Founder-in-Residence/CEO (Realtime Voice-Developer Tools)
3 Months ago • All levels
Game Engine
Job Description
The job involves leading a startup focused on real-time voice development tools. The Founder-in-Residence/CEO will refine the product strategy, lead product development, build a go-to-market strategy, build a team, and manage capital formation. The role involves working closely with AI Fund and DeepLearning.AI to build a voice layer that delivers low-latency, human-sounding conversations for developers. Responsibilities include refining product theses, driving early pilots to production, crafting wedge-first positioning, recruiting talent, and managing investor relations. The goal is to build great companies and move humanity forward through AI technology.
Good To Have:
- Voice / Real-Time Media Savvy: Understanding of WebRTC, STT/TTS, streaming ML inference.
- Scaled a telephony, conversational-AI, or dev-tools startup.
- Deep network in AI voice ecosystem (OpenAI, Deepgram, etc.).
- OSS maintainer or frequent contributor to WebRTC/voice repos.
Must Have:
- Repeat Startup Leadership: Founder or GM with 0 to 1 track record in B2B SaaS or infra.
- AI/ML Literacy: Comfortable discussing LLMs with engineers and customers.
- GTM Excellence: Proven history of shipping developer-first products.
- Fundraising & Storytelling: Ability to pitch top-tier VCs and negotiate terms.
- Stakeholder Management: Credible with innovation leaders and community moderators.
Who We Are: AI is the new electricity: Just as electricity transformed numerous industries starting 100 years ago, AI is now poised to do the same. AI Fund is an early stage venture firm founded by Dr. Andrew Ng in 2017. Our portfolio companies utilize AI technology and applications to improve processes and efficiency. The AI Fund team combines their experiences as AI pioneers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, investors, and operators. We are backed by a $176 million-dollar fund from top-tier VC firms.
Together, let’s build great companies that will move humanity forward.
About Portfolio Company: Voice is exploding as the next UX frontier, yet today’s speech→LLM→speech pipelines force builders to choose between low latency and deep reasoning & agentic workflows. Flowcast fixes this. We’re building the neutral, plug-and-play voice layer that lets any developer keep their own model, agentic workflows, and brand persona while still delivering sub-400 ms, human-sounding conversations. Our wedge is a realtime “pre-response” orchestrator that will expand into the default orchestration cloud for every agentic voice and video app.
Co-build With An Industry Partner: Flowcast is launching in collaboration with DeepLearning.AI, the global upskilling and community platform founded by Andrew Ng. DLAI’s 5-million-strong learner base and network of 50,000+ ML engineers provide unmatched distribution, design-partner access, and brand credibility with the very developers who will adopt Flowcast’s realtime voice SDK. Together, AI Fund and DLAI give our CEO a built-in pipeline of beta users, evangelists, and hiring leads.
Why Partner With AI Fund: We’ve been there. We’ve founded and scaled successful companies ourselves, and we know that creating meaningful startups is really hard. Many entrepreneurs toil with ideas for years. Many spend time building something without the foresight of limiting factors that could have been easily dismissed upfront. Accomplished execs often teeter between a desire to start a company and creating something great versus taking a job that is less fulfilling. If only someone could help with taking the risk out of turning an idea into reality and accelerate the company building process, more people would be inspired to start a company.
Coming up with great ideas, sussing them out, assembling great teams, and helping raise capital is what we do. We shorten a process that can take years down to months. We make sure you are going after the right market, are fully validated, and are surrounded by great teammates. Lastly, we make sure you see the world through the lens of a data scientist and machine learning expert, which is the perspective any meaningful company in the future must have. But we also know that the process is not about us. It’s about great founders and empowering them to do great things.
What We Seek: We are looking for passionate entrepreneurs with first-hand knowledge of the problem we are looking to solve. It’s not a mandate, but ideally, we want people with experience solving business problems and have a keen eye for anticipating business risks. You may have been a product manager running a product or product line before. You may have been an engineer who has been on the front lines of helping shape a company. You may have been a management consultant who has experience in a particular vertical. Or perhaps you are a proven entrepreneur who recognizes that the difference between success and failure is razor-thin, and you want every advantage you can get. Lastly, we want people who are leaders. We desire people who can hire great people, get others excited about their vision, raise capital, and make it all happen.
At AI Fund, we are committed to providing an environment of mutual respect where equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy (including childbirth, lactation and related medical conditions), national origin, age, physical and mental disability, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, genetic information (including characteristics and testing), military and veteran status, and any other characteristic protected by applicable law. AI Fund believes that diversity and inclusion among our employees is critical to our success as a company, and we seek to recruit, develop and retain the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool. Selection for employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need.
Together, let’s build great companies that will move humanity forward.
