Founding Account Executive

superset} Hive Community•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Powered by an always-on data fabric and intelligent orchestration of AI agents, Kana enables brands and media companies to learn, predict, and optimize every step of the customer journey for faster growth and smarter business outcomes. Our founding team is a group of marketing industry veterans, with decades of experience and success at every stage of growth - including successful exits in excess of >$1.4B to companies such as Microsoft and Salesforce. We are early, opinionated, and moving fast. It’s early-stage: We are solving problems that don’t yet have well-defined playbooks. Our earliest GTM hires are not just quota achievers; they are builders, storytellers, and partners in defining how the company grows. As a Founding Account Executive, you are not joining a sales team, you are helping create it. We will be prioritizing candidates based in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York. Why Join Kana This role is designed for sellers who want disproportionate impact and long-term ownership. We are a well-funded AI-native company, most recently Kana closed on a $15M seed round led by Mayfield, bringing total seed capital to $18M. You will sell a product built for agentic workflows, not retrofitted AI features The market is being shaped and you will have the opportunity to shape it, not just sell a modified narrative in an attempt to adapt You’ll have direct access to founders and your learnings directly shape product, pricing, and GTM motion We are confident in offering a meaningful upside on equity and career trajectory aligned with company growth

Requirements

You are entrepreneurial and creative and do not need rigid processes in order to drive success. Ability to move fast without perfect information.
You relish early-stage invention and find motivation in a certain level of ambiguity, solutioneering in partnership with a prospect, and close collaboration with our product/eng team.
You are not looking for a safe role. You’re looking for a meaningful, high impact role where you can help build a company.
5–10+ years of SaaS sales experience, with direct experience selling to marketing teams who are often quite technical.
Comfortable selling a product that isn’t fully defined yet and excited to co-create with customers.
Deep curiosity and excitement around AI-native products, agentic workflows, and modern marketing solutions.
Consultative mindset with an ability to create projects for prospects and clients where they don’t yet exist.

Nice To Haves

Prior experience at an early-stage startup (pre-seed / seed) is a plus.

Responsibilities

High Agency - Operate with a high level of agency and entrepreneurialism in a fast-moving, high-ambiguity environment. If you’re looking for a playbook and a deck to recite on the next sales call, this is not for you. You will help us write the sales playbook, drawing on strategic insights culled from your interactions with customers, prospects, and competitors as well as regular collaboration with our product and engineering teams.
Ownership - own the full sales cycle from discovery to close, including early outbound, founder-led intros, and network-driven deals. Be accountable not just for revenue, but for quality signals like why customers buy, hesitate, or churn.
Collaboration - partner directly with the founding team to define ICP’s, messaging, pricing, and sales motion through real world experimentation; influence demand generation, outbound strategy, and inbound conversion based on what you see in the field.
Creativity - sell an evolving, AI-native product by leaning heavily into discovery, problem-solving, and creative deal structuring; capture, synthesize and communicate customer feedback to directly influence product roadmap and agent development.