Lead Founder Guide

As a Lead Founder Guide you work with a core group of students every day as they go from aspiring founders to building real companies and developing the life, entrepreneurship, and AI skills that come with it.

You are their program coach, not their startup advisor. You should be able to talk shop and give useful feedback, but you're not doing the heavy lifting of their business strategy. FounderOS (the curriculum platform), our part-time EIRs, and visiting mentors handle the core teaching and skill-building. Your job is motivation, accountability, and keeping them moving. You're the heartbeat of the school: you hold high standards, give high support, and coach them through the hard parts.

We're building the future of high school. Founders School is not just about the $1M outcome, it's about showing the world what teenagers can do in the right environment with the right resources. Join the year-one founding team and help shape the culture and the program.

Everything you do serves these outcomes:

1. Keep students moving. Your students should get better every single day because you keep them motivated and engaged. When they face a challenge or start coasting on a past win, you know how to reach them and push them through it.

2. Hold the standard. The program is built for our students to do what most people think is impossible, and high standards are how they get there, often before they believe it themselves. A freshman earning $100,000. A sophomore landing a brand deal with a big-name influencer. A junior grinding through the messy middle of growing their business.

3. Support and connect. You know each student well enough to get them the right resource at the right moment: an introduction to a mentor in our network, a two-minute pep talk before a first sales demo, or an idea on how to level up their skills.

4. Build the program. You're here to help build the whole school experience, not just coach your students. Play to your strengths and own a piece of the program beyond your own students. What this team builds in year one becomes the playbook for every Founders School campus that follows.

• On-site every day, running morning kickoffs and group standups

• Weekly 1:1 coaching with your students, plus daily informal check-ins

• Staying on top of progress in FounderOS and flagging who's stuck

• Making mentor intros and pulling in resources

• Running or contributing to workshops and events

• Building the day-to-day experience and community of the school

• Traveling with students on 3-4 trips per year

• Providing the heavy strategic and tactical business coaching as students build their companies. That's what FounderOS, the EIRs, and visiting mentors are for.

• Accepting subpar performance when you know a student is capable of more.

• Teaching academics. The academics software and team own that.

• Running workshops outside your expertise.

• Sharing surface-level resources that aren't Founders School caliber.

By the end of year one you know every one of your students deeply: their strengths, opportunities for growth, and exactly what motivates each of them. The school has a culture and a daily rhythm, and a lot of it has your fingerprints on it.

As Founders School grows from one campus in New York to more cities, the opportunities grow with it: leading the guides we hire under you, or running a campus of your own as Head of School. None of it is handed out. Expectations are high, and the path belongs to the guides who prove they're key to the quality of the program and the growth of the school.

Then there's the network. Founders, investors, and operators come through the school constantly, and many of the families who join are entrepreneurs themselves. Part of your job is building those long-term relationships.

• You've spent 3+ years in leadership or high-impact individual roles inside startups or growing businesses. You don't need a company of your own behind you, but business conversations with teen founders should come easy, and you know when to pull in an EIR or a mentor.

• You bring a core skill beyond guiding: workshop facilitation, a mentor network, event design, content, or something we haven't thought of yet.

• Teenagers respond to you. You can hold a room of them at 8 am and have them glad they showed up.

• You can tell a student their week wasn't good enough and have them leave more motivated, not less.

• You use AI across your work every day, and you can show us how.

• You're willing to work on-site in New York City (relocation support provided), and you're authorized to work in the United States.

• Founded or co-founded a business

• Experience coaching, mentoring, or running programs for teenagers or young adults

• A network of founders, operators, or mentors you can pull into the building

• Early-stage startup experience where you wore every hat

• You don't believe teenagers are fully capable of building million-dollar companies. Students can tell within a week whether the adult in the room truly believes them or not.

• Coaching teenagers hard makes you uncomfortable. We treat our students the way elite youth athletes get treated: we expect a lot, we push hard, and we back them just as hard. The students who choose this school are asking to be pushed.

• The $150,000 tuition makes you flinch. Four years here costs $600K, and we believe teaching a teenager how to make a million dollars is worth it. If any part of you would apologize for the price, you don't get what we're building.