The Role
Join as President & COO to own HASH's commercial and operating performance: build go-to-market, lead enterprise sales, own customer lifecycle and success, manage finances and forecasting, create operating rhythms, hire and scale commercial teams, and partner with the CEO on strategy, fundraising, and major decisions. Initially hands-on, then build repeatable systems and teams to increase growth and execution reliability.
Summary Generated by Built In
About HASH
About the role
What you'll own
Go-to-market and revenue
Customers
Finance and company planning
Company operations
What you will share with the CEO
What success looks like
About you
This role is probably not for you if
Benefits
HASH is building an open-source platform for structured knowledge and organizational decision-making. We turn information from databases, applications, documents, communications, sensors, and other sources into continuously updated knowledge and process graphs. From this shared model, organizations can analyze their operations, simulate possible futures, automate workflows, and give AI agents the context they need to act reliably.
Our mission is to solve information failure and enable everybody to make the right decisions. We work on difficult technical and commercial problems, including applications in regulated and safety-critical environments.
Until now, our Founder/CEO has operated across almost every part of HASH: product, technology, research, sales, customers, marketing, finance, recruiting, partnerships, and general company operations. With initial commercial traction now secured, we're now looking for an exceptional operator to become the CEO’s counterpart in building HASH, debottlenecking the firm as we grow.
The CEO will increasingly focus on product, technology, people, and the long-term direction of the platform. You will take primary responsibility for turning what we are building into a successful, durable business. Your central mandate will be to own HASH’s commercial and operating performance: generating revenue, winning and retaining customers, building our go-to-market capabilities, managing our finances, and ensuring that the company executes effectively.
This is not a conventional back-office COO role. It is also not a staff position in which you prepare information for the CEO and wait for decisions. You will have genuine authority, broad ownership, and a direct role in determining company strategy.
Initially, you will be extremely hands-on. You may lead a customer meeting in the morning, revise our financial plan in the afternoon, interview a commercial hire, and help resolve an operational problem before the end of the day. Over time, you will build the teams and systems that make this work repeatable.
You will take the lead on how HASH finds, wins, and grows customers.
This includes:
- Defining our go-to-market strategy, target markets, ideal customer profiles, and highest-value use cases.
- Turning HASH’s technical capabilities into clear, compelling commercial propositions.
- Owning positioning, packaging, pricing, pipeline development, and revenue forecasting.
- Personally leading important enterprise opportunities, from initial discovery through commercial negotiation and close.
- Building the processes, collateral, systems, and team required to move beyond founder-led sales.
- Developing productive partnerships and distribution channels where they can materially accelerate the business.
- Establishing clear commercial metrics and holding the company accountable for them.
You will need to understand HASH deeply enough to represent it credibly to sophisticated technical and executive buyers. You do not need to be an engineer, but you must be intellectually curious and comfortable selling a complex, technically differentiated product.
You will own the overall customer relationship, from the first serious commercial conversation through deployment, success, renewal, and expansion.
You will:
- Develop a rigorous understanding of customer problems and purchasing behavior.
- Ensure that prospective customers are qualified against both their likely value and HASH’s ability to deliver for them.
- Create a coherent journey from sales through implementation and ongoing success.
- Maintain close relationships with senior customer stakeholders.
- Make sure that commitments are realistic, explicit, and delivered.
- Establish strong feedback loops between customers, product, engineering, and research.
- Identify repeatable patterns without allowing one-off requests to pull the product in conflicting directions.
- Build the customer success, solutions, and commercial delivery capabilities we need as the company grows.
We expect you to care equally about signing customers and making them successful.
You will take primary responsibility for the company’s financial management and planning, working with our external accountants, legal advisers, and other specialists where appropriate.
This includes:
- Owning budgets, forecasts, cash management, and runway planning.
- Maintaining a reliable company operating model and ensuring that decisions are grounded in accurate numbers.
- Developing scenario plans that connect hiring, revenue, product investment, and financing requirements.
