRM/tracker hygiene tight across every engagement and report weekly meeting volume, pipeline, and conversion against goals for each company.
• Manage the split across 3–5 concurrent engagements, triaging hours toward whichever company's pipeline needs it most.
• Hand off cleanly by transferring the playbook, lists, and messaging that worked when a company hires its own BDR or AE, then roll onto the next portfolio company.

Benefits

• Opportunity to work with top founders in SF and NYC.
• Learn from VP of GTM/Founder Success with 20+ years of tech sales leadership experience.
• First dips on founding GTM roles at First Round companies after 18 months in the role.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed