Founding Partner | Tech
Who you are
You have always been building, waiting for your shot at building something new.
Traits, both common and defining, of Founding Partners:
A keen entrepreneurial mindset and excellent business acumen, paired with an intimate understanding of digital business models.
Everything is possible. You have determined and infectious optimism that can weather the storms and inspire a team to keep going.
Energy and execution. You move with determination and speed, sparking the momentum that propels you and your team ever forward.
Empathetic leader, with high standards. You don’t believe in dictatorships. Instead, you see winning cultures as drivers of sustainable and scalable success.
Growth mindset. You have a voracious appetite for knowledge and you’re unafraid to admit what you don’t know and embrace every opportunity to learn.
A long view on success. You don’t look for overnight wins and believe that the success that matters most is the kind that lasts.
Grit. You enjoy being the hardest working person in the room because you know how to work hard and smart, always working towards a clarified purpose or goal.
Future vision. You understand where the world is today and want to build a business that will continue to be relevant in a world 100 years from now.
About the role
All Founding Partners are responsible for crafting the success of their Companies. In scaling from zero to one, Founding Partners are dedicated to answering a real customer problem by building fast, shipping and iterating to result in a phenomenal product. At WAY, Founding Partners are excited by the hard challenges and choose to see potential where others see problems.
What you’ll do
Obsess over Product Market Fit by investing time into your customers, shipping with speed and iterating until it’s right.
Define the mission, long-term vision and strategy of the Company.
Set ambitious targets for the Company to ensure it is always striving for growth.
Build, not only a team, but a culture that enables everyone to perform at their best and build towards a long future where everybody wins.
Do big things and small things. You are not too good for small tasks, and are ready to embrace the granular nuts and bolts of business building.
Have access to WAY’s carefully selected network of domain experts, successful entrepreneurs, and seasoned specialists to advise your process.
What type of Founding Partner you might be
Founding Partner [Tech]
Role Summary:
You are a master of your craft, creating products people love is your bread and butter. As a Founding Partner [Tech] at WAY you would build the product from its first iteration and guide it through its 100th, and beyond. You know that you build great product, not only for its technical excellence, but because you know how to build something people want.
The skills we look for in Founding Partners [Tech] include:
User Empathy: Translating user feedback into tangible, responsive changes in the product. You are obsessed with your customers and have a keen understanding of what they want. You are able to deconstruct their feedback into product iterations, moving ever closer to the product users need.
Agility & Speed: Understanding, deeply, the requisite fidelity of a product at each stage of its development. You are keenly attuned to the importance of gathering user feedback en masse in a product’s early stages, and able to continually iterate and ship MVP versions to gather critical user data.
Technical Craft: Designing the technical architecture of the product. You can build a product from scratch and own it through every phase of development and feedback. You know how to make it work well and look good.
Product Strategy: Coordinating product development with business. You have deep understanding of how product interacts with businesses goals, and are able to create a long term vision and roadmap that marries the two.
Collaboration Management: Managing interdisciplinary teams to execute well. You understand the complexities of how front-end design interacts with back-end development, and can effectively manage the relationship between teams of designers and developers.
Who we’re looking for:
Seasoned product managers with technical roots, full stack developers, previous startup founders, technical leads in early stage startups
Experience having built product, guided its strategy, and grown it to scale
Decisive and agile; you have strong ideas, but you’re not too proud to change the product based on evidence and feedback
Role details
Location:
Tokyo, Japan / Hybrid
Role type:
Permanent
Language:
Fluent EN, bilingual JP preferred