- Improving commercial discipline around pricing, contracts, margins, payment terms, and customer concentration.
- Producing high-quality management, board, and investor reporting.
- Supporting fundraising and other financing activity.
- Overseeing the external providers and internal processes involved in accounting, tax, payroll, insurance, legal matters, and financial controls.
We have bookkeepers and accountants, and you do not need to perform every task yourself. You do, however, need to understand the numbers, own their accuracy, and use them to make good decisions.
You will build the operating system that allows a small, ambitious team to execute at high speed without creating unnecessary bureaucracy.
You will:
- Translate company strategy into clear priorities, accountable owners, metrics, and operating plans.
- Establish an effective cadence for company planning, leadership decisions, and performance reviews.
- Identify where decisions or projects are becoming stuck and intervene before momentum is lost.
- Improve coordination across commercial, customer, product, technical, and research work.
- Clarify ownership where responsibilities are ambiguous.
- Make sure important decisions and commitments are recorded and communicated.
- Introduce process where it materially improves speed, quality, or reliability—and avoid it where it does not.
- Take responsibility for miscellaneous high-impact problems that do not fit neatly inside an existing function.
The goal is not to make HASH feel like a large company. It is to preserve the speed and ownership of a small team while making our execution increasingly reliable.
Alongside the CEO, as President & COO you will jointly own:
- Overall company strategy.
- Annual and multi-year planning.
- Fundraising and investor relationships.
- Organizational design.
- Executive and other company-critical hiring.
- Leadership development, performance management, and culture.
- Major partnerships and unusually important customer relationships.
- Decisions that materially change the direction or risk profile of the company.
Recruiting will be divided pragmatically. You will ordinarily lead hiring for sales, marketing, customer, finance, and operating roles. The CEO and CTO will remain more involved in product, engineering, and research hiring. Senior leadership recruitment and the overall hiring bar will be shared.
The division of responsibilities should remain explicit but not territorial. We want two leaders who optimize for HASH as a whole, communicate candidly, and step into one another’s domains when the company requires it.
During your first few months, you will establish a complete and accurate view of the company’s commercial, customer, financial, and operating position. You will take meaningful work off the CEO’s plate immediately rather than spending months observing it.
Within your first year:
- HASH will have expanded its initial enterprise customer base and developed a clear, evidence-backed go-to-market strategy.
- We understand which customers and use cases to pursue—and which to decline.
- Commercial opportunities are managed through a disciplined, visible pipeline.
- Revenue and cash forecasts are trustworthy enough to drive company decisions.
- Customers experience a coherent journey from initial conversation through deployment and expansion.
- Product teams receive structured, high-quality feedback from the market.
- The company has an effective operating cadence with clear priorities and ownership.
- The highest-leverage commercial and operating hires have been made.
- Important work happens without needing to be chased.
- The CEO is spending most of their time on product, technology, research, and long-term product strategy.
There is no single conventional background for this role. We are interested in people who combine commercial judgment, financial fluency, intellectual range, and the ability to earn the confidence of senior enterprise customers.
Strong candidates will be able to demonstrate most of the following:
- You have built trusted relationships with senior executives and can operate credibly with CEOs, CFOs, business-unit leaders, functional executives, and boards.
- You have personally originated, shaped, and won substantial engagements, partnerships, or enterprise opportunities. You understand that selling complex work involves diagnosing the real problem, developing conviction with the customer, navigating multiple stakeholders, and sustaining momentum through a long decision process.
- You understand how large enterprises actually buy, make decisions, allocate budgets, manage risk, and attempt organizational change.
- You have led complex transformation or performance-improvement work in which success depended on more than producing a good strategy. You know how to establish ownership, mobilize stakeholders, resolve resistance, and translate an ambition into measurable results.
- You can understand unfamiliar industries and difficult technical subjects quickly, identify what matters, and communicate it clearly to different audiences.
- You are highly financially literate. You can interrogate a business model, construct and challenge forecasts, allocate scarce resources, evaluate investments, and engage confidently with investors and boards.