About Portfolio Company: Voice is exploding as the next UX frontier, yet today’s speech→LLM→speech pipelines force builders to choose between low latency and deep reasoning & agentic workflows. Flowcast fixes this. We’re building the neutral, plug-and-play voice layer that lets any developer keep their own model, agentic workflows, and brand persona while still delivering sub-400 ms, human-sounding conversations. Our wedge is a realtime “pre-response” orchestrator that will expand into the default orchestration cloud for every agentic voice and video app.
Co-build With An Industry Partner: Flowcast is launching in collaboration with DeepLearning.AI, the global upskilling and community platform founded by Andrew Ng. DLAI’s 5-million-strong learner base and network of 50,000+ ML engineers provide unmatched distribution, design-partner access, and brand credibility with the very developers who will adopt Flowcast’s realtime voice SDK. Together, AI Fund and DLAI give our CEO a built-in pipeline of beta users, evangelists, and hiring leads.
Why Partner With AI Fund: We’ve been there. We’ve founded and scaled successful companies ourselves, and we know that creating meaningful startups is really hard. Many entrepreneurs toil with ideas for years. Many spend time building something without the foresight of limiting factors that could have been easily dismissed upfront. Accomplished execs often teeter between a desire to start a company and creating something great versus taking a job that is less fulfilling. If only someone could help with taking the risk out of turning an idea into reality and accelerate the company building process, more people would be inspired to start a company.
Coming up with great ideas, sussing them out, assembling great teams, and helping raise capital is what we do. We shorten a process that can take years down to months. We make sure you are going after the right market, are fully validated, and are surrounded by great teammates. Lastly, we make sure you see the world through the lens of a data scientist and machine learning expert, which is the perspective any meaningful company in the future must have. But we also know that the process is not about us. It’s about great founders and empowering them to do great things.
What We Seek: We are looking for passionate entrepreneurs with first-hand knowledge of the problem we are looking to solve. It’s not a mandate, but ideally, we want people with experience solving business problems and have a keen eye for anticipating business risks. You may have been a product manager running a product or product line before. You may have been an engineer who has been on the front lines of helping shape a company. You may have been a management consultant who has experience in a particular vertical. Or perhaps you are a proven entrepreneur who recognizes that the difference between success and failure is razor-thin, and you want every advantage you can get. Lastly, we want people who are leaders. We desire people who can hire great people, get others excited about their vision, raise capital, and make it all happen.
What You Will be Doing:
- Vision & Strategy: Refine product thesis, segmentation, and roadmap; evangelize the realtime-voice-as-infra category.
- Product & Tech Leadership: Partner with AI Fund & DLAI to hit <400 ms latency across varied STT/LLM/TTS combos; drive early pilots to production.
- Go-to-Market: Craft wedge-first positioning, pricing, and community-led distribution; land 5–10 lighthouse customers within 6 months.
- Team Building: Recruit A-caliber engineering, product, and GTM talent; foster a high-ownership, results-driven culture.
- Capital Formation: Own investor narrative, build financial model, and close pre-seed/seed rounds alongside AI Fund.
Must Haves For the Role Include:
- Repeat Startup Leadership — Founder, early CEO, or GM with 0→1 track record in B2B SaaS or infra.
- AI/ML Literacy — Comfortable discussing LLM fine-tunes, RAG, guardrails, latency budgets, and cost trade-offs with engineers & customers.
- GTM Excellence — Proven history of shipping developer-first products, building bottoms-up adoption loops, and closing enterprise logos.
- Fundraising & Storytelling — Ability to craft a crisp vision, pitch top-tier VCs, and negotiate term sheets.
- Stakeholder Management — Equally credible with Fortune 500 innovation leaders and open-source community moderators.
Nice to Have Skills Include:
- Voice / Real-Time Media Savvy — Working understanding of WebRTC, STT/TTS, streaming ML inference, or adjacent (Twilio, Discord, LiveKit, Dolby-io, etc.)
- Scaled a telephony, conversational-AI, or dev-tools startup from Series A to exit.
- Deep network in AI voice ecosystem (OpenAI, Deepgram, AssemblyAI, LiveKit, Vapi, etc.).
- OSS maintainer or frequent contributor to WebRTC/voice repos.
Characteristics That We Value Include:
- Accountability: an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one's actions while doing so with the highest regard for integrity.
- Leadership: able to influence others to follow you and lead the team to a brighter future.
- Grit: able to stick with projects and work hard through good and bad times. High pain tolerance and can perform well under stress or pressure.
- Scrappy: Takes initiative and proactively gets things done with low resources, but doing creative things, begging, borrowing, and whatever is needed in an ambiguous environment or situation.
- Ownership orientation: Demonstrated orientation of extreme ownership over all aspects of the company and extremely results-driven in nature.
At AI Fund, we are committed to providing an environment of mutual respect where equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy (including childbirth, lactation and related medical conditions), national origin, age, physical and mental disability, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, genetic information (including characteristics and testing), military and veteran status, and any other characteristic protected by applicable law. AI Fund believes that diversity and inclusion among our employees is critical to our success as a company, and we seek to recruit, develop and retain the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool. Selection for employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need.
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