Own Vocode's sales pipeline and drive enterprise deals to close. Take over active customer conversations, prioritize new markets, and develop sales collateral, terms, and onboarding. Work with ops leadership to build a high-performance sales function and sell to technical stakeholders using CRM and outreach tools.
Title: Founding Business Development Manager
Works with: COO
Comp: $120k–$190k OTE
Location: SF / Pacific Time
Type: Full time
Vocode is empowering developers to connect the world with magical conversational AI experiences. Today, our open source and hosted APIs are relied upon by thousands of engineers and organizations to create scalable, performant conversational AI agents operating on the front lines of myriad business cases: multilingual customer support, appointment scheduling, identity verification, lead qualification, and much more.
Since graduating from YC (W23), we’ve:
- Raised $3.25m from great investors: Base10, Google Ventures, Gradient, Accel, and angels like Amjad Masad (Replit), Avlok Kohli (AngelList), and Siqi Chen (Runway),
- Validated product/market fit, with dozens of enterprise customers scaling deployments in production and paying us real $,
- Begun to assemble an amazing team of highly technical folks to build a company together, with early hires from Apple, Brex, Stripe, and beyond.
At Vocode we are deliberate and intentional about the company we’re working to build. We want to foster an environment of autonomy, kindness, curiosity, and achievement, but we’re not expecting to commission a fluorescent “BE CURIOUS” sign for the wall of our office any time soon. Here are some things which we know really matter to us:
- We try to write things down We find that the act of writing something down – the scope of a project, a problem we’re facing, an update for the whole company – helps us to be clear in our thinking, and enables us to share context around our team without lots of meetings and talking.
- We try to default to trust This goes further than just “you’ll get a Brex card” – from day one you will be plugged in to the same context as everyone else on our team, and we’ll trust you to help us interpret it and set your own direction. (We also recognize that, like everyone, you’ll get things wrong – and we’ll trust you to help the company grow when that happens.)
- We seek clarity in communication Writing things down helps, but we also love impeccable agreements, having directly responsible individuals (even for work which is cross-functional), and generally investing the extra 10% which means everyone is unambiguously clear on what’s going on and what it means for them.
About the Founding Business Development Manager Role
The mission of the Founding Business Development Manager is to take ownership of Vocode’s sales pipeline and dealflow, driving deals to completion, and working alongside ops leadership to build a high performance sales team.
- 5+ years of experience working in a senior business development role:
- You likely still have, or have recently had, a personal quota to fill alongside driving your team to target,
- You have contributed to commercial and strategic decision-making within GTM / new business,
- Bonus: you previously worked in an unrelated role outside of sales (e.g. management consultant, startup founder) before moving into sales,
- Bigger Bonus: you were an early hire in a seed/Series A sales organization which grew rapidly, even if you were narrowly scoped as an IC.
- You are widely recognized as an exceptionally strong performer with a high ceiling:
- Leadership seeks you out in clutch moments (high stakes sales, new initiatives, turning around a bad month),
- Functional peers proactively seek you as a savant in some area, no matter how narrow,
- Cross-functional peers consider you to be an outstanding performer in your role,
- Demonstrable experience building and nurturing a pipeline from lead through to won business, either end-to-end or narrowly focused on origination, solution selling, or closing (i.e. you are a strong individual contributor, not a manager or leader),
- Strong understanding of enterprise sales: timelines, stakeholders, and approaches to managing both to successful outcomes,
- Demonstrable ability working alongside and selling to deeply technical stakeholders:
- You understand how to build credibility and trust without misrepresenting your domain expertise,
- Can point to times when you have had to self-start your own education on technical topics in order to maximize your performance in a role.
- Comfort with at least one CRM (e.g. Pipedrive), power outreach tool (e.g. Mailchimp, Outreach.IO), and deeply opinionated on which ones you love and loathe,
- Outstanding written and verbal communication, and – of course – exceptional needs-based and solution sales fundamentals.
Here are some real examples of the sort of work you might expect to do in this role:
Take over active customer conversations
We have a lot of pent up demand: conversations we’ve left on read (politely), SMEs seeking guidance on commercials, and big enterprise customers requiring significant time investment. We’ll warmly hand over these conversations to you virtually immediately, and support you as you ramp up to full autonomy.
Prioritize our next new market
We co-develop use cases for AI with customers, and (where permitted by exclusivity) transpose fully developed mechanics (e.g. “inbound first line customer support”, “consumer lead qualification”) into new verticals. You’ll help to prioritize the markets we launch in, and develop the profiles of customers you want to connect with.
Begin to build our sales collateral
Standard terms. Rate card. Case studies. Objection handling. Onboarding requests. We didn’t get to any of it yet, and as you solve these areas for your own individual contributions, we’ll empower you to do so in a way which helps lay rails for future members of the team and the wider company as a whole.
Similar Jobs
Artificial Intelligence • Cloud • Computer Vision • Hardware • Internet of Things • Software
Own and execute the multi-year telematics hardware platform roadmap end-to-end. Drive commercial outcomes for gateways, sensors, cabling and accessories through field validation, launch, lifecycle management, and cross-functional alignment. Engage customers and sales on strategic deals, use market and fleet data to prioritize, and mentor junior PMs while ensuring hardware strategy supports revenue, margin, and company growth.
Top Skills:
Can BusCloudEdge AiFccIotJ1939Obd-IiPtcrbSensorsTelematicsVehicle GatewaysWireless
Artificial Intelligence • Cloud • Computer Vision • Hardware • Internet of Things • Software
Own enterprise customer implementations of Samsaras IoT platform, driving deployment, onboarding, training, and adoption. Create launch plans, track implementation progress and product usage, run trainings and demos, and coordinate cross-functionally to ensure customer success and value realization.
Top Skills:
IotSamsaraVehicle Telematics
Healthtech • Software
Lead full‑stack engineering efforts to design, build, and operate production healthcare systems. Own epic-level features, mentor engineers, design for reliability and scalability, integrate with partners, and ensure launch readiness across backend (Java/Groovy), frontend (React/TypeScript), data (MongoDB), and event-driven pipelines (Kafka).
Top Skills:
AWSCypressFhirGitGrailsGroovyHl7JavaJavaScriptJestJunitKafkaMongoDBPlaywrightReactTypescript
What you need to know about the San Francisco Tech Scene
San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area attracts more startup funding than any other region in the world. Home to Stanford University and UC Berkeley, leading VC firms and several of the world’s most valuable companies, the Bay Area is the place to go for anyone looking to make it big in the tech industry. That said, San Francisco has a lot to offer beyond technology thanks to a thriving art and music scene, excellent food and a short drive to several of the country’s most beautiful recreational areas.
Key Facts About San Francisco Tech
- Number of Tech Workers: 365,500; 13.9% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
- Major Tech Employers: Google, Apple, Salesforce, Meta
- Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, fintech, consumer technology, software
- Funding Landscape: $50.5 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
- Notable Investors: Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins
- Research Centers and Universities: Stanford University; University of California, Berkeley; University of San Francisco; Santa Clara University; Ames Research Center; Center for AI Safety; California Institute for Regenerative Medicine