- You move comfortably between the strategic and the practical: from determining which markets HASH should pursue to improving a proposal, negotiating a contract, reviewing the pipeline, interviewing a candidate, or resolving an urgent customer issue.
- You have recruited, led, and developed exceptional people. You set a high bar while creating the conditions in which strong people can do their best work.
- You make sound decisions with incomplete information and are willing to be held accountable for their consequences.
- You communicate with unusual clarity, both in writing and in conversation.
- You have the confidence to challenge the CEO directly, the judgment to disagree constructively, and the lack of ego required to change your mind.
- You care more about building a consequential company than preserving the status associated with your present role.
Previous experience operating a B2B software company (ideally involving enterprise software, data infrastructure, AI, developer tools, simulation, or another technically demanding category) would be valuable, but it is not required. We care more about whether you can learn the mechanics of a technology business quickly and apply exceptional commercial and operating judgment to HASH.
This may be an especially compelling role for someone who has spent years advising management teams and now wants to become part of one: setting the direction, making the decisions, building the organization, and remaining accountable for the outcome.
Prior experience with the title “COO” or in a formal ops role is not required. You might currently be a founder, general manager, commercial leader, consultancy firm partner, operating executive, strategy leader, or unusually broad chief of staff. We care much more about the scale of problems you have personally taken responsibility for than the title you held while doing it.
- Your experience is limited to operating mature functions with established teams and processes.
- You want to oversee sales but do not want to sell personally.
- You view a COO primarily as an internal administration or project-management role.
- You are uncomfortable owning financial outcomes.
- You need problems to be carefully defined before you begin working on them.
- You prefer consensus to making a timely decision.
- You want a narrow remit with predictable boundaries.
- You are not interested in understanding a deeply technical product.
- You simply want to scale an existing process, rather than develop, execute and iterate on strategy from the ground-up.
- You don't value equity.
A base salary will be offered of £80,000-120,000 in London, or €80,000-120,000 in Berlin.
Compensation in this role is extremely heavily performance-based, with generous equity/bonus offered in addition to the base salary, in order to align management incentives.
By way of context, HASH's founders have previously sold companies for tens of millions, hundreds of millions (Trello, acq. $425m), and billions of dollars (Stack Overflow; acq. $1.8b).
Skills Required
- Proven ability to build trusted relationships with senior executives (CEOs, CFOs, business-unit leaders, boards)
- Personal track record of originating, shaping, and closing substantial enterprise engagements or partnerships
- Experience selling complex, technically differentiated products and navigating long enterprise procurement processes
- Deep understanding of how large enterprises buy, allocate budgets, manage risk, and implement organizational change
- Led complex transformation or performance-improvement initiatives requiring stakeholder mobilization and measurable results
- High financial literacy: constructing and interrogating forecasts, budgets, cash management, and investor reporting
- Experience building commercial teams and go-to-market capabilities (sales, customer success, solutions, partnerships)
- Proven experience recruiting, leading, and developing high-performing teams and senior hires
- Comfortable being highly hands-on across sales, finance, hiring, and operations during early-stage scaling
- Ability to understand unfamiliar industries and technical subjects quickly and communicate them clearly to varied audiences
- Willingness to personally sell and own financial outcomes, and to be accountable for decisions
- Confidence to challenge the CEO constructively and operate with low ego; strong written and verbal communication
- Prior experience operating a B2B software company (enterprise software, data infrastructure, AI, developer tools, simulation)
- Interest in substantial equity-heavy compensation and startup upside
Am I A Good Fit?
Get Personalized Job Insights.
Our AI-powered fit analysis compares your resume with a job listing so you know if your skills & experience align.
Success! Refresh the page to see how your skills align with this role.
The Company
What We Do
HASH is the open-source platform for decision-making, combining knowledge capture and modeling tools with fast, effective, distributed simulation of complex systems. We're on a mission to eliminate information failure and help everybody make the right decisions.
