Founding Account Executive (NYC)

# **What we're building** Enterprise marketing still runs through agencies because launching one campaign means coordinating specialists across Marketo, HubSpot, Meta, LinkedIn, CMSs, and a dozen other systems. It takes weeks. CharacterQuilt uses computer-use agents to do that work inside the software companies already use. A campaign that took three months can now ship in two days. We were among the fastest-growing companies in YC Spring 2026 - $1.5M to $3.5M in revenue during the batch alone - and just raised a $13M seed round. The story: we built a Clay replacement, then ran an agency for 12 months. That's why the agents actually work - we did every one of these jobs by hand first. Customers like Follett ($2B company) and Asana ($2B company) are genuinely launching campaigns in 1 day instead of 1 month. Bhairav, my co-founder, did AI research at NASA, NVIDIA, and MIT. When a customer buys CQ, they're buying forward-deployed engineering in their marketing team. My background is SDR, then AE, then product marketing, then demand gen - I've done all the GTM jobs. # **The role** You'll be one of two founding sales hires. You'll close deals with me (Clint). We have a full marketing engine - dinners, outbound, demand gen - that generates plenty of pipeline. Your job is to close it. And you're working for a founder who has actually done the SDR job and the AE job, not one who thinks sales is a vending machine. If you've sold to marketers before - martech, ABM tools, marketing automation - that's a real bonus, because our buyer is the CMO and you'll ramp faster speaking their language. But it isn't a requirement and we'll teach you the domain. The best person we've talked to so far came out of marketing, not sales. We've also talked to founders, engineers who moved into GTM, and people who ran events for a living. If you're sharp and you want to close, we want to talk - the path you took to get here matters less than what you can do in a room. I want this person to make $1M in their first year with us :). And beyond the money, you'd learn absolutely everything about AI in marketing by working with Bhairav and me - and selling what every CMO is trying to figure out right now. # **What you'll do** * Run deals from first meeting to close: discovery, custom demos, pilots, contracts. * Sell to CMOs and VPs of Marketing at mid-market B2B companies. * Use CQ's own agents to prep - we build a custom demo with the prospect's real brand and campaigns before every single call. * Travel 25%. Meeting people in person helps close deals. Your first 90 days This isn't a ramp. You're closing in week 2, and you're running experiments on the go-to-market by month 2. Both count. Days 1-30: Take the wheel. Sit in every one of my calls in week one. Run your own by week two with me in the room. You inherit live pipeline on day one, so there's no waiting for leads to mature. Build the custom demo yourself for every call, using our own agents, so you learn the product the way customers meet it. Go to two dinners. Target: three pilots signed by day 30. Days 31-60: Own the number, run the first experiments. Deals are yours end to end. Alongside them, you'll run two tests we've been wanting to run and haven't had the closer for. First, pricing: does a $2K one-month pilot convert to annual faster than a $10K pilot, or does it just anchor us low? You'll run both doors into similar accounts and we'll read the data together. Second, Deploy Day as a sales motion: take a prospect from brief to a live campaign in one day instead of a three-meeting cycle, and see if it collapses the close. Days 61-90: Pick our second beachhead. Choose two segments we haven't gone deep on (a 200-person company with one marketer vs. a 2,000-person company with a marketing ops team, legal tech vs. fintech, whatever the pipeline suggests). Run the same offer into both. Report what closed, what didn't, and why. Test a smaller front door, like a fixed-fee single-campaign kit or a 10-account ABM pack, and find out if it credits up to annual or just distracts. Host your first dinner with one of our community leads. Land two customer-CMO case studies and two referrals. Target: first annual conversions on the board and a written point of view on where we sell next. By day 90, the sales motion has your fingerprints on it. That's the job. # **Compensation** $180-250K base plus a flat 15% of first-year ARR, uncapped. At plan that's $1M total, and we want you to earn $1M in your first year. Commission starts paying at pilot signature and pays in full when the pilot converts to annual - no clawbacks, ever. Over 85% of our pilots convert. 0.2% to 1% equity, standard four-year vest - a lower base pairs with the higher end of the band. Based in the NYC area. We’ll be 5 days/week in person unless you’re traveling to prospects. # **You might be a fit if** * You're one of the smartest people in most rooms you're in. This is the thing we weight above everything else, and we test it directly in the first 20 minutes. Charisma doesn't cover a gap here. * You own a room. You're usually the one at dinner doing most of the talking, and the table is better for it. You can hold a position with a CMO who has decided they know more than you do. * You want to close. Not advise, not strategize, not build - close. Five demos a day and a number against your name. * You've done something hard that wasn't sales. Founded a company, switched fields, ran events, shipped something, learned a language. We care about this more than your quota history. * You're already deep in AI. You've built something with it in the last 90 days, even something small and dumb, and you'll show it to us. If you're smart and in sales right now, you're probably curious about this - we want the evidence. * You take feedback like it's free. Two founders will tell you plainly when you're wrong, most days, and you'd rather have that than a quarterly review. # **You might not be a fit if** * Your whole career is quota and nothing else. Not a hard rule, and a long closing career with a founder chapter or a side project on top is a great profile. But if closing is the only thing on the page, the burden is on you to show us you're still curious and still building things. * Your best story is a quota attainment number. We won't ask for one. * You want a defined, prescriptive sales process. Ours is real but it's still moving, and you'd be shaping it with us rather than inheriting it. * You'd rather build product than close deals. That's a real and respectable preference - it's just a different job, and we'd both find out in month three. # **Why this and not the other AE job on your desk** * Pipeline is supplied. Dinners, outbound, and demand gen already run. You close. * Your manager is a founder and did the SDR job and the AE job. Feedback comes from someone who's carried the bag. * The product builds your demo. Every call opens with the prospect's real brand and real campaigns, already live. * Paid at pilot signature, in full at conversion, no clawbacks. Over 85% of pilots convert. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.