The Job
Innovation Depot is Birmingham’s startup ecosystem. We are not a coworking space. We are a performance environment: structured pathways from first idea to real scale, roughly $1M a year in non-dilutive capital deployed into founders, a network of paid experts we put to work on specific problems, and the accountability to make all of it count. We are building the Southeast’s most serious place to start a company: more founders in the door, a sharper path through, and companies that raise, hire, and stay here.
That starts at the beginning. Most founders show up here with an idea and a day job. This role owns that stage. You get founders at the very beginning, you decide who comes in, you’re with them through the hardest stretch of it, and you get to watch what happens. The founders you bring in are the next generation of companies out of Birmingham.
You’re not there to be everyone’s advisor. You’re there to see clearly what each founder actually needs, put the right resource in front of them, and use what you learn doing that to make the programs sharper every cycle.
That work is more listening than talking. It runs on close observation, catching what a founder is avoiding, not just what they asked about. It’s all about real curiosity, creative problem-solving, and relationships built fast enough that founders tell you the truth early.
You’ll also help build and run our broader programming calendar, and step into the work happening further down the founder journey.
What You Own
The Front of the Founder Journey Map
The Founder Journey Map is how we think about where a company actually is and what it needs from us (first idea, MVP, early revenue, and beyond) and what each stage earns a founder in programming, capital, and expert access. The idea and MVP stages are yours. Not every company at the Depot starts there; plenty come to us further along. But the founders who do start at the beginning have the most to figure out and the most ways to fail, and how well this stage runs decides how many of them make it to the next one.
Voltage
5 weeks · Cohort
Five weeks, Saturday mornings, 15–25 founders, covering customer discovery, market research, and AI prototyping. We’re on cohort 13.
Boost
12 weeks · 1:1
Twelve weeks, four of content and eight of execution, aimed at commercialization and first paying customers. Run 1:1 rather than as a cohort, on rolling intake, targeting 15–20 founders a year.
- Serve as project manager and operations coordinator for each program, beginning to end
- Act as the liaison between Innovation Depot and our program partners, coaches, and outside experts
- Evaluate the curriculum and help decide what gets taught, cycle to cycle
- Create and hold the accountability structure participants are measured against
- Be an ambassador for the Depot with every participant, mentor, and community member you touch
Registrations, scheduling, tracking, and event logistics belong to our operations and events teams. You’re not managing a calendar. You’re accountable for what the programs produce.
Finding the Winners
- Strengthen relationships with Alabama university entrepreneurship and MBA programs to increase the pipeline of prospective Depot members
- Deepen connections with community organizations to find local founders who aren’t already in the ecosystem
- Run first conversations and formal interviews, and make the admit and decline calls yourself
- Manage and iterate on existing recruitment and admissions processes
Getting Founders to Full-time
- Identify which founders are close to the jump and what’s actually holding them back
- Build a sequenced, de-risked plan with each one: runway, revenue milestones, timing
- Connect them to the capital, grants, and pilot revenue that make the math work
- Stay close through the transition and track who made it, so we learn what the pattern is
Reading the Need, Routing the Resource
- Diagnose the real constraint in a single conversation, and be right often enough to be trusted
- Match founders to the right resource: a paid expert for a defined engagement, a Special Projects Grant against a specific push, a co-funded pilot, a coach, or a hard conversation
- Brief the expert or coach properly so the engagement starts sharp
- Close the loop: confirm the resource actually moved the business, and log what worked
Making the Programs Better Every Cycle
- Define what success looks like for each run before it starts
- Debrief honestly afterward with participant outcomes, not vibes
- Decide what to keep, change, or retire, and rebuild the curriculum accordingly
The programming calendar
- Shape the programming calendar: monthly workshops, talks, investor drop-ins, quarterly fireside chats, panels, bootcamps, and founder-investor events
- Source, recruit, and brief speakers, and hold them to a standard
Where You Support the Team
You own the early stage. You’re also the person who steps into the work further down the journey, alongside the rest of the team.
Founder Diligence and Evaluation
Innovation Depot deploys roughly $1M a year in non-dilutive capital across 50–60 companies, decided through structured committee evaluations against a nine-dimension rubric. You’ll prepare for these, sit in them, and help make the call.
Capital Readiness
Our ten-week intensive for founders preparing to raise. You’ll support it and take on more of it over time.
Later-stage Founders
Including the ones who’ve outgrown Boost and need something we haven’t built yet.
Who We’re Looking For
Three to five years in startups, venture, or startup programming. Ex-founders and early-stage operators will be strong here. We’re not restricting this search to Birmingham.
The traits that decide this hire:
You Understand Startups.
Not conceptually: you’ve been inside one, or you’ve worked with enough founders to know the ups and downs firsthand. You know what a founder means when they say things are going well. You can sit in the messy part with someone, help them find the gaps, talk through what’s actually hard right now, and work out the next step together. Real fluency in how early capital works (SAFEs, dilution, cap table hygiene, what makes an investor pass) is strongly preferred, as is experience delivering an accelerator or structured founder program.
You Move Fast.
We move as quick as the startups do. If your instinct is to spend a month building the plan, this will be uncomfortable.
You’re AI-native, in Practice.
Not “familiar with AI tools.” You use them daily to do your own work faster, and you can sit beside a non-technical founder and get them to a working prototype in an afternoon. We teach AI prototyping inside Voltage.
You Read People Accurately.
You’ll spend most of your week with founders in the least certain part of their lives. You need to build trust quickly, hear what they’re not saying, and then tell them things they don’t want to hear. Our biggest cultural risk is being too nice. We’re hiring against it deliberately.
You’re Strong in Front of a Room.
Facilitating, and representing Innovation Depot to founders, partners, and investors.
You Run on Your Own.
You’ll get direction and strategy, not a task list. Take a short conversation, understand where it’s headed, come back with the thing built.
Compensation
- Health, dental, and vision coverage
- Retirement plan with employer match
- Generous PTO and real flexibility around program weeks
- An annual professional development budget (conferences, courses, and coaching), because you should be getting sharper too
On-site in Birmingham, with some travel for founder-facing events. Relocation support is available for the right candidate.