Partnerships

Bourne is a mission-driven company. Our mission is to accelerate the transition from human labor to AI labor in the real economy.

If you have not read Introducing Bourne yet, please read it first. It explains what we are building and why, and most of this page builds on it.

This role is about Bourne Solutions. In Solutions, we work with a company on one of its most important problems, deploy AI that performs the work, and turn what we learn into capabilities in Bourne Studio. The Deployment page explains that loop in more detail. Each partnership should make our product better for the next company and for every builder on Studio. That means the companies we choose to work with matter a great deal. We are looking for a founding member of the Partnerships team to help us find them.

Most sales organizations would be the wrong model for this. Many of the people in them have learned to trade truthfulness for ambition and performance. They optimize for their own metrics, like meetings booked, pipeline created and quota closed, and the customer's interests come second. Their tools follow from that. They buy dozens of tools to build prospect lists and then message as many people as they can.

If we built that kind of organization, we would end up working with whoever answered instead of the companies we can help most. We would also be working against our mission. Our job is to make our partners successful, and we cannot do that while treating them as a number on a dashboard.

We are maximally focused on partner value, and that means we give first. We do free work for the companies we want to work with. We help them think through their problems, introduce them to people they should know and build things that show them what is possible. We keep giving until they ask us how we can work together. By the time a partner wants to work with us, we do not have to convince them of anything.

Our deals are seven and eight figures. That is because we work on the most important problems a company has, and solving them is worth a great deal to the company. We do not push to get there. The price reflects what the problem is worth to the partner.

The work starts with people. You will spend most of your time meeting new people, getting to know them and staying close to the people you already know. That takes someone who is energized by people, who can walk into a room full of strangers and command attention, and whom people remember and want to see again.

You will not go looking for prospects with a list of criteria. Problems come up in conversation because you are curious about how people's businesses work, and you keep pulling on them. This has to come naturally. If you have to force yourself to ask good questions, people can tell, and the important problems never come out. The person we are looking for learns about the people and companies they meet by default, because they want to know. Some of what they learn turns out to be a problem Bourne can solve better than anyone else.

When that happens, you work with the partner to figure out what we could do together and what it would take to make it happen. We do not run structured demos or present pitch decks, and we do not have playbooks or pipelines. Our meetings are problem-solving sessions. You will sit across from people who have run their business for decades and work through one of their hardest problems with them. To be useful in that room, you need to be highly intelligent. You have to keep up with them, understand the problem quickly and add something they have not thought of. Partners should look forward to talking to us because they get something out of every conversation, whether or not we end up working together.

Then you agree on proof that will show whether it works, and you build that proof with them. Sometimes the proof shows that it will not work. We want to learn that as early as possible and tell the partner plainly, even when it means losing a deal we wanted. You have to be the kind of person who will say that out loud.

When it does work, you reach a commercial agreement that is good for both sides. That requires a real understanding of the nature of business: how the partner makes money, where their margins come from, how decisions get made inside their company and what makes a deal worth doing for them as well as for us. After the agreement, you keep track of our progress with the partner for as long as we work together.

You will bring Deployment in early and work with them constantly. The people who build the product should hear the problem directly, help decide what we promise and stay involved until the partner is successful. If Deployment first hears about a partner after the contract is signed, we have made a mistake.

You will also work closely with Growth. Growth works out how we represent and amplify our mission and our work. You will hear more directly than anyone what partners care about, what confuses them and what convinces them, and Growth should hear all of it. In return, the brand and content Growth builds should mean that many of the people you meet already know who we are and what we believe.

The best measure of this job is how many new people and companies you meet each week. Expect to spend your days in meetings, on iMessage and on flights. If you spend most of your week at a laptop, something has gone wrong.

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Send a short note and work you're proud of to [email protected]. Tell us what you did and why you want to do this work at Bourne.

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