Remote Executive Assistant

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Would you like to work closely with two experienced entrepreneurs, providing administrative support to them? Do you have an interest in children, specifically elementary-aged kids (6-10 years old)? Our company is building an iPad app for children that helps them discover their interests and access the wealth of information online. We’re looking for an experienced assistant to work closely with two of our founders, helping with everything that comes up in the day-to-day of running a startup. 

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It’s important to us that you have previous experience as an assistant to an executive in a company. Also, it’s a big plus if you have experience with kids and parents since you’ll regularly interact with parents and their children. Finally, it’s important you have had a full-time remote job with a company because our team is entirely remote.

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The focus of this role will be assisting our CEO, Keith, and our President, David. We’re currently a small team of six full-time people and a few contractors, but soon we will be launching our product, raising a new round of funding, and expanding our team.

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

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First, a few hours of each day you’ll be 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 help them each to process their inbox, draft replies to emails, help organize the calendar & schedule meetings, and make travel arrangements. 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 these items.

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Personality-wise, Keith and David are easygoing, but they’re both experienced entrepreneurs so their standards are incredibly high. The emails you’ll be drafting are complex so it’s important that your natural personality is very detail-oriented. 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 forgets to mention the time zone when proposing a time for a meeting and never forgets the zoom link. In addition, you’ll need to be a strong writer, skilled at crafting tricky communication with a high degree of social finesse. Keith and David are looking for an assistant who will hit the ground running, in all of these areas.

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The second aspect of this job will be acting as a recruiting coordinator because Keith and David currently oversee all of our hiring. You’ll help refine job descriptions, post job openings, and draft outreach to candidates. It’s okay if you don’t have a lot of experience with recruiting; we will help you learn our approach to recruiting. However, we want to make sure that 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. Most weeks, you will coordinate with parents so Keith, David, and others can meet with parents and kids on Zoom.  Other 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 help vett contractors we’re considering hiring by evaluating their proposals.

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Job Requirements ​ 

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

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At The Explanation Company, we are building a new kind of internet browser for kids to use on their tablets. We think the internet is one of the greatest inventions ever. As grown-ups, it’s easy to take it for granted that we have instant access to information on anything we’re curious about, but children have been left out. We think this is because there is such a focus on making the internet “safe” for children, that all the other products overlook the single biggest problem with the internet for kids: it’s too difficult to use. Searching and browsing the web requires advanced literacy skills that most kids don’t have. We’re making it incredibly easy for children to explore their questions & interests, discover new passions, and do all this independently or with friends. Our goal is not to reduce the amount of time kids spend with screens, instead it’s to increase the quality of experience children have with the screens they love using.

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Our team culture is one where the fun of the work comes from solving hard problems with talented colleagues. Things are fast-paced, with a focus on getting things done. We have big plans and a small team that is passionate about reaching as many children as possible so we have to find clever shortcuts to work smarter, not harder.

 

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

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Keith leads our product & engineering strategy. He is an experienced entrepreneur who has started and had exits for multiple companies, most recently he was the co-founder and CEO of Mystery Science which he sold to Discovery Education in 2020. Prior to this, he was a product manager at Facebook, first leading News Feed and then leading Messenger. As a colleague, he's an engineer and product designer, who obsesses over creating great products that customers love. He's also a dad with two boys, who both use the company’s product and (helpfully) complain a lot about it! :)

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David leads everything else at the company. He was previously 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 and Nyla who enthusiastically use the company’s product nearly every day.

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

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Please fill out this application: https://mu2iq6nekvb.typeform.com/to/rZE02QJW

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