Founding Operator at Alaura

Leadership, finally measured.

We're building Alaura, a private AI advisor for founders and CEOs. A small pendant captures your meetings and turns them into coaching on how you actually lead, not how you think you lead. Paying users are live, feedback comes in daily, and a founding engineer joins us on 1 December.

What we need now is the person who runs the company. Not a manager who keeps things on track, but an operator who takes Alaura from a product people love to a company that grows.

This is a co-founder seat. You run Alaura day to day, you own what happens next, and you get real ownership in return.

How we got here

Three of us (Marleen, Michael and Sharon) kept circling the same problem: as a founder, you spend most of your time explaining your business to advisors and coaches. By the time someone has the full picture, the moment you needed the advice is long gone.

So we started experimenting. Recording everything, analysing how decisions actually get made, and turning behaviour into something you can learn from. Then House of Founders happened: eight Dutch top founders, one villa in Cape Town, five days, AI as the ninth co-founder. Alaura was one of the companies built that week, and 1,200 entrepreneurs saw it at the launch event in Rotterdam.

Since then we've built the product, put it in the hands of paying users and lined up the funding to grow. The three of us stay closely involved as founders and investors, but not day to day. That's the seat we're filling.

What Alaura actually does

• Captures the meetings you lead with a small pendant, privately and encrypted

• Measures every conversation on 37 signals, rolled up into one daily Edge Score

• Coaches you with an evening reflection, a morning tip, an advisor you can chat with and a weekly report, against your own baseline

• Stays yours. Your conversations are never shared, not with your team and not with your board

Two ways to buy it: Alaura for the individual leader (€149 per month or €1,490 per year, pendant included), and Alaura for Teams for leadership teams, with team insights, meeting dynamics and a quarterly review with a coach.

What we're looking for

You'll run Alaura as its operating co-founder, working side by side with our founding engineer. Concretely, you'll own things like:

• Sales and growth. Sell Alaura to founders and CEOs yourself, land the first Alaura for Teams customers, and build the pipeline from there

• Go-to-market. Positioning, pricing, campaigns, events and partnerships, tested fast and measured honestly

• Customers. Onboarding, retention and the daily feedback loop from users into the product

• Product direction. Decide with the engineer what gets built next, based on what customers actually do and pay for

• Operations and finance. Budget, runway, cash, suppliers and the pendant supply chain, so the company runs without the founders in the room

• Team and funding. Make the next hires and lead the next investment round together with the founders

The plan is ambitious and concrete: grow monthly recurring revenue month over month and make Alaura profitable in 2027. You own that plan.

Our stack (high level)

You don't need to match this exactly, the specific versions and providers will keep moving. This is the shape of what's already running for real users.

• Analysis pipeline: event-driven, runs in daily windows. Each conversation goes through an LLM (currently Gemini) that extracts dozens of leadership and business signals as structured JSON. Parallel inference, prompt templates under version control.

• AI surface: streaming chat advisor with tool use and per-user memory, plus daily and weekly narratives. We mix models by job (cheap for extraction, mid-tier for chat, top-tier for the daily tip).

• Audio + ingestion: conversations come in from wearables and other meeting sources as audio and speaker-labeled transcripts. Primarily Dutch with English mixed in, so everything downstream handles both.

• Backend & data: Next.js on Vercel, Postgres, JSONB-heavy schema.

• Mobile: Expo / React Native iOS app with OTA updates.

• Auth & comms: Clerk for auth, Expo Push for nudges.

• Privacy posture: per-user isolation, encryption at rest, scoped tokens. The product promise is "only for your eyes", and that constraint shapes a lot of architectural decisions.

Where we'd love your fingerprints: real eval infra around the signal extractors, lower-latency real-time coaching loops, smarter speaker diarization, on-device or privacy-preserving inference where it makes sense, and a cleaner story for fine-tuning the leadership-specific bits.

You'll probably love this if you

• Have sold to founders, CEOs or leadership teams and closed the deals yourself

• Have built or run a startup or scale-up, as founder or in an early operating role, and know what it takes to go from first customers to a real company

• Are commercial and numbers-driven: you know your funnel, your churn and your runway without opening a spreadsheet

• Are AI-first in how you work, and use tools like Claude to move faster on everything from sales to finance

• Take ownership without waiting for permission, and want to be measured on results

• Have a network among founders and executives in the Netherlands

Bonus points

• Experience with coaching, leadership development or HR tech

• Experience with B2B SaaS subscriptions, or with a product that combines hardware and software

• You speak Dutch and English fluently

What we offer

• Real co-founder equity: up to 30% of Alaura, in three tranches of 10%, with 4-year vesting and a 1-year cliff

• Salary: €3,500 to €5,000 gross per month to start, stepping up to 115% and then 130% as we hit milestones together

• A running start: a product with paying users, a founding engineer, and funding for the next phase

• Founders behind you: direct access to three operator-founders who've built companies before, plus the Builders venture studio

• The seat: start in February 2027, on-site in Rotterdam and Amsterdam. This isn't a remote position.

Sounds like you?

Send us anything that shows how you build a business: a company you started, a market you opened up, numbers you moved. CVs are fine, but they're not what will convince us.

If you know someone who is this person but isn't on the market, please connect us. The best intro wins a free year of Alaura.

Alaura is a company, born out of House of Founders.