Founding AE - Hack

Brightidea New • San Francisco, CA

12d

About The Position

Hackathon is a new, standalone startup spun out of Brightidea, a company with 26 years of experience in innovation management. Hackathon is focused on building and selling a dedicated hackathon and innovation-event product. It operates with its own product, brand, and go-to-market strategy, but benefits from Brightidea's backing, customer relationships, and category credibility. Joining Hackathon now means joining a startup team with a running start, not starting from scratch. The role of Founding Account Executive is a full-cycle sales position focused exclusively on the Hackathon product. This role involves generating pipeline through outbound prospecting, managing the sales process from start to finish, and closing deals. A key differentiator of this role is the ability to address prospect needs by using AI tools to prototype missing capabilities in real-time, rather than simply logging feature requests. The Founding AE will also play a crucial role in establishing the go-to-market playbook, processes, and tooling for Hackathon.

Requirements

• 5+ years of full-cycle B2B SaaS sales experience.
• Track record of self-sourced pipeline and closed-won revenue.
• Prior experience as an early or founding sales hire, or strong interest in building process from scratch.
• Genuine hands-on comfort with modern AI coding tools (e.g., Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT).
• Sufficient technical fluency to reason about feasibility (e.g., distinguishing between a quick script, an API integration, and a significant engineering lift).
• Strong outbound sales instincts.
• Comfortable engaging with both technical and executive buyers.
• Ability to translate business pain into a sales narrative and a technical prototype.
• Curious, low-ego, and energized by ambiguity.
• Comfortable being the sole (initial) go-to-market hire on a single-product startup team.

Nice To Haves

• Experience selling into innovation, HR, people ops, event, or L&D personas.
• Prior experience at an early-stage or lean-team SaaS startup where AEs wear multiple hats.
• Experience selling event, community, or engagement-platform products.
• A portfolio, GitHub, or demo showcasing 'vibe-coded' work.
• Experience helping build or formalize a sales process, playbook, or tooling stack from the ground up, ideally at a company spun out of or backed by a larger parent.

Responsibilities

• Own full-cycle sales for Hackathon, including sourcing, qualifying, running discovery and demos, negotiating, and closing new business.
• Build and execute an outbound prospecting motion (email, LinkedIn, calling) to fill the Hackathon pipeline.
• Identify where the Hackathon product doesn't fully meet a prospect's event, workflow, or requirement during discovery and demo calls.
• Use AI coding tools to rapidly prototype solutions (scripts, lightweight integrations, custom automations, feature mockups) to address prospect needs.
• Quickly and technically assess when a prospect's need cannot be reasonably solved for, to avoid overpromising.
• Translate field learnings and prototypes into structured input for Hackathon's product and engineering teams.
• Accurately forecast and manage the pipeline with discipline in the CRM.
• Help define the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and messaging for Hackathon.
• Document successful sales strategies and processes to create a repeatable playbook for future Hackathon AEs.
• Provide input on and help implement the CRM, sales engagement, and AI tooling for Hackathon's go-to-market motion.
• Partner with Hackathon's product and marketing functions, as well as Brightidea's broader teams, to refine positioning, packaging, and pricing.
• Bring real objections and win/loss patterns back to leadership to inform Hackathon's product packaging and pricing.
• Potentially assist in sourcing, screening, or reference-checking future sales hires.

Benefits

• Startup-level ownership and speed.
• Backed by Brightidea's 26 years of category credibility, existing customer relationships, and operating support.
• Opportunity to build a go-to-market motion from scratch.
• Opportunity to address and solve deals stalled by product gaps.
• Compensation: $150,000 - $300,000 OTE depending on size of quota.

What This Job Offers

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