Founders Associate

About Dust

Work is being rewritten, and the people holding the pen are the ones who actually run it.

We call them AI operators: the employees inside companies who build, deploy, and run AI agents for their teams, without waiting for someone to hand them a tool. Dust is the platform they choose to rewire how their company works.

With 70%+ weekly active users, people stick with Dust as much as they do with Slack and Notion. We don't get piloted and shelved. We land once, and spread. We're at an exciting stage of our journey, and growing fast.

We're serving great customers like Datadog, 1Password, Cursor, Clay, and Persona, and aim to x5 our growth by the end of 2026.

Dust is backed by Sequoia with a determined team of optimists (coming from Stripe, OpenAI, and Stanford) who like to focus on users, ship fast, and don't take themselves too seriously while doing so. The Generalist named us among the Future 50.

Summary

We're looking for a Founder's Associate to work directly with our co-founder Gabriel for a 6-month internship (July 2026 - January 2027). You'll own the operational rhythm that keeps our leadership team aligned and our investors informed, from board materials to investor updates to teamOS.

This is a rare opportunity to see how a fast-growing, Sequoia-backed startup operates from the inside, work alongside founders daily, and build leverage across every part of the company. If you thrive in ambiguity, move fast, and want real responsibility from day one, this role will accelerate your career.

What you'll do

Executive Support & Operations

• Own the preparation and delivery of monthly investor updates, ensuring they're accurate, compelling, and shipped on time

• Manage board meeting preparation, coordinating inputs across functions and ensuring materials are polished and ready

• Support the Chief of Staff on executive-level projects and strategic initiatives that have already been scoped and shipped

Team Operating System

• Run weekly team meetings (weeklies), ensuring they're well-structured, actionable, and maintain team rhythm

• Maintain and improve teamOS—our internal systems for goal-setting, accountability, and cross-functional coordination

• Partner with Area Leads and Ops to keep the team drumbeat consistent and effective

Stakeholder Coordination

• Act as a trusted liaison between the Chief of Staff, founders (especially Gabriel), and cross-functional partners

• Ensure nothing falls through the cracks during a critical period when the Chief of Staff is on leave

• Build relationships across the team to understand how decisions flow and how to keep operations smooth

We're Seeking

Every candidate and employee's success is measured against the same 3 dimensions: Aptitude, Attitude, and Agency.

Aptitude

• Previous experience in high-output environments: startups, VC, consulting, or banking

• Strong written communication—can draft investor updates and board materials that are clear, concise, and founder-ready

• Ability to juggle multiple priorities, manage deadlines, and deliver high-quality work under pressure

• Comfortable with ambiguity and able to structure unstructured problems

• Currently pursuing or recently completed a Master's or MBA program

Attitude

• Collaborative and humble—makes the people around you better, not just yourself

• Low ego, high output—willing to do whatever it takes to move the team forward

• Strong cultural fit with Dust's values: optimistic, user-focused, and doesn't take yourself too seriously

• Proactive communicator who keeps stakeholders informed and aligned

• Absorbs friction rather than creates it—makes hard things easier for the team

Agency

• Owns problems end-to-end without waiting to be told what to do

• Drives outcomes proactively—sees what needs to happen and makes it happen

• Makes decisions independently and knows when to escalate vs. when to execute

• Brings solutions, not just problems—comes with recommendations, not questions

• Takes initiative to learn fast, ramp quickly, and deliver impact from day one

Compensation and Benefits

• Competitive compensation: €50,000 annual salary (prorated for 6-month contract)

• Opportunity to work directly with founders at a Sequoia-backed startup

• New MacBook Pro or Linux machine, monitor, keyboard, etc.

• Beautiful office in the heart of Paris

• Opportunity to travel to the US multiple times a year

• Regular team events and offsite

Location

We're prioritizing building our team with an in-person culture at our offices in Paris and San Francisco, because we value the magic that happens when talented people work closely together.

Why Dust

The models are powerful enough. What's missing is the product layer where AI meets how companies actually work. That's what we're building: the infrastructure that lets any team turn scattered knowledge and tools into coordinated execution with agents they build, own, and run themselves.

We use Dust ourselves every day. We get to shape how humans and agents collaborate while solving our own problems with the product we ship. That loop is rare, and it's why we move fast.

If you're excited about defining a new category and want to join a determined team of optimists who focus on users, ship fast, and don't take themselves too seriously, we'd love to talk.

Even if you don't check every box in our requirements, we encourage you to apply. We value diverse perspectives and backgrounds, and we're more interested in your potential and passion than a perfect match to our checklist.

Learn how we think and work.

• Our product constitution, a story about our mission

• Agents at work - Latent Space, podcast with our cofounder, Stanislas Polu, 2024

• LLMs reasoning and agentic capabilities over time - dotAI, podcast with our cofounder, Stanislas Polu, 2024