Role Description We're looking for a builder—someone who wakes up thinking about how to open doors, close deals, and move an entire market forward. As General Manager / Market Lead, you are the Founder’s proxy in your territory. You drive market growth through strategic coordination across sales, government relations, customer pilots, lobbyists, and cross-functional teams. You won’t directly manage every function—but you’ll have dotted-line influence across all of them, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks and the market moves forward. This is not a “manage from a dashboard” role. You’ll be in the room with legislators and on-site with pilot customers. Think of the person who would have jumped at the chance to launch a new city for a company like Uber or Lyft in the early growth days—but with the added complexity of navigating public-sector stakeholders and shaping policy. What You’ll Drive - Market Strategy & Revenue Growth: Build and execute the go-to-market plan for your assigned territory (e.g., Maryland). Own the revenue target and coordinate the people and resources needed to hit it. - Outbound Sales & Business Development: Personally prospect and close new government and enterprise accounts. - Legislative & Government Relations: Meet with state and local legislators, attend hearings, and build the relationships that turn policy conversations into procurement opportunities. - Lobbyist Guidance: Strategically direct external lobbyists to ensure alignment with company priorities and messaging. Hold them accountable to outcomes, not activity. - Pre-Sales Pilots & Customer Success: Coordinate pilot programs across product, engineering, and customer teams. Ensure pilots convert to contracts by staying close from kickoff through go-live. - Sales Troubleshooting: Diagnose stalled deals, remove blockers, re-engage champions, and rescue at-risk opportunities. If something is broken in the funnel, you find it and fix it. - Courtroom & Regulatory Presence: Attend court sessions, regulatory meetings, and public comment periods as the company’s representative on the ground. - Cross-Functional Coordination: Serve as the connective tissue between HQ and your market. Rally product, marketing, legal, and ops teams around market-specific needs without needing a formal reporting line. Qualifications - Entrepreneurial to your core. You’ve either started something yourself or operated like a founder inside a fast-scaling company. Ambiguity is where you do your best work. - Relentlessly outbound. Your default mode is action: picking up the phone, walking into an office, sending the follow-up. Pipeline doesn’t build itself, and you don’t wait for inbound leads. - A strategic thinker who can also execute. You can map a 12-month market entry plan on a whiteboard, then spend the afternoon knocking on doors to make it real. - Comfortable in government and political environments. You understand how procurement cycles, legislative calendars, and policy advocacy work—or you learn fast and aren’t intimidated by them. - An exceptional communicator. Whether it’s a 1:1 with a county commissioner or a panel at an industry conference, you command the room and build trust quickly. - Energized by public-private partnerships. You see the intersection of technology and government as a feature, not a bug. The bureaucracy is the puzzle you want to solve. - Scrappy and resourceful. You’re the person who figures out the workaround, calls in the favor, and ships it anyway. Requirements - 8+ years of experience in high-growth, operationally intense environments. Startups, marketplace businesses, or territory-based sales organizations are ideal. - High intellectual and strategic horsepower. You pattern-match quickly, synthesize complex information, and make sharp decisions under uncertainty. MBA, management consulting, or a founded-and-operated-something background are strong signals. - Track record of opening or scaling a new market, city, or territory. You can point to a geography or vertical you built from zero (or near-zero). - Strong outbound presence. You’re credible and compelling in a room with senior stakeholders—whether that’s a C-suite buyer, a state legislator, or a skeptical procurement officer. - Government or public-sector experience is a plus, not a requirement. We have sales specialists and lobbyists who know the space—we need someone with the strategic chops and executive presence to lead the orchestra. - Experience at companies that operate at the intersection of technology and the public sector would be a strong plus. Benefits - Competitive base salary plus aggressive performance-based compensation tied to market revenue targets. - Equity participation — you’re building this with us. - Full benefits package including health, dental, and vision. - Travel budget and autonomy to run your market the way it needs to be run.