DancingLlama
DancingLlama

AMA - Working in Founder's Office from past 3 years.

Hello everyone,

Saw quite some people doing AMAs on this platform from VCs to Engineers, but nobody from Founder's Office roles.

Knowing that this role is somewhat new in the job market, not many people still know a lot about it. Shoot your questions, would answer them to the best of my capacity.

Background: Worked in the FO role for 2 FMCG brands, before joining a Fintech where I am working right now. Graduated from BIT, Mesra in 2021, but started working alongside my graduation coz of COVID.

17mo ago
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SillyCoconut
SillyCoconut

Salary?

DancingLlama
DancingLlama

Depends on the funding of the startup and your overall experience in strategy roles. But you do make better than most other roles in your company. In my case, my CTC is 12.6 LPA with some portion of it in form of ESOPs. My counterpart in the same role but has some consulting experience earns double of this, although we do similar work.

SnoozyPancake
SnoozyPancake
Meesho17mo

Ever thought of asking for similar pay if you were making similar impact?

DizzyBiscuit
DizzyBiscuit
Gojek17mo

Hi! thanks for doing this!

  1. What responsibilities do you've in this role?
  2. Too much hype around the role! Do founders in seed stage require such folks around them? I think it makes lot of sense when the headcount becomes 50+ and you've lots of projects going on in parallel
DancingLlama
DancingLlama
  1. The responsibility in this role is of a generalist. Kind of in-line with Entrepreneur in Residence or Chief of Staff. But mostly, revolves around making company wide performance reports, taking initiatives, setting up whole new teams, coming up with implementable solutions when a tough situation arises, etc. Hope you get a gist.

  2. Kind of agree with your headcount analogy, although can't fix on the 50 number, as definitely depends on the industry of the startup, number of co-founders, management ability of the founder as well. Coincidentally, 2 of the 3 companies I have worked in, I had joined at the Seed stage itself and the 3rd one was still bootstrapped when I joined. Depends on Founder to Founder.

BubblyNugget
BubblyNugget

Currently I am looking for Founders Office/EIR/COS and Corporate Strategy roles. Can you please let me know how to land in these roles and interview preparation ( what is asked and tested for in the interviews ) and any relevant information ? It will be a great help to me.

Little bit about myself I am an IIM 2020-22 passout. Currently working as a Product Manager at one of the top travel tech companies in India and i am looking for a switch to the above mentioned roles.

DancingLlama
DancingLlama

You can be asked some case solving or solving some problems that arises in their own startup. They will judge you on the basis of your approach on how to look at the problem, how deeper can you think, can you think horizontally (other ways to solve the same problem) and the feasibility of your solution. They might throw challenges to you regarding your solution and will judge you on the basis of how well you can defend or amend your solution. Why do you want to switch from Product Management to Founder's Office?

BubblyNugget
BubblyNugget

Thanks for the reply. I have discussed in detail about why I want to switch from PM to Founders Office or similar roles. Any advice or suggestion is appreciated.

Post Link - https://share.gvine.app/6wRs3GoXAwUWzAa96

ZoomyMuffin
ZoomyMuffin

How did you manage studies & full-time? I am in a similar boat rn, would love your advice on this.

DancingLlama
DancingLlama

My situation was very very different. It was COVID, so we only had online classes. I used to tune in to the classes and continue my work on the side, basically, not focusing much on the classes 😂 I used to self-study at the time of the exam as earlier when I used to pay full attention, I didn't like the way they taught. YouTube zindabad! I think your situation would be very different from this.

ZoomyMuffin
ZoomyMuffin

My college is luckily quite lenient on the attendance policy. Major Issue would be exams, preparing and giving exams need one whole month for proper focus, In my previous Internships I used to breaks and stuff. But, unsure how would I be able to manage once I take up the full-time offer? Are the companies lenient wrt this? Do they consider you’re still a student and would be unavailable most of the time?

BubblyNugget
BubblyNugget

Can you provide a few more insights on the performance reports on things like how these reports are made? Do we need to be equipped with skills related to reporting and any tools etc ? Is core analytics involved in this Or it's just presentations and building some structured reports in excel.

DancingLlama
DancingLlama

You need to be able to learn quickly. Each company uses different tools for dashboards and reports. It's a plus if you already know some data analytics and how to draw conclusions from reports, but always be prepared to be challenged with a new tool or new requirements. In one company, we have used Zoho Analytics. In another we used Power BI and Excel.

BubblyNugget
BubblyNugget

Thanks for the revert ! This gives me some clarity now.

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