--- title: 'Founding Product Marketer - Lithos Ai at Unusual Ventures' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-product-marketer-lithos-ai-unusual-ventures-san-francisco-4mvpgm8df3dg' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-28' --- # Founding Product Marketer - Lithos Ai at Unusual Ventures - **Company:** Unusual Ventures - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $150k–$200k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-10-26 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-28 - **Apply:** https://jobs.lever.co/unusual/743f7d14-617b-4daa-9b87-612eda591538 ## 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 on models like DeepSeek and Kimi. 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 on inference and GPU virtualization into a product. We are a small team, and this is one of our first ten hires. ## Why this role matters We have a product that is measurably faster than the alternatives and customers who care about speed. What we don't have yet is a clear story, a known audience and a steady presence in the places AI developers pay attention. You will be our first marketer. This is a hands-on role: you will set the strategy and do the work yourself, from positioning to the first blog post. We need someone who can figure out who our buyers are, decide what we should say to them, and get our founders in front of the right people. What you build becomes the foundation for the rest of our marketing. ## What you'll do - Own positioning and messaging. Define how Lithos is described to AI developers and engineering leaders building agents and customer-facing AI features where speed matters. Turn benchmark results and customer wins into a story people remember. - Find our audience. Work out who our best buyers are, where they spend their time and what makes them try something new. Use what you learn to focus everything else. - Create the content that earns developer trust. Technical blog posts, benchmark write-ups, launch announcements, docs pages, case studies and customer videos, written or shaped by you. - Raise the profile of Lithos and its founders. Get the founders into the right conferences, podcasts, panels and communities, and help them show up prepared, with talks and posts that land. - Run launches and events. Plan and ship product launches, and work with partners and investors on developer meetups and executive dinners. - Arm the people who sell. Build the pitch, website copy, competitive positioning and customer-facing materials the founders and our founding account executive use in every deal. - Measure what works. Track which channels and messages bring in real usage and pipeline, and put more into what works. ## What we're looking for - 4+ years in product marketing for a technical product sold to developers or engineering teams, ideally in AI infrastructure, cloud, developer platforms or data infrastructure. - Real technical depth. You can explain latency, throughput and cost per token, read our docs, run a quick benchmark yourself, and hold your own with engineers. - Experience at an early-stage startup, where you built the marketing function or a big part of it instead of inheriting one. - Your own point of view. You set direction rather than waiting for instructions, and you are comfortable being the only marketer for a while. - Excellent writing. You can make a technical idea clear, specific and interesting in a few sentences. - You want to stay hands-on and build, not manage a team right away. - Nice to have: you have marketed inference, GPU cloud, model APIs or agent tooling, launched an open-source or developer-first product, or have an engineering background. ## 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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