Ex Founder at Zania in San Francisco, CA

Ex-Founder

Why Zania

Every enterprise spends millions of dollars on Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC). It's one of the most critical, yet universally painful, parts of running a business. For decades, this industry has been dominated by legacy systems with notoriously low NPS scores, making it totally ripe for disruption.

Zania is building agentic AI for Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) to solve this massive problem. We are on a rocketship trajectory, creating intelligent agents that automate and augment the most complex risk and compliance workflows. We have found exceptional product-market fit and are scaling our team very quickly. Some reasons to join Zania are:

• Dream Customers: Our customers are the most notable enterprises in the world, including FAANG, Big 4 firms, and a portfolio of top customers.
• Tier 1 Backing: Funded by a leading Tier 1 venture capital fund, giving us the resources to build a generational company.
• World-Class Team: Zania is hiring the best. Our team includes AI and Security leaders from Airbnb, Microsoft, Bain & Company, Deloitte, PwC, Brex, and Instacart.
• Pioneering Technology: Our engineers and GRC experts work at the absolute forefront of applied AI, building the next generation of agentic systems that will define the future of compliance.
• Hyper-Growth: We have seen 10x ARR growth in the last year and are rapidly expanding.
• Competitive Compensation & Equity: You will be rewarded like an owner.

Role Overview

This isn’t a traditional corporate role. It’s a creative and operational challenge built for a battle-tested entrepreneur.

Zania is growing at a breakneck pace. We are looking for an ex-founder to act as a co-pilot to our founding team. We don’t want someone who needs a playbook; we want someone who has built the playbook from scratch before. You will operate as a true generalist and founder proxy—taking on our most critical 0-to-1 initiatives, driving aggressive growth experiments, and managing strategic investor relations.

If you are a former founder looking to join a deeply technical, hyper-growth rocketship and get your hands dirty building a generational company, this is your arena.

What You’ll Do

• Drive 0-to-1 Strategic Initiatives: Parachute into the most critical areas of the business—whether that is standing up a new revenue channel, fixing an operational bottleneck, or launching a new product initiative—and build it from the ground up.
• Accelerate Growth: Act as a high-agency growth engine. You will identify untapped GTM motions, build strategic partnerships, and execute experiments with relentless speed.
• Manage Investor Relations: Work directly alongside the CEO on fundraising strategy, board deck creation, investor updates, and capital allocation planning.
• Act as a Founder Proxy: Operate with the authority, context, and extreme ownership of the founding team to unblock teams and accelerate decision-making across the company.
• Move Fast with High Autonomy: Low friction, high output. You will concept, execute, and iterate on business strategies without waiting for approval chains.

What We Care About

• Founder DNA: You have been in the driver's seat. You know what it takes to survive, pivot, and scale in highly ambiguous environments.
• Extreme Agency: You don't wait for permission or perfectly outlined scopes. You find the biggest fire or the biggest opportunity and you own it.
• Strategic & Tactical Range: You can debate high-level capital strategy with board members at 9:00 AM and manually scrape a lead list or format a customer proposal at 10:00 AM.
• Execution Speed: You have a ruthless ability to prioritize and an obsession with momentum.
• Commercial Taste: You know the difference between a vanity metric and a lever that actually moves the needle for enterprise revenue.

Minimum Qualifications

• Experience as a Founder, Co-Founder, or early executive at a venture-backed or bootstrapped startup
• Track record of scaling revenue, operations, or product initiatives from zero to tangible traction
• Deep understanding of B2B/Enterprise SaaS growth dynamics and venture capital operations
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills—you must be able to credibly interact with CISOs, Fortune 500 executives, and Tier 1 investors
• Financial and analytical fluency to model growth scenarios, build forecasts, and structure strategic bets

How to Apply

Skip the traditional resume. Send us a one-page memo answering one of the following prompts:

1. The Autopsy: What was the biggest failure or hardest lesson from your last startup, and how has it changed the way you operate?
2. The Growth Plan: Outline a highly unconventional, zero-budget GTM experiment you would run in your first 30 days at Zania to capture the attention of enterprise CISOs.

The bar is simple: Does this memo prove you have founder-level clarity, grit, and strategic taste?

Location

Based in (or willing to relocate to) Palo Alto, California, working in-person with the team five days a week.

Compensation & Benefits

• Flexible PTO policy
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Meals and snacks in the office
• Relocation support

Zania is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law.