Founding AE - Hack

Brightidea New Job Board•San Francisco, CA

10h•$150,000 - $300,000

About The Position

Hackathon is a new, standalone startup spun out of Brightidea, a company that launched the first online innovation platform in 2000. Brightidea has over 300 global brands as customers and has generated over $15 billion in business impact. Hackathon aims to build and sell a dedicated hackathon and innovation-event product, operating with its own product, brand, and go-to-market strategy, but supported by Brightidea's infrastructure, customer relationships, and category credibility. Joining Hackathon means joining a startup team with a significant head start.

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 assess feasibility (e.g., distinguish between a quick script, API integration, or 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 of something you've vibe-coded.
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 prospect needs that the Hackathon product does not currently meet.
Use AI coding tools to rapidly prototype solutions for prospect needs.
Assess the feasibility of prospect requests and communicate limitations.
Provide structured input to Hackathon's product and engineering teams based on field learnings and prototypes.
Accurately forecast sales and manage the pipeline in the CRM.
Help define the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and messaging for Hackathon.
Document successful sales strategies to create a repeatable process for future AEs.
Contribute to the selection and implementation of CRM, sales engagement, and AI tooling.
Collaborate with Hackathon's product and marketing teams, and Brightidea's broader teams, on positioning, packaging, and pricing.
Provide feedback on pricing and packaging based on real objections and win/loss patterns.
Assist in recruiting future sales hires by sourcing, screening, and reference-checking candidates.