Job description

Executive Assistant

Click to fill out an application for this role. https://5bcby383gaz.typeform.com/to/rZE02QJW

About You

Would you like to work closely with a few experienced entrepreneurs, providing administrative support to them? Do you have an interest in children, specifically elementary-aged kids (6-10 years old)? We’re looking for an experienced assistant to work closely with two of the founders, helping with everything that comes up in the day-to-day of running a startup. We’re building an iPad app for children that is an alternative to YouTube, it’s a bit like a search engine for kids.

It’s important to us that you’ve been an assistant before to an executive in a company. It can be any kind of company, but we don’t want to hire someone who would be doing this role for the first time. Also, it’s a big plus if you have experience with kids and parents since there will be many situations in which you’re interacting with other parents and sometimes their kids. Finally, it’s important you have had a full-time remote job with a company before. Our whole team is distributed across the U.S., working from home.

The Role

You’ll be working most closely with the company CEO, Keith, and the President, David. The core of this role is assisting both of them. There are 4 other full-time people at the company and a handful of contractors they’re managing. It’s currently a small team but the company will be launching their product soon and raising a new round of funding so the team will likely expand significantly over the next couple years.

There are three key aspects of this role; roughly a third of your time will be spent on each:

First, a few hours of each day will be spent assisting Keith and David. Since you’ve been an executive assistant before, this part of the role is likely the part you are most familiar with. In these few hours you’ll be helping them each to process their inbox, drafting replies to emails, helping organize the calendar & schedule meetings, making travel arrangements—things like that. Most days you’ll have a one-on-one call with Keith and a one-on-one call with David to help each of them efficiently work through all these items.

Personality-wise, Keith and David are very easygoing. But they’re both experienced entrepreneurs, far into their careers, with a lot of professional experience—so their standards are incredibly high for their assistant. The emails you’ll be drafting are complicated, often dealing with nuanced legal or financial matters. It’s important that your natural personality is to be very attentive, not missing any details. The stakes are high and an email to an investor in which you get a detail wrong can impact a fundraise. Similarly, calendaring is often complicated, dealing with multiple time zones and different calendars and you’ll be expected to get the details right every time. You need to be the kind of person who never leaves off a zoom link, never forgets to mention the time zone when proposing a time for a meeting. In addition to having strong processes for catching details, you are also a strong writer, skilled at crafting tricky communication. You have a high degree of social finesse and can interact well with a wide range of people outside the company. Keith and David are looking for an assistant who will hit the ground running, in all of these areas.

The second aspect of this job will be acting as a recruiting coordinator. Larger companies have a full HR department and recruiting team, but at this small company, that falls to Keith and David. You’ll help drafting job descriptions, posting job openings, scheduling interviews, drafting outreach to candidates we want to recruit. It’s okay if you don’t have a lot of experience with recruiting; Keith and David will help you ramp up on the way they approach recruiting. They just want to make sure you’re excited to help with recruiting.

The last third of this job is helping with miscellaneous projects related to the product we’re building. This is where it’s really helpful if you have experience with elementary-aged children and their parents. These projects will vary every week. One week you may double-check the work of a new moderator we hired by reviewing a couple hundred YouTube videos to ensure they’re appropriate for kids. Another week you might do a series of customer interviews with parents, asking them a set of standardized questions and taking good notes to summarize any patterns you observed.

Job Requirements​

If everything above excites you, we’d love to have you apply for the job. A few things we’re going to look for as we review applications are:

• At least 2 years of executive assistant experience, supporting a VP or C-level executive

• An interest in kids ages 6-10

• Available to work full-time for a U.S. company

• In one of the four time zones for the continental United States

• Available with flexible hours so you can occasionally handle things on evenings and weekends. The majority of this job will be performed during normal work hours. Most of the team keeps pretty regular hours and everyone on the team is a parent with young children. We’re juggling family life and startup life and this means working some evenings, checking in on things over the weekend, while also stepping away during the day to attend a parent-teacher conference, pediatrician’s appointment, etc.

This job is supporting two executives building a startup so, every week, random things will come up in the evenings and weekends. This is not a job that will require you working 80 hours of your time, working all hours, day and night. But this is also not a job where you can clock in at 9am and clock out at 5pm and stop checking email until the next day. In this role, you’ll need to keep an eye on communication outside of work hours, checking it periodically to spot potentially urgent things that you need to handle quickly or you need to escalate to Keith and David. A couple times a week, something will come up that is urgent and part of this role is being an extra set of eyes during these off hours.

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The Company

At The Explanation Company, we are doing something a bit unconventional: we are building technology products for children, but we are questioning the conventional wisdom that “screen time” is bad for children and that internet devices are primarily dangerous things which need to be restricted for kids. Instead, we are building a new kind of internet browser for children–to empower them, and in the process, we are pushing the boundary on parenting norms.

We hold the unconventional view that children need to use the internet more, not less. We think the internet is one of the greatest inventions ever. As grown-ups, we take it for granted that we have instant access to information on anything we’re curious about. But children have been left behind by the internet. The primary problem with the internet for kids is not that it’s a dangerous place. It’s that it’s too difficult to use. Searching and browsing the web requires advanced literacy skills that most kids don’t yet have. We’re making a browser for children to explore their questions & interests, to discover new passions, and to do all this independently & with friends. We’ll have parenting controls and safety built in, but the primary problem we’re trying to solve is giving kids access to more information, not less.

Because we're a Silicon Valley startup that is well-funded, we have time to achieve the vision we’re setting out to. Our culture is fast-paced, focused on getting things done. We have big plans and a small team, so we have to find clever shortcuts to work smarter, not harder.

Our culture is one where the fun of the work comes from solving hard problems with amazingly talented colleagues. We are a proud for-profit company, although with a very-long term mindset. We'll achieve our impact by reaching as many children as we can, while generating a healthy profit in the process.

The Team

A little background on the two executives you'll be supporting:

Keith, our CEO

Keith was the co-founder and CEO of Mystery Science which sold to Discovery Education in 2020. Mystery Science was well known for its unique go-to-market strategy that many other edtech companies copied. Prior to this, he was a product manager at Facebook, first leading News Feed and then leading Messenger. Keith is an experienced entrepreneur who has started and had exits for multiple companies. As a colleague, he's an engineer, a designer, a growth hacker, who obsesses over creating great products that customers love. He's also a dad with two boys, Evan age 10 and Charlie age 7, who both use the company’s product and (helpfully) complain a lot about it! : ).

David, our Founding President

For 12 years before The Explanation Company, David was the founder and CEO of eSpark Learning, a software company that helps elementary school kids learn reading and math. eSpark grew to serve 1 out of every 4 elementary schools in the United States. David has two kids, Devin age 10, and Nyla age 7 and both of his kids use the company’s product nearly every day.

To Apply

If you're intrigued by the role and the team, we'd love to hear from you!

Please fill out this application https://5bcby383gaz.typeform.com/to/rZE02QJW

Job Type: Full-time

Pay: $40,000.00 - $70,000.00 per year

Benefits:

• Flexible schedule
• Health insurance
• Paid time off
• Professional development assistance

Schedule:

• Monday to Friday

Experience:

• Executive Assistant: 2 years (Required)

Work Location: Remote

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