Substrate builds fintech infrastructure to grow America’s industrial GDP, starting with captive finance-as-a-service for equipment vendors.
Today, only the largest manufacturers like Caterpillar and John Deere offer financing in-house; everyone else sends customers to external lenders with outdated processes and tight credit boxes. Substrate unlocks in-house financing for the other 99.5%, enabling more sales and a new revenue channel.
In just a few months since launch, we've partnered with some of the largest machine sellers in the world—including auctioneers, dealers, marketplaces, and manufacturers—across manufacturing, construction, energy, agriculture, and more. Our vision is to own financing—the most critical transaction in equipment sales—and expand outward, like Stripe with payments, to build the financial operating system for equipment: insurance, banking, invoicing, warranties, liquidations, and more.
Our team comes from SpaceX, Anthropic, Ritchie Bros, Ramp, and other leading companies. We raised a seed round co-led by Floodgate (first investors in Lyft/Twitter) and the CEO of Holt, the biggest Caterpillar dealer in America.
About the RoleWe're hiring a Chief of Staff to lead projects across the business. This is a true founding, hands-on role for someone who wants creative ownership at an early-stage startup: you'll lead initiatives across every part of the company (product, GTM, talent, ops, finance), while being both strategic and deeply hands-on/tactical.
You'll work directly with the founder/CEO and senior leadership across operations, risk, and capital markets. You'll build the playbook as you go, drop into whatever matters most that week, and turn ambiguous problems into shipped outcomes. It's a "mini-COO" seat — one of the fastest ways there is to learn how an entire company gets built.
Some of the things you'll do:
Drive GTM execution: run experiments, build campaigns, and visit customers at trade shows
Own cross-functional projects end to end, from a rough problem statement to a shipped result, across product, GTM, capital markets, and ops
Product management: write crisp PRDs, spec requirements, and work directly with engineers and designers.
Run talent acquisition for hard-to-fill roles: source candidates, manage the pipeline, and help us hire exceptional people
Prepare investor, board, and fundraising materials for investors
You believe in objective good and beauty, and you want to bring them to an antiquated, predatory industry.
You believe not all technology is created equal. You don’t care about building another enterprise SaaS tool, you want to build tools that advance civilization.
You want to work with people who treat their work as craft, who violently reject “just good enough,” and you want to help build that culture.
Deeply curious. Your friends would describe you as a "voracious learner."
Extraordinarily organized and detail-oriented. You can drill to the atomic unit of any task or workflow and understand it from first principles, without someone building the system for you.
Have both breadth and depth. The surface area here — debt markets, AI, equipment verticals, sales, product, GTM, investors — is enormous, and you're the kind of person who can absorb things fast and execute.
Have a track record of high ownership in demanding environments — a startup, consulting, banking, or a serious operating role. (We care more about horsepower, judgment, and drive than a specific number of years)
Will do what it takes to win.
Able to travel ~once per quarter for trade shows and vendor visits.
Are excited to help build this company — and its culture — from the ground up, and aligned with all of our Cultural Principles.
SF preferred, but not required
$110K-$140K base
$35K-$90K equity
401K
Medical, dental, and vision insurance fully covered
If you are interested, please apply via Dover AND email [email protected] with:
Why you're the right fit. Be as specific as possible (no more than <500 words).
Availability for a 30min call
Skills Required
- Lead cross-functional projects end-to-end across product, GTM, capital markets, and ops
- Product management experience: write PRDs and work directly with engineers and designers
- GTM execution experience: run experiments, build campaigns, and engage customers at trade shows
- Talent acquisition experience for hard-to-fill roles: source candidates and manage hiring pipeline
- Prepare investor, board, and fundraising materials
- Track record of high ownership in demanding environments (startup, consulting, banking, or operating role)
- Extraordinarily organized and detail-oriented; strong execution and operational rigor
- Deep intellectual curiosity and ability to rapidly learn new domains
- Able to travel approximately once per quarter for trade shows and vendor visits
- San Francisco location preferred
What We Do
Substrate was founded to return the United States to dominance in semiconductor fabrication. We invent technology to extend Moore's Law while reducing costs of leading-edge fabs and the wafers they produce.
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