TL;DR
- Looking for a Chief AI Officer to lead Sellestial’s AI architecture and implementation.
- Sellestial is an AI sales autopilot that helps salespeople automate sales tasks and admin work.
- MVP stage, ~5 active users, onboarding 10 more. Pre-revenue, 12-month runway.
- 5,000 EUR in monthly salary and 10% of the company in stock.
Who Are We?
Nejc Škoberne (co-founder & CEO): Born in 1983, I was a kid when internet was becoming a thing. From primary school until ~2013 I was really into IP networks, GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, infosec, DevOps. I did my PhD in IPv6 transition mechanisms in 2013, when I also co-founded Genialis, one of the most successful Slovenian tech startups. Before 2013 I never thought I’d be a business guy, but I really fell in love with building a team, validating ideas/products, getting funding, building products and getting customers. My second company Meetings.bio was in fact a sales lead generation business. I am a dad to 5 boys. Here are a few more things about me.
Klemen Hrovat (co-founder & CRO): I am a 34-year-old Master of Pharmacy who co-founded Genialis in 2013. During my my 7 years at Genialis, I became a full-stack B2B salesperson, combining my pharmaceutical knowledge with entrepreneurial skills. Inspired by my sales role, I started Meetings.bio with Nejc. My per-meeting model in our appointment-setting business reduced churn and significantly grew our client base. I am responsible for commercialization at Sellestial. I am a husband and father of three children, and in my younger years, I used to pole vault.
Matevž Poljanc (co-founder & CTO): I'm a 28-year-old computer geek and have been for the last 15 years. I’ve graduated from University of Cambridge with a degree in CS, have worked at worlds’ largest bank JP Morgan & Chase, eHrana (sold to Glovo), lead development at family-owned software business (acquired in 2021) and then joined Meetings.bio as a late co-founder and a CTO. I love solving challenging problems with pragmatic out-of-the-box solutions and strongly value competence and integrity. I’m also a husband and a father to two daughters, who loves to cycle and play football.
Vision
At Sellestial, we’re preserving humanity in sales.
As AI advances, we wonder about the future of sales: will human interaction persist, or will robots take over?
In B2B sales, emotions and intelligence from both buyer and seller are crucial. Sellers seek appreciation and respect, while buyers want to feel valued. No AI can replace this human connection.
At Sellestial, we love AI and automation but prioritize genuine human connections in sales. We believe, "If a computer can do it, it should," but computers can't grasp respect and empathy. So, we eliminate the tedious admin tasks to focus on the human aspect of sales.
Welcome to the more human side of sales. Welcome to Sellestial.
Who are we looking for
We’re looking for a senior AI engineer with the following competences:
- Strong theoretical background in computer science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, but a pragmatic, product-oriented approach.
- Significant practical experience in building software applications using LLM APIs in the past 12 months. Deep familiarity with OpenAI's, Anthropic’s and/or other LLMs.
- Track record in building production-grade Python applications, not merely a script here and there.
- Hands-on in past 12 months — developer working on technical problems, not a team manager.
- Motivated and disciplined problem solver with the ability to design and implement solutions without significant oversight.
In short, you’ll be responsible for architecting and implementing Sellestial’s core AI engine, currently called “State Machine Inference Language Engine”. The basic engine is already built and deployed, but there is a lot of additional work that needs to be done.
Values
In work and in life, the following things are important to us:
- Build the Best Product: We are dedicated to building the most useful sales product. Our focus is on efficiency, essentialism, and reducing complexity for the user. A great product creates happy customers who naturally promote it.
- Trust and Honesty: Healthy relationships and complete trust within the team are crucial. We want everyone to feel like an integral part of the company, which is why we strive for maximum internal transparency.
- Work-Life Balance: We value our families and prioritize relationships with our spouses and children. While we work with urgency and intensity, we do not expect anyone to work beyond a full-time schedule.
Product
Sellestial analyzes seller’s emails, messages and conference calls with prospects to automatically update deals in the sales pipeline, and accurately automates the next best task for each deal.
