Founder's Associate

About Comena
Comena builds AI agents for industrial distributors and manufacturers to automate their order processing from e-mail inbox to ERP. At distributors across the US and Germany alone, there are 4 million sales and procurement people stuck in manual workflows between inbox and ERP. We want to automate this work and liberate these people to work on more meaningful things.

We’re part of the YC S25 batch - the most selective batch in YC history. We recently raised a seed round from top Silicon Valley investors and are serving customers across US and Germany.

About the role
We’re hiring a Founder’s Associate to work directly with the founders on the highest-priority projects in the company. This is an early-career, high-ownership role for someone who wants a front-row seat to building an AI startup from the inside.

This role has two flavors. Both are highly execution-heavy, customer-facing, and close to the founders.

Track 1: Sales & Growth
This track is for people who want to build deep go-to-market skills fast. Your initial focus will be outbound sales: cold calling, cold emailing, LinkedIn outreach, lead research, follow-up, and pipeline building. Over time, you’ll take on broader sales and marketing responsibilities.

What you’ll do

• Run high-volume outbound across phone, email, LinkedIn, and other channels
• Build and use AI systems across the entire GTM stack
• Test messaging, call scripts, and outbound sequences
• Book meetings and keep follow-up moving
• Maintain strong CRM hygiene and clear pipeline tracking
• Support trade shows, prospecting campaigns, and other growth initiatives
• Work directly with the founders on whatever helps generate pipeline and revenue

Track 2: Operations & Customer Success
This track is for people who want to learn how an early-stage company delivers for customers and scales operations. Your initial focus will be customer onboarding, customer support, and internal coordination. Over time, you’ll own more of the systems and workflows that make Comena run smoothly.

What you’ll do

• Project manage customer onboardings and implementation timelines
• Respond to customer questions and operational issues with speed and clarity
• Translate customer feedback, bugs, and requests into structured tickets for engineering
• Build internal tools, and AI-assisted workflows for operations
• Identify repetitive work in support and onboarding, then automate or streamline it
• Help build an operations function that scales through software, AI, and strong process design

What we’re looking for

• Strong communication skills
• High ownership and low ego
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and moving quickly
• Wanting to work very hard beyond traditional 9-5 hours
• Good judgment, attention to detail, and follow-through
• Excitement about startups, AI, and industrial businesses
• English and German required

You might be a fit if

• You want to work directly with founders and learn fast
• You like being trusted with real responsibility early
• You are excited by execution, not just strategy
• You want a role that can grow quickly with your performance

Why join

• Work directly with the founders every day
• Learn how an AI startup wins customers and scales operations
• Get broad exposure, rapid feedback, and increasing responsibility
• Help modernize how industrial companies operate