What's a Founder's Associate?

Dom here, founder of Generalyst. I believe the future belongs to generalists, not specialists - for a myriad of reasons.

For the longest time, there hasn’t been a clear path to build your career as a generalist.

Go to university. Pick one lane. Stay in that lane at all costs.

When I came out of university, I had no clue what to specialize in. The blessing and curse of business students, I suppose.

What I would’ve needed back then is a Founder’s Associate position. But it wasn’t a thing. (In fact, the very first Founder’s Associate posting was published right when I graduated in fall 2016.)

Today, that’s changed: almost every founder has an FA, and the ones who don’t are actively looking for one.

But what exactly does a Founder’s Associate? How can you use that position to kickstart your career? What makes a good FA, and how do you become one?

Those are the questions we’ll cover in this article. Let’s dive in.

What does a Founder’s Associate do?

The first and foremost task of an FA is to leverage the founder. Particularly in early-stage startups, founders still do everything - and I mean everything - themselves. So the first hire they usually bring in is someone to help them with … everything.

Jeff Bezos has this wonderful analogy that a company should only do what makes their beer taste better. By extension, this applies to the founder. Your job as Founder’s Associate should be to free up the founder as much as possible so they can focus on making their startup’s beer taste better.

Typical tasks can include:

1. Taking on admin work: the ultimate example of work that needs to be done, but it doesn’t really matter who does it as long as it’s done.
2. Marketing & sales: early on, startups mostly need new customers. You’re the person that does whatever it takes to get those into the door – whether that’s cold calling, distributing donuts in front of coworking spaces, running ad experiments, or building landing pages on Lovable.
3. Customer onboarding: a lot of companies I work with have their product dialed in, and know how to acquire new customers, but the existing ones fall through the cracks. A good FA identifies this, and catches those customers.
4. Fundraising support: when a company is fundraising, it becomes the main priority. It’s a tedious process – coordinating outreach and investor meetings, creating materials, managing the data room, all of these are tasks FA’s help with.
5. Grant applications: a task that I see on almost every job description, and a perfect example of leveraging the founder – it’s an important task (often, these grants are substantial), but they don’t require the expertise of the founder (unlike product development or deal closing). A FA can be incredibly impactful here.
6. Automating processes: founders tend to be blind to their startup’s shortcomings. When someone comes in with a fresh set of eyes, they’ll usually spot plenty of things that aren’t working and/or could be automated. The best FAs see optimization potential and simply get after it. Vibe coding encouraged.
7. Organizing fairs and events: another typical task - fairs take a lot of preparation and can have an incredible impact on the business if executed well; but again, the preparation work isn’t something that requires the expertise of the founder, it just needs execution.

This, of course, isn’t an exhaustive list of activities; just a starting point. The scope of your work will be as broad as the founder’s scope.

The tasks outlined here are for a typical pre-seed / seed-stage startup. In later stages, the scope of tasks shifts from operational execution to systems building, as the founder moves from a contributor into a manager role, with a higher focus on stakeholder management, management alignment via OKRs, business analytics, and process optimization.

‍

Which type of profile makes for a good Founder’s Associate?

Most job descriptions I see ask for experience in startups, consulting (particularly MBB), VC, or banking.

Startup experience is one thing, but I find the other three mostly to be a proxy for a combination of soft skills. So let’s look at those:

• Ability to understand new contexts rapidly – a core meta skill for every generalist. As a FA, you’ll be thrown into new topics on a daily basis. Better be good at learning them. Intelligence is highly helpful here.
• Relentless work ethic – as FAs tend to be early in their careers, they have less tools than someone who’s more experienced. It’s necessary to put in the reps on a daily basis to build your career, and hard work is part of that.
• Good professional toolkit – founders are too busy to teach you how to use Excel. You should know your way around current tools, from Office products and Notion all the way to AI solutions like Claude Cowork, Lovable, and Cursor.
• Clear communication – you’re being hired because time is a constraint. Your communication needs to be on point: accurate, with clear action items, understandable on the first read, good logical flow.
• Problem solving ability – you’ll be solving a lot of them. Being able to find a solution yourself is a huge asset.
• Track record of excellence – given that the position is in high demand, and founders tend to be outliers themselves, show your excellence. Could be exceptional results in academia or your career, being on the national team, winning awards in school, or a difficult journey to where you are today.
• Bias for action – in startups, it’s better to ask for forgiveness than for permission. People who just do and build things tend to have a big advantage.

All those things you can learn in consulting or banking, but also outside of it. So if you haven’t worked in either of those contexts, prove that you still have them.

What progression opportunities does the position have?

Founder’s Associate isn’t a forever position. You hold it 1-2 years, and then move on to one of three options:

Career Generalist

Most commonly, FAs get promoted to a more senior generalist role – for example, a Chief of Staff (what’s that?) or a Strategy & Operations manager. It’s also the best foundation to become that role in a different, slightly larger company.

If the company you work in grows, you’ll grow with it. Either you remain a generalist, or …

Specialization

… you identify one thing that you really enjoy doing, and do more of that. For instance, you might realize that GTM is your thing, so you move into an Account Executive role first and later on develop into a Head of Sales, or becoming the first person in the People department and building that out later on.

In a growing company, there’s lots of jobs to be done – you can just pick one and do that really well, according to your strengths.

The beauty of the position is that it allows you to sample what to specialize in.

Entrepreneur

Future founders often make the best FAs*.*** First, you learn the chops from an experienced entrepreneur and get paid to make mistakes; then, you take these learnings to build your own business.

Some companies even clearly define this track: work as FA for 1-2 years, then get a guaranteed angel investment from the founders.

Regardless of what you pick: the possibilities are endless. So if you’re still unsure where your career will take you, becoming a Founder’s Associate will be a great first step.

How do you become one?

Apply to Generalyst today. We work with top startups from Germany and Europe to help them find the right Founder’s Associates for them.

See 10-20 companies within 4 weeks, get your first introductions within 24h of being accepted into the program, and we’ll help you navigate the journey.

Apply here.

‍

‍