Work @ AbstractOps
Open Roles
John Puma
Hari RaghavanAbstractOps is the OS for building & scaling companies.
Right now, "corporate" functions — HR, finance, legal, compliance, vendor management — are very fragmented and inefficient, with dozens of point solutions that don't talk to each other. As a result, companies waste 10-20% of their time on things that are tedious but automatable.
This doesn't have to be the case. Think about how chaotic sales processes were before Salesforce, and how far that function has come in the couple of decades since. We're applying the same principles to rebuild the "company stack" (i.e., building an OS / connective tissue between HR, finance, legal, compliance and vendor management). We're building a product that lets you run a company like writing code -- modular, reusable, and extensible pieces, integrated with existing systems. This is a lot of surface area, so we’re specifically starting with the employee lifecycle.
But because no one buys a “platform”, we’re sequentially building solutions to specific, painful use cases. By unifying payroll, cap table, contracts, etc. in one place, we unlock net-new functionality and make hard things feel easy: State payroll tax compliance; Compensation planning; HR compliance; and more.
Benefits
Why Should You Work With Us?
🚀 Crazy ambitious mission: we're rewriting core aspects of how every company in the world are built and run. (Forbes recognized us as a Cloud 100 Rising Star!)
🤑 Transparent, fair compensation: we have a robust compensation framework; we evaluate candidates rigorously, and put our best foot forward on compensation, with some flexibility between cash / equity... but then we don't negotiate (more details below).
🎑 An abundance of emojis and gifs, wackiness, and bad jokes — we have a grown-up, thoughtful culture (the average team member has 8 years of experience) but we love having a playful side and a sense of humor.
👓 So much transparency: we try really hard to do right: by the team, clients, stakeholders. When you have nothing to hide, you can be much more open and move faster ;).
🚴🏼 Investor & customer love: Want to hear more from an outside (albeit biased) perspective? Here's a video from one of our investors.
Why Might You Not Be a Fit?
🤚 Unwillingness to roll up your sleeves. No matter what you read in TechCrunch, startups aren’t glamorous. We love people who relish the idea of doing what needs to be done. Execution and moving the ball forward builds a durable company. You have to wander the desert to get to the oasis — ask any early employee at a unicorn!
✨ If you are uncomfortable with uncertainty. Early stage startups are rapidly evolving organizations. you really have to relish and embrace that to succeed.
⛑️ If you don't want to give it your all, or think about work outside of work. This doesn't mean working more hours. But we do believe that a) some of the best ideas come about in the shower or on a walk, and b) dedication to our customers, product, team is crucial to culture.
⚔️ You're not okay with bluntness and real-time feedback. We have a very transparent, direct culture... we try very hard to pair it with kindness, so this should never feel unpleasant.
👨🏫 If you need lots of management. We love people who are autonomous: self-motivated and self-directed. Leveling up the team is important to us, but this comes through doing hard things together and figuring it out; not from “being managed” or “being taught”.
What Would Make You an Amazing Fit?
🔍 High attention to detail: we care about the little things, and we work with sensitive information. Our standards for security and precision are accordingly high.
🧠 Raw intelligence / capability: we want each team member to add orthogonal perspectives, and upgrade our game.
💗 A heart full of hustle: we rely on a high-context, high-trust setup, which means everyone’s responsible for driving their own outcomes forward.
🔀 You love complex systems: in every function (technical or not), we work in systems, processes, relational data. Thinking of 2nd / 3rd order efficiencies is our jam.
⁉️ Curiosity as a habit: we love rethinking things just a little bit so we can figure out the most efficient, effective way to do things.
🙇 Low ego, low insecurity: We’re looking for people who are comfortable in their skin, and don’t take feedback personally. We love confident people, who don’t mind being wrong… because that mistake is a learning opportunity. If you aren’t thick-skinned, or you prize politeness over the right answer, this may not be a fit. A growth mindset is key.
In case it isn’t obvious already, we’re a fairly unusual company...
- We have an unusual recruiting process (this is probably the longest jobs page you’ve seen; public compensation for every role; an intake form that’s long but gets a high NPS; and a social contract during the offer to set expectations between the company and hire)
- Lots of internal transparency: open calendars, company metrics, documentation, cap table...
- Policies to optimize for for quality of life: unlimited PTO with a 2-week min; paid time off for mental health and extra “recharge” days spread through the year; parental leave; above market health benefits; $250 / mo WFH stipend. More in AbstractOps Benefits
- A distributed, diverse team (>50% women including in leadership; ~50% non-white)
- We’re not perfect 🙂 ; we iterate constantly to build “culture as a moat.”
- This unusual combination incidentally results in a high close rate on candidates (>90% from offer to acceptance, in every function).
Even more info on why our culture is very different from the average startup...
We love...
- rationality, but not at the expense of empathy
- good process and business hygiene, but not bureaucracy
- re-thinking things, but not reinventing them
We like efficiency. We geek out on elegant automation. We enjoy good wine and quality friends. We love saving money and finding the best deals but don't mind spending money to save time (time is our most precious resource!).
We all care deeply about creating a team and culture that is fun, that listens, and that creates the conditions for personal and business success, and we hope you do too... because you'll build that team and culture with us. If you're the right person, you'll be right there with us, shaping the company and running your own team.
- Enabling small companies to be more knowledgeable and thoughtful is one of the most powerful ways to augment effective innovation.
- We have fairly strong views on values that are rooted in fairness, empathy, and pragmatism. We wear them publicly and want you to help us shape them, too.
- We love smart generalists — those who are driven by curiosity, rather than solely building expertise in a single area.
- Simplifying complex things is deceptively hard. We’re trying to take multi-faceted companies, and boil them down into a few hundred parameters that define how their core operations work.
- We get tripped up by this a lot. We go down rabbit holes, or sometimes build interesting things that users don’t care about. We’re learning and trying to get better at this.
- We're working on a more complex problem than most startups (which is saying something!) but if we succeed, the addressable market is nearly unbounded. We aim to rival AWS or Salesforce in scope, impact, and market cap.
- We believe in a healthy work / life balance. We limit meetings and coordination overhead. Everyone runs fairly independently: we don't over-coordinate, but we over-communicate (in public Slack channels whenever possible).
- However, we work hard. This isn’t a 9-to-5 job. Every single teammate is held to a high bar on the outcomes they deliver, and we aren’t afraid to have a hard, honest conversation if that’s not happening.
- We believe in individual responsibility. We all have plenty to do and overseeing teammates is not one of them! Fairness, trust and experimentation guide everything we do.
Depending on seniority we offer a lot of equity (and fair cash). Every member of our team has been an early employee at another startup, and we know it can be a bad deal sometimes. So we take a great deal of care to be transparent and generous with equity, so that you feel like more of an owner. Based on rough benchmarks, our equity grants are 2-4x industry norms for seed-stage companies.
We try to get back to everyone within a week of the application, but sometimes we get backlogged a bit. If you know startups, you know there are a ton of open threads. If you have any questions whatsoever, please reach out. You are potentially part of our team so don't be shy!
Team, Investors, and Values
