Chief Executive Officer

The opportunity

OutFriend is cold email that sounds like you. It learns a sender's voice
from their own past emails, generates the campaign, runs it on a schedule, handles the follow-ups,
and surfaces the replies worth answering. Lead filtering through to reply handling, in one
interface. Campaigns that run themselves.

We are looking for a CEO to take it to market.

This is the earliest of our open seats. If you want to own a go-to-market from the very first
decision, this is the one.

Who it sells to

B2B sales and revenue teams running their own outbound. The build deliberately favours a simpler
interface than Apollo or Clay, which points at smaller teams who were priced or complicated out of
the incumbents. Confirming that segment, or replacing it with a better one, is part of the job.

The founder

Stefan Chao built OutFriend. He is an engineer with a background in creative products and community
platforms, and his instinct is product and user experience, which is why OutFriend is noticeably
simpler to use than the enterprise tools it competes with. He stays on as technical founder and
keeps building.

Why now

The sales engagement market is roughly $9-10B in 2026 and growing at about 16% a year, and it is
nowhere near winner-take-all. Outreach, Salesloft, Apollo, Instantly and lemlist all coexist
profitably, which means winning a segment does not require beating everyone. That matters for a
small team: the market is large enough to build a real business in and fragmented enough to enter.

The wedge is simplicity. Most tools in this category are built for revenue operations teams and
carry the complexity to prove it, while the person actually sending the email wants far less.
OutFriend is deliberately the simplest thing in the category.

The second wedge is quality. Cold outbound is saturated with tools that generate obviously robotic
email and buyers have learned to spot them instantly. Training on how the sender already writes is
the opposite approach.

Go-to-market starts with you.

What you will own

• Launch. The first real launch and everything around it. This is immediate.
• Customers. Personally. Find them, sell them, learn from them, keep them.
• Positioning and pricing. Wide open. Who this is for and what they pay is your call to make.
• The channel. OutFriend is an outbound tool, so the most convincing proof is using it to sell

itself. Do that publicly.

• The roadmap, jointly with Stefan. You bring the customer signal, he ships.

Who you are

• You have taken a B2B SaaS product from nothing to its first paying customers. The zero to one

part specifically, at early stage rather than at scale.

• You can sell, personally and now. There is no team.
• You know product-led growth. A simple self-serve product in a crowded category lives or dies on

activation and time to first value.

• You have an engineering or mathematical background, or you think like someone who does. You will

be reasoning about deliverability, send volume and reply rates constantly.

• You know outbound as a practitioner. You have run campaigns, you know why most of them fail, and

you have opinions about deliverability, targeting and copy.

• You are comfortable with genuine uncertainty. Pricing, ICP and positioning are all unanswered.
• You work well with a product-minded technical founder and do not need to control the build to

feel like an owner.

• You move fast and you would rather ship something imperfect this week than something clean next

month.

What you get

• Equity as a co-founder and CEO, at the earliest possible point.
• A working product and a founder who ships.
• Founder Ventures behind you. Rome Rogers built the studio from an idea in February 2026 to 13

founders across 7 companies in five months, with no recruiters and no job posts, and runs the shared outbound and growth infrastructure. Brian Flynn has built 26 companies and taken 10 through to exit, including Macromedia to Adobe, across more than 70 M&A deals.

• A portfolio of founders sharing channels, infrastructure, and what is actually working. Useful

here in particular, since FV runs its own outbound at volume and OutFriend is that problem.

• Total ownership of the commercial side. Nothing has been decided yet, which means you decide it.

Compensation: an equity-led package. We say that up front because it is the first thing worth
knowing. This is a founder seat and it is priced like one.

About Founder Ventures

Founder Ventures is a venture studio building bootstrapped B2B SaaS companies. We validate demand
before anyone writes code, pair founders who complement each other, and share infrastructure across
the portfolio so each company moves faster than it could alone. It was founded by Rome Rogers and
Brian Flynn.