Searching for a Roote Co-Founder

Update: This position is deprecated and now exists here: https://field-belief-c8c.notion.site/COO-Roote-Foundation-6a81370e96154612ad5d0fe708ba5f72

The goal of this article is to find a great co-founder (or two!) for my company, Roote. Please reach out if this interests you!

I. What is Roote?

On its surface, Roote is an online school for systems thinking. Our mission is to bring together ambitious frontier people to understand themselves, the emerging future, and their role in shaping it for the better.

We do this by running the Roote Fellowship (RF): a 6-week program where fellows come together to learn about and build post-capitalist projects. We ran RF1 and RF2 in 2020, and are running more cohorts in 2021.

We'd love to grow our RF cohorts in the coming years. By 2025, we'd love to run 5 cohorts per year with 100+ fellows in each. Most importantly, we'd love to give every fellow an amazing experience that positively transforms their life path.

That doesn't quite show our full ambitions though. We want to help humanity transition to a post-capitalist world. We're fed up with the ravages of modern society: the climate crisis, vetocratic governments, extreme inequality, a broken information system, and more. The world can be so much better. We (I) want to help build it. But who am I?

II. Who am I?

I'm Rhys! I am hyper curious, intentional, abstract, generative, enthusiastic, ambitious, and caring.

I'm a teacher, writer, and facilitator.

I'm a pretty chill guy, but I work best when I am pushed by my teammates.

I'm a pretty abstract thinker, but I work best when that's balanced by concrete action.

III. What am I looking for? Who are you?

I'm looking for someone to shore up my blindspots. Someone who has a deep drive for ambition and success. Someone who has a bias towards concrete action.

And of course, I'm looking for someone who is deeply committed to the mission and values of Roote. You should want to envision, build, and personally embody a post-capitalist world.

(See below for the full job description.)

If you're interested in possibly working together please reach out at rhys@roote.co. (Or send your friends my way!) I'd love to know what makes you interested in Roote and how your deep self relates to competitiveness and concrete action. If there's a fit, we'll hop on a call and then start working on a project together.

As an important note: This is very much a co-founder type role—high risk, high return. Although I think Roote could be making substantially more money than we do now, payment at the beginning is largely in equity, learning, and network. (Right now Roote roughly makes $2,000/month through the Roote Fellowship and my Patreon. I'd love to split that and equity with you as we scale. I expect to be making closer to $20,000/month by the end of 2021.)

Finally, I've written a more traditional job description for how I'm imagining this role. It's below.

Roote Co-Founder and COO

Role Overview

This is a unique opportunity to build the foundations of a networked post-capitalist humanity.

I started Roote in August 2020 to imagine and build a positive future by educating ambitious frontier people. As of Feb 2021, we've run three fellowships and totaling Roote Fellows—the start of a community of post-capitalist builders.

We're now entering the next stage of Roote—growing the fellowship and influencing the larger global stage. I'm searching for great co-founders to help me catalyze this future.

This role is similar to the executive directors that operationalize Jon Haidt's books. See "Projects Co-Founded" on his website here. It's also similar to Itzik Yahav's role at Sapienship.

What You'll Do

Work with Rhys to create a profitable online school.
Push the pace and ambition of Roote.
Co-develop the culture and processes of the Roote organization.
Create an amazing student experience that turns Roote Fellows into enthusiastic supporters. (By specific actions like building a self-organizing fellows community and developing curriculum.)
Build relationships with aligned institutions to place and sponsor Roote Fellows.
Grow Roote's marketing funnel through content like The Rhys Show, Rhys' newsletter, and new channels.
Co-organize a 500-person conference at the intersection of Roote's topics.
Divide back-of-house logistics for starting a company: legal formation, accounting, healthcare, etc.
Roughly speaking, your role can be seen as working with me to take a massive backlog of Roote ideas then prioritizing, experimenting, and operationalizing them into repeatable business models.

Who You Are

Have a strong bias toward concrete action. You should often ask: "Why can't this be done sooner?"
Have a strong bias towards ambition. You should often ask: "Is this the most ambitious plan we could come up with?"
Align with Roote's guiding values: you search for root-level solutions, look to positively shape technology, believe "everything in moderation, even moderation", think holistically about human needs, and operate from a place of abundant generosity.
Thrive in uncertainty. You enjoy creating certainty from uncertainty.
Interdisciplinary and relentlessly curious about the world. You get excited by the Roote RFPs and this reading list.
Have many skills and are excited to learn more. You'll learn whatever it takes to solve a problem for Roote. You are comfortable with some code but lean towards no-code.
A teacher and community builder.
Want to focus for 10+ years on world-class company building.

Why You Might Be Excited About Us

You get to be weird and creative. This is not a traditional VC firm, tech company, online school, or academic research hub.
You want to work with me. Here is my How to Work With Me Manual.
We have a great network. You want to work with global leaders and ambitious frontier people.

Why You Might Not Be Excited About Us

You aren't comfortable with the uncertainty of an early-stage startup.
You aren't aligned with the Roote values.
You aren't aligned with the Roote mission. We have a multidisciplinary, global, humanity-level, long-term scope. Roote isn't a fit if you want to focus on a specific field at the local level.

Location, Start Date and Compensation

I live in San Francisco, but Roote Fellows are all around the world, and this job can be done remotely. After COVID, I have a strong preference for in-person in the Bay Area.

Compensation for this role is: a) An equal equity stake as Rhys in Roote. b) Half of all income until we grow the team more.

You would start as soon as possible.

Please reach out if this interests you! I'd love to hop on a introductory call and begin to collaborate on projects to see if there's a fit.