Founder Associate

Founder's Associate — San Francisco

Run the company with the founder, from SF launch to Series A.

📍 San Francisco Bay Area · On-site / Hybrid · Full-time · Start ASAP

About Bitewise

Bitewise is an AI-native platform that turns food discovery into real restaurant transactions. Diners watch short, authentic videos of dishes, let AI narrow the choice, and lock in a time-sensitive deal — then dine. Dine like a regular.

We solve two persistent problems: diners waste time deciding where to eat amid fragmented, untrustworthy content; restaurants sit on empty tables during off-peak hours with no good way to fill them dynamically.

After validating in Barcelona and Paris, we're launching in San Francisco — building the real-time exchange for local dining. Team of ~14 across product, AI, and city operations.

The role

This is not a paper-pushing chief-of-staff job. You'll be wherever the bottleneck is that week — in the field, in the data, in the room:

1. Own pieces of the SF launch. Restaurant supply, creator production, deal operations. In the field signing restaurants and running shoots, not behind a desk watching dashboards.

2. Drive fundraising execution. Investor research, deck and data-room prep, outreach and follow-ups. You'll learn how a seed round actually gets built.

3. Build the operating system. Turn manual workflows into scalable systems — hiring pipelines, merchant onboarding, metrics that keep the machine honest. Work with product and AI teammates to automate what works.

4. Special projects. New-city scouting, partnership BD, pricing experiments — whatever the founder needs, before he knows he needs it.

Who will thrive here

• Owner mentality. You move work forward without waiting for step-by-step instructions, and you finish what you start.
• Range. One day you're pitching a restaurant owner, the next you're tightening an investor narrative. Context-switching energizes you.
• Written communication at investor quality. Clear thinking on the page, not just in your head.
• Field-ready. Comfortable walking into restaurants, talking to strangers, solving messy operational problems with judgment.
• Analytical spine. Spreadsheets, metrics, structured thinking — you argue with numbers.
• AI-native curiosity. You reach for AI tools before manual work, and you can tell a useful workflow from an impressive demo.

Helpful, not required: startup / consulting / ops experience; hospitality or marketplace background; Mandarin, Spanish, or French (our tourist markets).

Details

• Location: San Francisco Bay Area, on-site / hybrid
• Type: Full-time
• Compensation: $20–$40/hr + equity
• Start: November 2026
• Reports to: Founder, directly

Interested?

Email [email protected] with your résumé or LinkedIn, a short note on why this role (not just why startups), and one example of something you built, sold, or improved without being asked to. Practical initiative matters more than polished credentials.