--- title: 'Founding Account Executive - Lithos Ai at Unusual Ventures' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-account-executive-lithos-ai-unusual-ventures-san-francisco-hrkth7a4vxs7' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-11-04' --- # Founding Account Executive - Lithos Ai at Unusual Ventures - **Company:** Unusual Ventures - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-11-04 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-04 - **Apply:** https://jobs.lever.co/unusual/774fc7d2-ec6d-44e6-8299-68a0a7400a21 ## Job description ## About Lithos Lithos builds the fastest agentic inference on the planet: frontier open models at full precision on standard GPUs. Our engine currently holds top spots on Artificial Analysis for output speed, time to first token and end-to-end latency. We serve inference to growing startups as well as FT500 companies through a public API or on their own hardware. Lithos was founded by Carnegie Mellon computer science professors who spent years turning systems research into a product. We are a small team, and this is one of our first ten hires. ## Why this role matters We have serious enterprise interest from well-known, AI-forward companies, and we need someone to turn it into revenue. This is deliberately an individual contributor role. We don't yet know our repeatable sales motion well enough for anyone to build a team around it. We need one great seller who can run our first enterprise deals end to end, close them, and tell us what actually wins. What you learn becomes the playbook the rest of our sales organization is built on. ## What you'll do - Own our first enterprise deals from start to finish. Take active opportunities with large, AI-forward companies from technical evaluation through pilot, pricing, procurement and signature. - Run technical sales without a big support team. Work directly with the founders and engineers to scope pilots, define success criteria and prove our speed advantage on the customer's own workloads. - Build pipeline. Find and open new accounts with companies building AI agents and customer-facing AI features where speed matters. - Write the playbook. Document who buys, why they buy, what objections come up, how pricing lands and how long deals take. Bring the founders clear, honest answers about what closes and what doesn't. - Shape the product and pricing. Bring customer feedback straight to the founding team and help decide what we build and how we charge for it. ## What we're looking for - 5+ years of closing complex, technical enterprise deals, ideally in AI infrastructure, cloud, developer platforms or data infrastructure. - A track record of closing six- and seven-figure deals with technical buyers, and the ability to walk through exactly how you won them. - Experience as an early or founding sales hire at a startup, where you built the process instead of following one. - Comfortable going deep on technical conversations with engineering leaders, and fast at learning what you don't know. - You want to stay hands-on. You're motivated by closing deals and building something new, not by managing a team right away. - Nice to have: you have sold usage-based or consumption pricing, GPU or cloud capacity, or AI and ML tooling. ## About Unusual Ventures ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: A venture capital firm that provides hands-on operational support and a dedicated engagement model to help technical founders of enterprise AI software startups achieve product-market fit. - **Entity Type**: Private (venture capital fund) - **Headquarters**: Menlo Park, California, United States - **Founded**: 2018 - **Founders**: Jyoti Bansal and John Vrionis ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Venture Capital / Financial Services, with a focus on seed-stage enterprise AI software startups. - **Target customers**: Technical founders of early-stage startups (B2B through founders). - **Mission or purpose statement**: “Raise the bar for what founders should expect from their venture investors” and give technical founders the best odds of finding product-market fit. ## Products & Services - **Unusual Venture Capital**: Seed-stage investment in enterprise AI software startups. - **Unusual Founder Services**: A team of full-time operators embedded with portfolio companies to execute customer discovery, go-to-market strategy, and product-market fit work. - **Unusual Academy**: An immersive program where founders work side by side with Unusual’s founders and expert operators. - **Community & Events**: Quarterly founders events, founder academy, monthly intimate dinners with customer prospects, and go-to-market tools. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not applicable (private fund; not publicly disclosed). - **Key Metric**: 20 employees (as of latest data); 51,647 LinkedIn followers (+16.5% yearly); 10 active job postings (+100% yearly). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: LPs are primarily non-profits (hospitals, foundations, HBCUs). Portfolio companies include Rime (powers nearly 100 million phone calls/month for clients like Mayo Clinic, Dialpad, Upstart, and Asurion). Co-founder Jyoti Bansal is one of only 16 people to build two companies surpassing $100M in revenue (AppDynamics and Harness). - **Growth Signals**: Portfolio companies raise follow-on rounds at valuations “significantly above industry averages.” The firm has seen a 100% increase in job postings year-over-year. ## Competitive Advantages - **Full-time operator model**: Unlike traditional VCs, Unusual embeds dedicated operators who do the work alongside founders, not just advise. - **Concentrated portfolio**: Makes a small number of investments each year, giving each founder full attention. - **Proven founders**: Jyoti Bansal (AppDynamics, Harness) and John Vrionis (30+ billion-dollar outcomes) bring deep first-hand experience. - **The Unusual Method**: A purpose-built framework for product-market fit, refined through thousands of customer conversations. - **LP alignment**: LPs are primarily non-profits, creating a “forces for good” ethos. ## Strategic Focus - Continue investing in seed-stage enterprise AI software startups. - Expand the Unusual Method and Founder Services to increase portfolio success rates. - Build a close-knit, supportive founder community to drive repeatable PMF. ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: “Forces for good” – employees work with a mission-driven team committed to founders through the hard phases. 5.0/5.0 employer rating (1 review) with high marks for work-life balance, compensation, and career growth. - **Work environment**: Small team (20 people) with high impact. Offices in Menlo Park (HQ) and San Francisco; team also distributed across the US and Australia. Remote/hybrid policy not explicitly stated, but the presence of multiple offices suggests flexibility. - **Notable perks**: Opportunity to work alongside top technical founders and industry veterans; direct involvement in the product-market fit process; exposure to a concentrated portfolio of cutting-edge AI startups. - **Career path**: Roles across venture operations, sales, finance, and programs. The firm actively hires for roles that support portfolio companies (e.g., Founding Account Executive, VP of Engineering, Software Engineer) as well as internal functions (e.g., Director of Programs, VP of Sales). ## Sources 1. [unusual.vc](https://www.unusual.vc/our-story/) 2. [unusual.vc](https://www.unusual.vc/team/) 3. [unusual.vc](https://www.unusual.vc/founder-services/) 4. [jobs.lever.co/unusual](https://jobs.lever.co/unusual) 5. 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