focal leads inception rounds in exceptional technical founders - often before the company is obvious, before consensus forms, before datasets show a trace. We exist to see talent first, build conviction first, and back founders building the impossible first.

We're now hiring a founding technical leader to build the software, data, and AI systems that help us see earlier, decide better, act faster, and compound what we learn across every opportunity and portfolio company.

This is NOT an internal AI tools role. This IS a founder role. You own the proprietary intelligence layer - the system that shapes how we source, decide, support, learn, and execute.‍

We're looking for someone we'd back as a technical founder, but whose obsession is building the machine behind many companies rather than just one.‍

If you want to start your own startup, pitch us instead. If you want to build the technical nervous system of the firm that backs the next generation of outliers, this is that.

This role IS for you if you:

• Want to win with real ownership over outcomes, not a seat at someone else's table
• Are deeply technical and have built 0→1 with founder-level ownership
• Move from ambiguous problem → architecture → shipped full-stack product with real taste
• Are intensely competitive, high-agency, long-term oriented, and high integrity
• Live at the AI frontier with strong opinions on what's real vs. hype

Is NOT for you if you:

• Want a mature eng org, clean datasets, obvious metrics, or a PM handing you specs
• Primarily want a path into doing deals
• Are more excited by AI demos than durable systems people use every day
• Can't point to something meaningful you've built recently
• Optimize for short-term incentives over long-term outcomes

The best way to describe this role is: Small team, moving at startup speed, large surface area for impact, real ownership, and high bar for output, judgment, and integrity.

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Why us / why now

AI is a historic platform shift for builders and investors. The next titans of technology are emerging, and we're building the firm to be their first believer and highest-impact partner.

While the opportunity is bigger than ever, venture has also never been more competitive. Yet, most firms are scrambling to modernize as they resist truly transforming - most still run on partner memory, scattered notes, manual workflows, and intuition with AI bolted on.

Some are truly leveraging software and data but most systems only truly work once a company leaves a visible trail: hiring patterns, customer signals, funding momentum, network activity.

We focus earlier: We want to win at inception, when the founders are the main signal and the company isn’t yet legible to conventional datasets.

Our edge has to be both better judgment loops around technical founders before consensus forms and systems that let a 5-person team compete with firms many times our size.

This is a hard problem to solve. Venture feedback loops are sparse, delayed, and noisy. The best founders look strange before they look inevitable. Public data is easy to scrape and overfit. LLMs sound right while being wrong. Your job isn't to automate venture - it's to design judgment loops where humans and software make each other sharper.

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The role

A long-term, high-impact founding role with meaningful financial upside (carry in funds), real ownership, and a mandate to shape how the firm is built. You’ll join as our 5th team member, partnering directly with our GPs in a flat structure.

The further you can push us, the better.

You will own focal’s technical roadmap end-to-end: the data layer, AI systems, internal products, and portfolio-facing tools that become our structural edge.

The work spans founder discovery, signal ingestion, entity resolution, founder graph construction, knowledge retrieval, human-in-the-loop ranking, LLM evaluation, investment workflows, products our portfolio founders actually use, and more.

This isn’t executing a pre-set list of automations. Your job is to understand how the firm makes decisions, identify where software, data, and AI can sharpen those decisions, and build systems that become part of how focal operates. You own architecture, roadmap, data strategy, build-vs-buy decisions, vendor choices, and technical budget.

Initially, your core responsibility is to build and own the systems that become focal’s compounding edge. This includes:‍

1. A brain that compounds how we make better decisions, faster. Every founder interaction, inbound pitch, lost deal, partner note, intro path, portfolio request, founder update, and GTM network interaction should make focal smarter. Turn that raw material into systems that retrieve context, surface what matters, and sharpen conviction.
2. ‍Systems that let 5 people do the work of 50. Workflows, agents, automations, and internal products that give a small team the coverage and speed of a much larger firm - without replacing the human judgment early-stage investing requires.‍
3. Sourcing agents that surface founders before anyone else sees them. Aggregate signals from where technical builders leave traces, learn which signals matter, surface non-obvious founders early, explain why they're interesting, route to the right human, and learn fast.‍
4. A platform that extends to our portfolio. 100+ technical founders who become peers, users, and design partners. What you build should help them. What they teach us should make the system smarter.

We see your work as a true edge, not a cost center. The systems you build will define how we compete for the next decade. We will back it with budget, access, and serious attention.

If this compounds as we expect, the role becomes CTO.

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Who we are

focal is aninstitutionally backed venture firm investing out of a $50M fund II (2025 vintage), leading rounds at the very start (pre-seed / inception) - a term we do not use loosely: 75% of our Fund II investments are within a month of incorporation.

We back:‍

• Bold missions - founders pursuing the most asymmetric opportunities in AI-native software
• ‍Technical builders - teams building with unmatched speed and intensity‍
• Across North America - from hubs in SF and Miami

We show up for the people we back, we never stop learning, and we play the long game.

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The offer

The package for our current focal II fund includes:‍

This is a rare chance to be part of building a generational venture firm at a true inflection point.

• Carry in Fund II and every future fund you're part of. Startup equity is one bet on one outcome. Carry is participation in every company we back, across every fund, for as long as you're here. Grants layer over time and your upside compounds. Exact % shared with qualified finalists.
• ‍Cash comp commensurate with experience and impact (~$175k-$250k base)‍
• Additional benefits: 100% paid healthcare, 401(k), 6 weeks PTO, 3 months paid parental leave‍
• Budget for tools, compute, office needs, and experimentation‍
• High trust, low process. You have wide autonomy over how you work, we care first and foremost about impact.

We're remote across Miami, SF, and Nashville with frequent in-person time. Work remote or alongside us - your call.

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How to apply

AI is the defining opportunity of our generation - transformative, urgent, and filled with possibilities yet to be explored, especially within venture capital.

Skip the resume, email us at hiring@focal.vc with:

1. Your LinkedIn (& X if available)
2. One thing you’ve built that real people actually use (even if it’s just you) and tell us who uses it, what they'd use otherwise, and one decision you made that is counter intuitive. We look for evidence of taste, systems thinking, and judgment. This can include:
   
   • A GitHub repo, personal side project, a tool you shipped, etc.
   • Optional: a 2min video walking us through it