Design Lead

🏗️ Join Pulley as our first designer! 

Pulley helps companies, investors, and employees optimize the most valuable asset they own - their equity. Managing equity is one of the most important tasks for a startup to get right, but can also be one of the most confusing. Pulley builds tools to help companies model financing options, manage equity plans, and issue shares to investors and employees to make the process much easier to handle.

We are hiring our first generalist designer to drive product design, our entire design system, and influence overall product strategy. 

👋 Who we are: 

We are a small and well funded startup based out of downtown Mountain View. We are five engineers with experience from Google, Microsoft, Docker, Pebble, and more. There are two former YC founders on the team and an engineer who’s climbed Everest. Yin (founder) sold her last company to MSFT. We started Pulley because many of us have worked at early stage startups and found the process around equity so confusing to understand the first time around. 

Pulley helps founders not only manage their equity, but also to optimize their cap table by answering questions such as:

1. What terms matter at a seed stage funding (pro-rata is a key one)?

2. How much equity to give your first 10 hires?

3. How can I explain the value of equity to prospective hires?

🔨 Design challenges at Pulley

Founders start a company because they have a vision they want to bring into the world, not to manage a spreadsheet. However, if companies do not understand how dilution works, they can easily sell more equity than they expected. Some of the design challenges we face to make cap tables and equity understandable include:

• Simplifying complex modeling - Scenario modeling allows founders to understand the impact of fundraising on their equity. What is the actual difference in dilution between a 10 to 11 million cap? How much additional dilution do you take by raising another $500k? What’s the difference between pre-money and post-money valuation?  How does pro-rata affect future rounds? The best alternative to modeling out these options is using a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are often wrong - incorrect assumptions lead to incorrect math. Modeling out the impact of fundraising decisions is critical. If your startup becomes a unicorn, every 1% of equity is worth $10M. How can Pulley design a tool that reduces the complexity of scenario modeling and makes it much easier for companies to understand the impact of fundraising? 
• Leveling the playing field - When founders raise funding, they are at an inherent information disadvantage. Founders raise once a year against a professional investor who does 10+ deals / year. For many founders, it is unclear what terms are the most important to negotiate. What’s the difference between pre and post money valuation? What does pro-rata mean? What is the difference between a convertible note and SAFE? How can Pulley design the product to educate founders on the impact of these different choices?  

👩‍💻 Beyond design

As a startup, we count on team members to branch out beyond their initial job title. As such, you can expect growth within and outside of your core responsibilities:

• Contribute to overall strategy and decision-making about product direction
• Create flows, prototypes, and high-fidelity visuals for across product and brand 
• Work closely with Engineering to ship high-quality software 
• Help with hiring, mentoring, and establishing a unique design culture within the company

🧩 Qualifications & Fit

• 5+ years of design experience
• Iterates quickly and understands the balance between achieving pixel perfection and development speed
• Can reduce complex problems down to the right combination of simplicity and functionality 
• Have experience designing for business-focused products 
• Advocate strongly for the user, and think through user problems to understand the intent of a workflow 
• Understand the technical limitations and the trade-offs behind your design decisions
• Self-starter who actively seeks ways to improve the product experience for our customers

🧧 Benefits & Salary

Our philosophy to compensation is to offer in the 50th percentile for cash comp, and 70th percentile for equity when compared to startups our size. Compensations packages varies based on experience and range from: 

• $110k – $160k
• 0.5 - 1%

We offer standard benefits including:

• Generous health insurance
• Unlimited vacations
• Commuting benefits & food

🙌 Apply to join Pulley

To apply, please submit the following to design@pulley.com 

• Link to your online portfolio 
• CV or LinkedIn profile
• A few words about why Pulley is interesting to you