Senior Entrepreneur In Residence
Founders School is a 4-year high school where students build real companies targeting $1M in profit by graduation. The program launches Fall 2026 with 20 students and 2 Senior EIRs. You would be one of them, coming in as a founding team member of one of the most radical educational endeavors in the world.
The Role
The demands of this role are high. You've built something from nothing. Not inherited a team of 50 and optimized it, but started at zero, figured out what to sell, sold it, and got past a million dollars. That's the minimum expectation for this role.
You're also at the AI frontier. You use AI every day in your own work. Not just asking questions to ChatGPT or Claude, but building workflows, replacing yourself in parts of your work, and trying the new models when they drop. You can show us what you've built, and it's legit. This is non-negotiable.
Your students will be 14-to-18-year-olds building real businesses. They're the most ambitious teenagers in the country, and your job is to shape them into elite founders.
You'll spend the majority of your time in direct 1:1 coaching: figuring out where each founder is stuck, identifying the highest-leverage move, and holding them to a clear action plan until it's done. The rest of your time goes to workshops, group sessions, and building the culture of a program that has never existed before.
This is not a teaching job. There is no curriculum. There is no classroom. Students handle their academics in a compressed 3-hour morning block through our Timeback platform, then the rest of the day they're working on their business and leveling up their entrepreneurial capabilities.
We promise students $1M in profit by graduation or their tuition is refunded. Your performance will be measured by how well your students track toward it. If that kind of accountability excites you, you're the right person. If it makes you nervous, this isn't for you.
The Three Pillars of the Founders Program
Build a $1M Business — You coach students through the full arc: finding a real problem, building a product, getting customers, and scaling to $1M in profit. You've done this yourself, so you know what actually matters at each stage versus what feels productive but isn't.
Top 1% AI Native — By graduation, your students should be able to walk into a Fortune 500 and lead an AI workshop. You're already operating at the frontier in your own work. You teach students to be builders with AI, not just users of it.
Develop as Thinkers and Operators — Selling, resilience, financial literacy, cold outreach, rationality. And the deeper work: reading widely, writing clearly, examining their own assumptions, articulating conviction. We're building philosopher-builders, not just operators. You model it. You coach it.
What You Will Be Doing
- Coaching student founders 1:1 through strategy, execution, and growth decisions — the majority of your week
- Leading standups, weekly ship reviews, and group sessions (feedback circles, peer discussions, debates, board meeting sims)
- Facilitating workshops: Sales Blitz, AI Agents & Automation, Negotiation, Growth Campaigns, Pitch Competition
- Placing students in apprenticeships and making the track assignment call at the end of Boot Camp
- Working alongside world-class entrepreneurs who come through the program — and helping students extract maximum value from every interaction
- Helping shape the culture, systems, and playbook of a brand-new program from day one
- Working directly with the two Program Directors to build something that hasn't been built before
What You Will NOT Be Doing
- Teaching academics. No lectures, no lesson plans, no grading. Academics are handled by a dedicated team — your focus stays on ventures.
- Following a pre-set curriculum. You facilitate applied learning based on what each student actually needs right now.
- Giving motivational talks without follow-through. Every conversation ends with a specific action and a deadline.
- Lowering the bar when a student is "close." The bar is how you show them you believe they can clear it.
- Managing admin — scheduling, paperwork, enrollment logistics. That's handled by ops.
- Navigating school bureaucracy. Your time stays on the students.
What This Becomes
At 12 months, your students have real revenue, real customers, and a validated business they're ready to scale. You've helped build the coaching playbook that the next wave of EIRs will learn from. You know every student's business cold — their unit economics, their bottleneck this week, and the thing they're avoiding.
As the program scales to more cities and more students, Senior EIRs take on pod leadership — mentoring teams of Junior EIRs, shaping campus culture, and potentially serving as Head of School for an entire city. You're getting in at the start of a program designed to produce the next generation of founders at scale.
Requirements
- You have grown a business from zero to $1M+ in profit. Not joined one that was already there — built it. This is non-negotiable.
- You are fluent at the AI frontier. You use AI daily to build, ship, and analyze. You will be asked to show us your workflows. This is non-negotiable.
- You have built real products, shipped them, and managed teams.
- You hold high standards and provide high support at the same time. You can tell a student founder her strategy doesn't work and have her leave more motivated, not less.
- You genuinely like being around teenagers and they respond to you.
- You are willing to work on-site at our campus (relocation support provided).
- You are legally authorized to work in the United States.
Nice to Have
- Founded or co-founded multiple ventures
- Scaled a business past $1M into multi-million or exit range
- Shipped AI-native products or built custom agents in production
- Experience working with young people — students, early-career professionals, or youth program participants
If you've built something real and the idea of helping teenagers do the same thing sounds like the most meaningful work you could do next, apply now.
Interested? Email nat.eliason@alpha.school to learn more.