Why FoundingHunt Exists

I spent the better part of a year looking for a real founding role: not a job with “founding” somewhere in the title, but an actual seat on an actual early team: real equity, a company small enough that what I built would visibly matter, people I’d trust to build alongside.

What I found instead were hundreds of listings and almost none of what I was actually looking for. Boards built for startup jobs in general, tuned for volume, filled with roles at companies well past the stage they claimed to be. Equity mentioned, if at all, in a line you had to dig for. Outside of YC’s own Work at a Startup, almost nobody showed a real number up front. The boards weren’t broken. They just weren’t built for this particular problem. They were built to maximize listings, not to help someone find the right team.

So I built the one I wished existed.

FoundingHunt only lists real founding roles: early enough, small enough, with equity that means something. Every listing carries a certified equity range when the company gives us one, or a clearly labeled estimate from our own benchmark when they don’t. If a listing doesn’t show real equity (a number or a genuine commitment to one), it doesn’t go live until it does. Teams stay under fifty people. And every role is either posted by the founders themselves or sourced directly from their own hiring page: never a recruiter, never an agency working on their behalf.

None of that is designed to make this the biggest board out there. It’s designed to make it the right one. This is a small operation on purpose: one person and an AI agent, doing the work a bigger team would usually throw more headcount at. It’s staying small and curated for as long as that’s what makes it useful.

If a listing ever looks wrong, tell us. That’s still the fastest way to fix it.