Flytedesk powers media and advertising on college campuses. We build the technology that college media organizations and universities use to manage their operations. We build the technology that small businesses use to reach students. We work with brands, campaigns, and causes as their college partner in understanding, reaching, and driving outcomes with students.
We have a presence at almost every college in the country and the ability to reach 20 million students through campus billboards, student influencers, campus email newsletters, college newspapers, digital ads, SMS, and more.
We started flytedesk as the tool we needed at our college newspapers and have grown to become the single largest funding source for student journalism. Brick by brick, we’re creating a sustainable business model for college media by providing a coveted service to advertisers. We’re mission-driven, profitable, newly remote, and unrelenting in pushing our business and customers forward.
Full disclosure, this thing is a bear. When we first started, we figured that we’d build a simple way to aggregate a few different types of media on college campuses, plug it into existing demand sources, and boom – profit. It wasn’t that easy.
Our platform has become a whole parallel universe… the college media ecosystem isn’t unlike that of the outside world but everything is sufficiently different that we’ve built and built until flytedesk became pretty much the entire Lumascape. We’re the SSP, the DSP, the DMP, the ad server… and we operate across every type of media.
What emerged is a minor miracle. While the rest of the media industry is being decimated by the platforms… we’ve created a business model that’s actually working.
We’re looking for a VP-Product to take on a significant leadership role and transform our Grace Hart of a product into the Miss Congeniality we know she can be. (hey, it’s an apt metaphor and we’re sticking with it!) Our customers on both sides of the marketplace love us and rely on us and we have an incredible opportunity to build something defining for an industry that sorely needs it. You’ll own our roadmap, lay down strong processes, build a team, and create the intuitive UI that’ll help us scale. You’ll work closely with our CEO, Alex Kronman, to translate our vision to pixels, and with our business teams to understand what our customers need next. We’re emphasizing this translation role because we have most of the right clay on the table and are focusing on those fundamentals before we add any more. That means in the short-term we’ll need you to be a utility player – product manager, UI designer, and member of the executive team. The right candidate is hungry to grow, intent on building something big, and has the communications skills to work across the organization while growing a team.
Responsibilities
Organization: We’re not inherently disorganized, there’s just a lot here. We’ll ask you to be a simplifier: owning the road map, making sure we’re taking on the right next projects, resourcing them appropriately, and getting them delivered with excellence and consistency.
UX/UI/Design: We love great design. We have many instances of great design in our product and we’re looking for someone to lead great design of a cohesive whole. We’ll look to you to create sleek, easy-to-use UI and work to implement it with engineering. Ultimately, you’ll identify and hire a first-class design team.
Product Vision: We feel incredibly lucky to be building a product that can play such a positive role in the industry. If we’re successful, we’ll build more than just a better future for college media, but also a platform and model that professional media companies can use to survive and thrive for another generation. Yes, we’re looking for someone who can bring Alex’s vision to life more fully… but his vision is really just the result of knowing our customers and opportunity really intimately. We’re also looking for someone willing to dive super deep to expand and iterate on the success we’ve had so far.
Skills
Must Have:
- Extremely organized and process-oriented
- Empathetic, ego-aware, not an asshole, comfortable evolving thinking quickly without drama
- Demonstrated management and leadership skills
- Excellent written and verbal communication
- 5+ years experience in UX/UI (if you over-index on Product Management and under-index on design, please note in your application)
Nice to Have:
- 5+ years product management experience
- College media/professional media/adtech experience
Your Team
You’ll work closely with Alex, and our VP of Engineering, Dan Newman, as well as interfacing frequently with our business and engineering teams. You’ll start as a One-Person Show, but as you establish processes that can scale, you’ll ultimately be tasked with building out the product team too.
This role reports directly to the CEO.
Please let them know you heard about it from Venture Connect