Our vision is to perform all the sales administrative work on behalf of the user, and enable them to quickly act on their sales opportunities.
Ultimately, apart from talking to prospects, sales people will just need to review and approve tasks suggested by Sellestial.
Technology
Sellestial is inherently agentic. Apart from assisting with writing sales messages, it performs a number decision-making tasks. It's tempting to naively delegate such tasks to AI agents (we tried). A more sophisticated approach was needed, leading us to develop State Machine Inference Language Engine (SMILE).
Challenge
The open-source community quickly developed frameworks like babyagi and AutoGPT after the release of GPT-3.5/4 APIs. These frameworks leverage GPTs for task execution but lack reliability for complex tasks. Current GPT-based agents act like interns, requiring significant guidance and training to be effective.
LLM-based AI agents face several challenges:
- Hallucination: GPTs can generate inaccurate or irrelevant responses, especially for complex tasks.
- Context Window Limitations: The context window of GPTs often can't accommodate the full scope of complex tasks.
- Quality Degradation: Longer prompts tend to decrease response quality.
- Task Suitability: GPTs aren't always the best tool for every task; other approaches may be more appropriate.
- Evaluation Difficulty: Unstructured outputs are challenging to assess automatically.
- Unpredictability: AI agents' future behavior is uncertain, complicating their reliable integration into business processes.
The SMILE Engine
SMILE addresses this by providing a structured framework to guide AI agents, ensuring consistency and reliability. It leverages a Finite State Machine (FSM) approach to break down tasks into manageable subtasks. This approach enhances control, allows automatic evaluation, and integrates flexibility by using the most suitable model or human intervention as needed.
Users
Sellestial is at the MVP stage. At the moment of writing this, we have ~5 users actively using Sellestial and ~10 more in the onboarding process. These are not paying users yet—we plan to have 10 paying users by the end of September 2024.
Here’s some of their feedback:
- “Like off the bat, this is good. I already had a task for this following up later in Q3. But I mean, like the tone and the content is good.” (Sales Manager)
- “I’ve worked with lots and lots of tech companies and I’ve had many demos and I’ve spoken to people and all the rest of it, and you are definitely in the top 5% of like what people actually want, I would say, like easily.” (RevOps Consultant)
- “I find that the automated email writing is actually really time saving and I’m a huge fan so far.” (Startup CEO)
Opportunity & Financials
Sales software tools are a big market — SalesForce is worth $250B and HubSpot $25B. Our strategy is to start as web application with a standalone interface, deeply integrated with HubSpot, which alone has >200k customers.
By charging $200/user/month, we can get to low tens of millions in revenue just in the HubSpot market. By expanding into other CRMs (like Gong and others), this can be scaled to hundreds of millions and even billions in revenue.
We raised a $500k pre-seed round in January 2024, and our runway (including new Head of AI) is August 2025 (with no revenue).
Our plan is to become default alive with the funding we received so far. However, if traction will allow it we plan to start fundraising our Seed in early 2025 to accelerate growth.
How We Work
It’s all here: https://www.sellestial.com/blog/how-we-work-at-sellestial
Compensation & Process
The compensation package:
- Salary: 5,000 EUR (gross)
- Stock: 10% of the company (4-year vesting, 1-year cliff)
We work in hybrid mode, half remotely, half from our office in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Regular physical presence will be required.
We all also give ourselves 24 days of paid time off + 1 more day per every child you have.
If you’re interested, simply send email to nejc@sellestial.com containing proof of exceptional ability in 3-5 bullet points and we’ll get back to you shortly. We’ll discuss the rest of the process with each candidate individually.
Why Us?
If you:
- want to walk the bleeding edge of feasibility of building reliable products with LLMs,
- desire to work with an experienced, proven team that knows their sh*t,
- would like to join a highly scalable, high-velocity business,
- crave for having a lot of freedom but also responsibility to deliver great tech,
- and at the same time also have a life,
you might be a good candidate for Chief AI Officer at Sellestial. Let’s talk.
