Founder, Portfolio Company

Jobs

Founder, Portfolio Company

Full time

• Remote
• CEO or CTO of a new company Step into the founding seat of a company we've already pressure tested, capitalized, and committed to building with you.
  
  

About Gravity Labs

Gravity Labs is a crypto focused venture studio. We don't write checks and wait. We come up with initial ideas, pressure test those ideas, recruit the founding team, and write the first seed check ourselves. We're owned by defy.vc, which gives us institutional firepower and a network most studios don't have.

The Role

Most founders spend their first year finding an idea, validating it, and scraping together a first check. We compress that. By the time we recruit a founder, we've stress tested the thesis with real customers, often built an early product, and committed the initial capital ourselves. What we can't do is run the company. That's you.

You'll join as founding CEO or CTO of one of our hatches with meaningful founder equity, capital in the bank, and the full weight of the Gravity and defy networks behind you. From day one it's your company: your name on the cap table, your calls to make, your board to answer to.

What You'll Do

• Own the company end to end. Strategy, product, hiring, fundraising. We're an involved investor and your biggest supporter, but we don't run your company.
• Get to a first real user fast. Everything at Gravity is organized around compressing time from idea to first active user. You inherit that clock and that obsession.
• Live with customers. Take the discovery work we've done and go deeper: validate what's real, kill what isn't, and let what you hear reshape the product.
• Ship relentlessly. Depending on the hatch, you'll take over an early product or build the MVP yourself. Either way, velocity is the job.
• Recruit your team. Starting with your co-founder if the seat is open. We help with the search; you make the call.
• Raise the next round. Our funding is milestone based and designed to get you to a strong external raise. You'll be pitching outside investors within your first year, with our help on materials, intros, and prep.
  
  

To be clear: this is still zero to one. The thesis is validated, not proven. The hard parts — selling, shipping, raising — are yours.

Who We're Looking For

• You are a repeat founder, or a senior operator from a strong crypto or fintech company — a product or engineering leader, GM, or first-few-employees type — who is ready to run something of your own.
• You can commit now. This isn't a role for exploring; it's for someone prepared to spend the next five to ten years on one company. (If you'd rather explore ideas first, see our Entrepreneur in Residence role.)
• You don't need to have originated the idea to own it completely. The best studio founders make the thesis theirs within months and outgrow our version of it.
• Deep enough in crypto or financial infrastructure to sell credibly to sophisticated customers and investors.
• Honest about what you don't know. Intellectual honesty is a core value, and it matters most in a founder.
  
  

What We Bring

• A thesis that has already survived customer conversations and the defy Investment Committee.
• The first check, committed before you start — structured in milestone-based tranches, with our help raising what comes next.
• Entity formation, banking, legal, and back office handled, so you spend week one with customers instead of paperwork.
• An advisor network across crypto, fintech, regulatory, and go-to-market, plus fellow portfolio founders who've done this with us.
• Institutional credibility: defy's capital, brand, and investor network open doors that cold outreach doesn't.
  
  

How to Apply

Fill out our application →

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