[Hiring] Chief of Staff @The Explanation Company

Would you like to work closely with experienced entrepreneurs, providing administrative and operational support to them and their team? Our company is building an app for children that helps them connect with their friends and explore their interests. We’re looking to hire someone who is experienced at supporting an executive. You will work closely with our co-founders, helping with everything that comes up in the day-to-day of running a startup.
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It’s important to us that you have previous experience as an executive assistant, ideally in a tech startup. It’s also important that you have experience working remotely in a full-time role. We are a U.S.-based company with an entirely remote team.

The Role

The focus of this role will be assisting our President, David and CEO, Keith. They lead a team of six full-time people and a dozen contractors.​ There are three key aspects of this role; roughly a third of your time will be spent on each. First, a few hours of each day you’ll be assisting David and Keith. Since you’ve been an executive assistant before, this part of the role is likely the part you are most familiar with. In these few hours you’ll help him process their inbox, draft replies to emails, help schedule meetings, and make travel arrangements. Most days you’ll have a one-on-one call with David and Keith to help them efficiently work through these items.
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Personality-wise, David and Keith are easygoing, but they’re experienced entrepreneurs and have incredibly high standards. The emails you’ll be drafting are complex so it’s important that your natural personality is very detail-oriented. The stakes are high and an email to an investor in which you get a detail wrong can impact a fundraise. Similarly, calendaring is often complicated, dealing with multiple time zones and different calendars and you’ll be expected to get the details right every time. You need to be the kind of person who never forgets to mention the time zone when proposing a time for a meeting and never forgets the Zoom link. In addition, you’ll need to be a strong writer, skilled at crafting tricky communication with a high degree of social finesse. David and Keith are looking for an assistant who will hit the ground running, in each of these areas.
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The second aspect of this job will be acting as a recruiting coordinator. We expect to be expanding the team soon. You’ll help edit job descriptions, post job openings, draft outreach to candidates, and conduct some first round interviews. It’s okay if you don’t have a lot of experience with recruiting; we will help you learn our approach. However, we want to make sure that you’re excited to help with recruiting.
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The last third of this job is helping with miscellaneous projects related to the product we’re building. Most weeks, you will coordinate with parents so David and others on the team can meet with parents and kids on Zoom for user interviews. Other projects will vary every week. One week you may double-check the work of a new contractor we hired by reviewing a couple hundred short videos to ensure they’re appropriate for kids. Another week you might help evaluate contractors we are considering hiring.

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Job Requirements ​

If everything above excites you, we’d love to have you apply. A few things we’re going to look for as we review applications are:

• At least 3 years of experience as an Executive Assistant or Chief of Staff, supporting a VP or C-level executive for a U.S. company.

• Available with flexible hours so you can occasionally handle things on evenings and weekends. While the majority of this job will be performed during normal work hours, you’re supporting an executive building a startup so every week things will come up in the evenings and weekends. You’ll be expected to keep an eye on communication outside of work hours, checking it periodically to spot urgent things that you need to handle quickly or you need to escalate to David or Keith.

The Company

At The Explanation Company, we are building a new kind of internet browser for kids to use on their tablets. We think the internet is one of the greatest inventions ever. As grown-ups, it’s easy to take it for granted that we have instant access to information on anything we’re curious about, but children have been left out. We think this is because there is such a focus on making the internet “safe” for children, that everyone is overlooking the single biggest problem with the internet for kids: it’s too difficult to use. Searching and browsing the web requires advanced literacy skills that most kids don’t have. We’re making it incredibly easy for children to explore their questions & interests, discover new passions, and do all this independently or with friends. Our goal is not to reduce the amount of time kids spend with screens, instead it’s to increase the quality of experience children have with the screens they love using.

Our team culture is one where the fun of the work comes from solving hard problems with talented colleagues. Things are fast-paced, with a focus on getting things done. We have big plans and a small team that is passionate about reaching as many children as possible so we have to find clever shortcuts to work smarter, not harder.

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To Apply​

If you're intrigued by the role and the team, we'd love to hear from you!