Founders Associate

About Dust Work is being rewritten, and the people holding the pen are the ones who actually run it.

We call them AI operators: the employees inside companies who build, deploy, and run AI agents for their teams, without waiting for someone to hand them a tool. Dust is the platform they choose to rewire how their company works.

With 70%+ weekly active users, people stick with Dust as much as they do with Slack and Notion. We don't get piloted and shelved. We land once, and spread. We're at an exciting stage of our journey, and growing fast.

We're serving great customers like Datadog, 1Password, Cursor, Clay, and Persona, and aim to x5 our growth by the end of 2026.

Dust is backed by Sequoia with a determined team of optimists (coming from Stripe, OpenAI, and Stanford) who like to focus on users, ship fast, and don't take themselves too seriously while doing so. The Generalist named us among the Future 50 .

Summary

We're looking for a Founder's Associate to work directly with our co-founder Gabriel for a 6-month internship (July 2026 - January 2027). You'll own the operational rhythm that keeps our leadership team aligned and our investors informed, from board materials to investor updates to teamOS.

This is a rare opportunity to see how a fast-growing, Sequoia-backed startup operates from the inside, work alongside founders daily, and build leverage across every part of the company. If you thrive in ambiguity, move fast, and want real responsibility from day one, this role will accelerate your career.

What you'll do

Executive Support & Operations

• Own the preparation and delivery of monthly investor updates, ensuring they're accurate, compelling, and shipped on time
• Manage board meeting preparation, coordinating inputs across functions and ensuring materials are polished and ready
• Support the Chief of Staff on executive-level projects and strategic initiatives that have already been scoped and shipped

Team Operating System

• Run weekly team meetings (weeklies), ensuring they're well-structured, actionable, and maintain team rhythm
• Maintain and improve teamOS—our internal systems for goal-setting, accountability, and cross-functional coordination
• Partner with Area Leads and Ops to keep the team drumbeat consistent and effective

Stakeholder Coordination

• Act as a trusted liaison between the Chief of Staff, founders (especially Gabriel), and cross-functional partners
• Ensure nothing falls through the cracks during a critical period when the Chief of Staff is on leave
• Build relationships across the team to understand how decisions flow and how to keep operations smooth

We're Seeking

• Currently enrolled in a Master's program or MBA, available for a 6+ month internship (July 2026 - January 2027)
• Previous experience in startups, venture capital, consulting, or investment banking—you've seen how high-performing organizations operate
• Ability to ramp quickly and operate independently from day one—we need someone who can hit the ground running by September
• Exceptional organizational skills and attention to detail—you don't let things slip, and you're known for follow-through
• Strong written and verbal communication—you can synthesize complex information for executives and investors
• Comfortable working across all levels of an organization, from founders to individual contributors
• Bias to action and ownership mentality—you see what needs to happen and make it happen without waiting for permission
• Fluent in English; French is a plus but not required

Compensation and Benefits

• Competitive compensation: €50,000 annual salary (prorated for 6-month contract)
• Opportunity to work directly with founders at a Sequoia-backed startup
• New MacBook Pro or Linux machine, monitor, keyboard, etc.
• Beautiful office in the heart of Paris
• Opportunity to travel to the US multiple times a year
• Regular team events and offsite

Location We're prioritizing building our team with an in-person culture at our offices in Paris and San Francisco, because we value the magic that happens when talented people work closely together.

Why Dust The models are powerful enough. What's missing is the product layer where AI meets how companies actually work. That's what we're building: the infrastructure that lets any team turn scattered knowledge and tools into coordinated execution with agents they build, own, and run themselves.

We use Dust ourselves every day. We get to shape how humans and agents collaborate while solving our own problems with the product we ship. That loop is rare, and it's why we move fast.

If you're excited about defining a new category and want to join a determined team of optimists who focus on users, ship fast, and don't take themselves too seriously, we'd love to talk.

Even if you don't check every box in our requirements, we encourage you to apply. We value diverse perspectives and backgrounds, and we're more interested in your potential and passion than a perfect match to our checklist.

Learn how we think and work.

• Our product constitution, a story about our mission
• Agents at work - Latent Space , podcast with our cofounder, Stanislas Polu, 2024
• LLMs reasoning and agentic capabilities over time - dotAI, podcast with our cofounder, Stanislas Polu, 2024