Founding GTM

Remote, US-based. Full-time.

About Poka Labs

Poka Labs builds AI agents that automate pricing, quoting, and cross-sell for complex manufacturing businesses. Specialty chemicals, pipe fittings, abrasives, advanced materials, adhesives, coatings, metals. Industries where technical specs drive pricing, catalogs run to 20,000+ SKUs, and the best account managers carry decades of tribal knowledge in their heads.

A typical quote at one of our prospects: customer emails an RFQ. The account manager/engineer decodes the product and configurations, checks inventory, factors in tariffs, freight, customer history, and competition, then gets internal approval. Weeks go by, multiple people, and customers get left in the dark.

Our AI agents run 24/7 doing this work. A week becomes five minutes. Win rates go up. Margin improves. Customers grow.

Deployed at F100 enterprises and mid-market manufacturers. Based in SF, growing fast.

About the Role

First dedicated GTM hire at Poka Labs. Build the outbound engine that fills the founder's calendar with qualified discovery calls and turns them into customers. You own pipeline cold to qualified, run discovery, and graduate into mid-market and enterprise closes yourself. Founder closes to start. By Month 6 you should be running deals.

What You'll Do

• Cold outbound across email, phone, LinkedIn. ~250 dials, ~250 personalized emails, and 100 LinkedIn messages per week.
• Refine the ICP list. $25M+ specialty chems, pipe fittings, abrasives, advanced materials, coatings, and adhesives with 1,000+ SKUs. Identify Director of Sales, VP Sales, Commercial Director, President, COO, and CFO at each account.
• Book 20+ qualified discovery calls per month.
• Iterate the outbound sequence weekly. Kill what does not work.
• Travel monthly to industry conferences. Work the floor, set meetings, fill pipeline.
• Visit customer sites with the founder when it helps close.
• Build the playbook so the next five hires can run it.
• Feed customer signal back to engineering. Pricing pushback, integration objections, feature gaps.

What You'll Bring

• 2 to 5 years of outbound B2B sales. SDR who consistently hit quota and is ready for more, or an early-stage BDR/AE looking to own a function.
• Comfort on the phone with buyers in legacy industries.
• Track record of opening cold accounts and grinding through the no's.
• AI-native workflow. Clay, Claude, Apollo, ChatGPT, the rest of the modern outbound stack.
• Willingness to travel ~25% of the time.

Bonus

• Sold into manufacturing, distribution, or industrial verticals.
• ERP vocabulary (Epicor, SAP, NetSuite, Oracle, IFS).
• German, Spanish, French, or Mandarin. We have prospects in Europe, LATAM, and Asia.
• You have set foot on a plant floor, distribution warehouse, or industrial trade show.

Why Join Poka

A product that works. F100s and mid-market manufacturers pay us today. Pilots convert into multi-year contracts. You will not be selling a deck.

Founder-led coaching. Work daily with Malay (HBS, chemical engineer, specialty chemicals across US, Germany, and China). Every call reviewed. Every loss dissected. You will learn industrial enterprise sales faster than at any name-brand SaaS company.

Hunter comp. OTE $140k to $200k. Base plus commission on contract values. Accelerators after achieving quota. No caps on earning.

A market nobody serves well. Industrial manufacturing moves trillions on tools built in 1998. Legacy CPQ (Salesforce CPQ, PROS, Vendavo) is rules-based and brittle. We are the AI-native alternative.

Own the function. The first. Playbook, comp plan, future hires, channels. All yours.

Remote, US-based.

How to Apply

Don't just send a resume. Prospect us.

Pretend Poka is on your target list. Figure out who to contact, what to say, and how to land the meeting. Email, LinkedIn, call, voicemail. Send the actual outbound sequence you would run if Poka were a $200M specialty chemicals distributor. We will evaluate it the way our prospects evaluate ours.

Interview Process

1. 20-minute call with Malay (CEO). Vibe check.
2. 60-minute working session. Live cold-call exercise plus GTM teardown.
3. Paid Work Trial
4. Offer.