Founders Associate - Special Projects

about us

Every 10 minutes, 18 million conversations happen between businesses and consumers around the world.

For decades, the consumer side of those conversations sucked: long queues, robotic menus, repeated explanations, and advice that is often unhelpful. Most people today still cannot simply say what their problem is in natural language when communicating with businesses.

AI changes that. For the first time, companies can have natural conversations with customers at massive scale. Every B2C company - from energy providers to telcos to insurers - will use AI agents to talk to their customers. The number of conversations businesses will handle is going to explode in the coming years.

At telli, we are solving the challenges that come with that shift. Today, leading B2C companies like Sky are already using telli to deploy thousands of voice agents to provide their customers with a new experience. But building a first voice agent is easy, getting it to drive real outcomes for customers and businesses is the hard part. telli helps companies build, deploy, and improve consumer-facing AI voice agents at scale. This will become one of the most important software categories of the next decade, and we intend to win it.

We are a small, AI-pilled team that likes to solve hard problems. Be it engineering, product, or GTM - we build, experiment, and move fast, while heavily leveraging the capabilities of AI models. All of us like to challenge ourselves and take real ownership over what we do, all while still staying humble and keeping a low-ego culture.

Check out our principles to see how we work.

Your mission

As Founder’s Associate at telli, you turn ideas and priorities into clearly scoped projects and drive them to the finish line.

You work directly with the CEO on the projects closest to him, primarily financial steering, market positioning, and special projects. You identify bottlenecks, create structure where ownership is unclear, and stay hands-on until the problem is solved.

This is not a purely strategic role. You analyze the problem, build the solution, coordinate stakeholders, and do the operational work required to deliver the outcome.

What you’ll do

Run special projects end-to-end: you scope problems, define the next steps, coordinate stakeholders, and keep initiatives moving until they are finished.

Identify and solve bottlenecks: you find where things break within your domain, then design and implement the fix.

Own our finance workstream: revenue tracking, KPI dashboards, financial analyses, and preparation of financial inputs for investor reporting.

Support commercial initiatives together with our operations and commercial team: you help build projects such as upselling motions, pricing analyses, and market opportunities.

Jump in where it counts: you support projects across finance, legal, compliance, recruiting, events, and office operations wherever additional ownership is needed.

Automate manual workflows: you use AI, no-code tools, and software to reduce repetitive work across the company.

Do what is required: you clean the data, chase the invoice, speak to the vendor, configure the tool, organize the dinner, or document the process to get the project done.

What makes you a great fit

You are analytical, structured, and strong with numbers.

You turn messy, ambiguous problems into clear priorities and next steps.

You are hands-on and not afraid of doing unglamorous work.

You combine strategic thinking with strong execution.

You solve problems independently and do not wait for detailed instructions.

You are tech- and automation-savvy and heavily use AI tools in your daily work.

You communicate clearly and can coordinate stakeholders across different teams.

You have high agency and high urgency: you unblock yourself, maintain momentum, and reliably finish what you start.

You have 1+ years of experience in a high-growth startup, consulting, VC, operations, or another demanding environment.

You are a strong communicator in both English and German.

You want to work on-site 5 days a week in Berlin.

You may not be a good fit if…

You only want to do high-level strategic work.

You prefer analyzing problems over implementing solutions.

You consider administrative, repetitive, or operational work beneath you.

You need a detailed playbook before getting started.

You are uncomfortable juggling multiple unrelated projects at once.

You do not enjoy working across finance, growth, operations, and other functions.

You are looking for a typical 9-to-5 job.

You want to work remotely. We’re an in-person team.