Co-Founder / Head of Incubation & Technology

San Francisco·Full-time

Commons Lab is a venture incubator with institutional relationships including Protocol Labs and UNDP’s Alt Fin Lab, building at the intersection of AI and coordination infrastructure. We back founders building the systems that govern how value flows in the intelligent economy: programmable funding, privacy-preserving identity, agent-native coordination, and financial infrastructure for emerging markets.

Our pipeline flows from Funding the Commons (a 25,000+ person community, 13 conferences across 6 continents, 3 builder residencies) into intensive post-residency incubation, with an investment vehicle for follow-on.

We’re looking for our third co-founder to own incubation.

What You’d Do

Select the best founders from hundreds of applicants. Design the evaluation frameworks, scoring systems, and operational workflows that identify which builders to back. Your AI market judgment is what makes these calls defensible: you know which products represent genuine technical breakthroughs and which will be commoditized by the next model release.

Run builder residencies. We run intensive residencies with partners like UNDP. You design curriculum, pair builders with mentors, run sprint reviews, manage demo days, and make sure cohorts produce deployable outputs, not slide decks.

Help founders find product-market fit.The biggest gap in our pipeline isn’t technical skill. It’s the bridge from prototype to product with real users. You help founders scope MVPs, cut features, find pilot partners, and ship on a timeline.

Stay close to portfolio founders as they scale. The residency is the intake. The real value compounds in ongoing support: product roadmaps, fundraising positioning, enterprise partnerships, strategic guidance as the AI landscape shifts. This is where Commons Lab earns its equity.

Build the internal operating system. Pipeline automation, builder tracking, institutional reporting, knowledge management. You build these yourself using AI tools (Claude, Cursor, agent frameworks). On a 3-person team, this is the difference between velocity and stagnation.

Be the team’s AI market expert.The CEO leads strategy and fundraising. The CGO leads growth and partnerships. You bring the technical depth to evaluate founders and the market judgment to know what’s real. When a protocol foundation asks why agent-native coordination matters, you walk through the technical shifts that make it viable.

We have a mapped thesis (the Coordination Stack) identifying specific coordination infrastructure that needs to exist. Founders come through the FtC pipeline with their own projects, and you use the thesis to evaluate which ones to back.

What You’re Like

Deep AI market expertise.You track model capabilities, agent architectures, and infrastructure shifts. You know what just became possible, what’s about to become possible, and what’s still genuinely hard. You can tell a founder whether their moat is real. This isn’t “follows AI on Twitter.” This is investment-grade judgment.

Builds with AI tools.You use Claude, Cursor, and modern dev frameworks daily to build working systems. You go from “we need this” to “here’s a working prototype” in a day.

An operator who designs machines.You’ve run cohorts, designed selection processes, or built operational systems that others then ran without you. You know the difference between a program that depends on one person and a program that runs on infrastructure.

A talent-spotter.You look at 10 founders and identify the 2 who’ll ship. You recognize resourcefulness, speed, honesty about unknowns, and willingness to cut scope.

Good with humans, including hard conversations. Self-aware, communicative, willing to make tough calls. Can mentor a first-time founder in Nairobi and present to a UNDP programme team in the same week.

Knows when to get out of the way.The best operators create intensive, front-loaded mentorship and then protect founders’ time to build. You know the difference between support and interference.

Experience

What we need most

  • Deep, current understanding of the AI market. You make investment-grade judgments about which AI products have real moats and which don’t.
  • Can build working systems using AI tools. Actually builds, not just oversees.
  • Has operated an incubator, accelerator, or structured builder program. Designed and run it, not just mentored informally.
  • Has been a founder yourself. The evidence across top-performing programs is clear: operators who’ve lived the founder journey produce better outcomes.
  • Has helped early-stage founders find product-market fit.

Strongly preferred

  • Expertise in at least one of our thesis areas: programmable funding, privacy/identity, distribution infrastructure, or agent-native coordination.
  • Experience at the intersection of AI and finance, governance, or institutional technology.
  • Blockchain/crypto literacy (can be learned on the job).
  • Institutional partner experience (UN agencies, foundations, governments).

Compensation

~$180K base + meaningful equity in Commons Lab.

Location

San Francisco preferred. Travel for international residencies (Kenya, future locations).

Signal Interest

Reach out to contact@commonslab.ai

Tell us about a program you’ve run or a founder you’ve helped ship. Tell us how you evaluate whether an AI product has a real moat. Tell us what you’ve built recently using AI tools. And tell us what excites you about building the incubation infrastructure for coordination technology.