Head of Growth

The opportunity

Rankwise is the infrastructure layer for AI search. It measures whether
AI engines cite you, finds the questions they answer without mentioning your company, then closes
the gap: drafting the articles and shipping the live-site technical fixes, JSON-LD, canonicals and
robots rules, that crawlers actually read. Everything ships subject to approval.

The positioning is "AI visibility, measured." Become the answer AI engines cite.

Owning distribution end to end is the job.

Who it sells to

Three segments, and knowing which to lead with is part of the role:

• Agencies managing AI visibility across client sites. The highest-value lane, since one agency

win covers five to twenty sites.

• In-house SEO teams closing the gap between the answers they are missing and the citations

they earn.

• Founders who want AI mentions with no SEO function to lean on.

Self-serve is live: a free audit with no card, then start free.

The founder

Jan van der Horst built Rankwise. He is a full-stack engineer who works across AWS, serverless
architecture and agentic AI, and he ships unusually fast. He recently built an entire internal
company platform in a single night. He is not looking for someone to advise him on growth. He is
looking for someone to own it while he keeps building.

Why now

AEO and GEO is the hottest space in search, because SEO traffic is collapsing.

Clicks to the number one result fall around 58% when an AI Overview appears. Sixty percent of
Google searches now end without a click at all, rising to 93% in AI Mode. Publishers lost roughly a
third of their search traffic last year.

Every company with a content budget suddenly needs to know whether AI engines mention them, and
almost none can answer that today. The category is forming right now, the incumbents are slow, and
Rankwise is already shipping in it.

What you will own

• The growth engine. Pick the channels, build the systems, and make them repeatable. Organic

and product-led first, since that is how Rankwise sells itself.

• The funnel. Landing page through trial through paid. Own the whole path and the numbers on

every step of it.

• Segment focus and pricing. Agencies, in-house SEO teams and founders are three different

motions with three different price points. Deciding where to concentrate is yours.

• Content and AI visibility. Rankwise is an AI search product. It should be the most-cited

example of its own output, and you should be the one proving that publicly.

• Customers. Early on this means selling directly, not just building funnels.

Who you are

• You have built and run growth for a B2B SaaS product, and you can point at numbers you moved.
• You know product-led growth as a practice rather than a slide. Activation, onboarding, trial

conversion, expansion. Rankwise is self-serve and PLG is the motion.

• You have done it at early stage. Taking something from nothing to its first real traction is a

different skill from optimising a machine that already runs, and this is the former.

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

product is technical and the growth work is quantitative.

• You can sell. Personally, from day one, before there is a funnel to hide behind.
• You are fluent in the execution, not just the strategy. SEO, lifecycle, conversion, positioning.

You have done the work yourself, recently.

• You are comfortable being early. No team under you at the start, no budget to hide behind, and a

product that will still be changing while you sell it.

• You know or want to know AI search. Nobody has ten years of GEO experience. Curiosity and speed

count for more than a track record here.

• You want to own growth outright, with the scope and the numbers actually in your hands.

What you get

• Equity in the company. This is the ground floor and the ownership reflects that.
• A technical founder who ships daily and does not need managing.
• 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 growth infrastructure you would be plugging into. 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 who share channels, infrastructure, and what is actually working.
• Full ownership of the growth function with no committee and no board.

Compensation: an equity-led package that reflects how early this is. We say that up front
because it is the first thing worth knowing, and we talk through the full details on the first call.

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.