In today’s deep dive, we look at how the Founder’s Office went from an undefined startup job to one of the most sought-after roles in the ecosystem. We examine what these jobs actually involve, how much they pay, why business schools are pushing them, and what people do after leaving them. We also look at the less flattering side: title inflation, unpaid internships, long hours, and whether “working with the founder” is sometimes being used as a substitute for proper pay and a proper job.

There is a Founder’s Office job in Bengaluru right now that requires an MBA and pays between ₹20,000 and ₹28,000 a month. The work includes coordinating meetings, following up with clients, managing schedules and reminders, and helping the founders with routine administration. The company says the candidate will also get exposure to sales, recruitment, operations, networking and “founder-level decision-making.”

There is another Founder’s Office job at Flo Sleep in Mumbai. It pays ₹24 lakh to ₹30 lakh a year, plus 0.1% to 0.25% equity. The person is expected to work on strategy, operations, growth and new initiatives, and could eventually run major projects or entire business verticals.

Then there are jobs that go much further. A Gurgaon consumer startup recently advertised a Founder’s Office position paying ₹50 lakh to ₹80 lakh, including ESOPs. The person would work on fundraising, board material, investor relations, financial analysis and major business decisions.

All three jobs carry roughly the same label.

That tells us something about the strange new career category Indian startups have created. “Founder’s Office” can mean executive assistant, business analyst, salesperson, project manager, strategy consultant, chief of staff, future COO or simply the person who deals with everything that does not fit anywhere else.

Yet the title has become one of the more desirable jobs among ambitious young people entering startups. Business schools now advertise Founder’s Office placements. There are clubs preparing students for these roles. Startups promise a “front-row seat” to company building. Some companies even offer unpaid Founder’s Office internships because, they argue, working close to the founder is itself valuable.

A whole economy is forming around the idea that sitting close to the founder can accelerate a career. The interesting part is that sometimes it really can.

Large Indian companies have always had a way to train future leaders. They recruited graduates into management trainee programmes, moved them through different functions, gave them access to senior managers and eventually placed them somewhere in the organisation.

The Founder’s Office is starting to play a similar role inside startups, except nobody designed a formal programme.

Instead of spending six months in marketing and six months in finance, a 25-year-old might spend Monday working on pricing, Tuesday preparing a fundraising deck, Wednesday interviewing candidates, Thursday studying a new city and Friday sitting in on a meeting with investors.

The training material is simply whatever problem the founder happens to have that week.

Weekday, the YC-backed recruiting startup, is currently offering ₹12 lakh to ₹15 lakh in cash plus ESOPs for a Founder’s Office role. New graduates can apply.

Flo Sleep's description is even more direct. It says the role is meant for people who eventually want to “build and run businesses”, and promises work across strategy, growth, operations and new initiatives.

That is not very different from what an old management trainee programme promised: spend a few years understanding the business, then become a leader.

There is one huge difference, though. HUL or Tata could build a structured programme with rotations, mentors and a defined career path. A Founder’s Office employee gets none of those guarantees.

The founder is the programme.

If the founder delegates well, explains decisions and lets a young employee own difficult problems, two years can produce an unusual amount of learning. If the founder does not, the same employee can spend two years making decks, scheduling meetings and chasing people on WhatsApp.

That is probably the biggest problem with the category today.

At the bottom of the market, Founder’s Office has started becoming a better-sounding name for fairly ordinary work.

Fat Pig Ventures recently advertised a Founder’s Office Associate position at ₹1.8 lakh to ₹3 lakh a year. The responsibilities mix research and strategy with vendor coordination, business profiles, portal submissions and administration. No previous experience is required.

The Bengaluru job paying up to ₹3.36 lakh is even clearer. Its full title is “Founder’s Office Executive / Executive Assistant”. The objective, according to the company itself, is to reduce the founders' time spent on coordination, scheduling, reminders, routine follow-ups and administrative work. An MBA is mandatory.

There is nothing wrong with being an executive assistant. Good EAs can be extraordinarily valuable.

The interesting question is why the job needs to be called Founder’s Office.

The answer is partly demand from employers and partly demand from candidates. “Executive Assistant” sounds administrative. “Operations Executive” sounds ordinary. “Business Development Associate” sounds like sales.

“Founder’s Office” sounds like strategy.

The employer gets a more attractive job posting. The candidate gets a more attractive line on the CV.

This is how title inflation happens without anybody necessarily lying.

Further up the ladder are genuine generalist roles. These people research new markets, analyse data, work on launches, help with hiring, improve processes and take on projects no department owns yet.

Above them are strategic Founder’s Office roles that look more like internal consultants or entrepreneurs in residence.

And at the top sits the real Chief of Staff or junior COO: someone trusted to represent the founder, work with senior executives, prepare board discussions, resolve cross-functional problems and sometimes make decisions on the founder's behalf.

The salary range reflects this confusion. One end of the market is below ₹3 lakh. Weekday is at ₹12 lakh to ₹15 lakh. Flo Sleep is at ₹24 lakh to ₹30 lakh plus equity. Some senior jobs are being advertised at ₹50 lakh to ₹80 lakh.

It is hard to think of another startup job where the same label can cover a 25-fold difference in annual pay.

The title has therefore become almost useless by itself.

A better question is simple: what can this person decide without asking the founder?

The strangest part of the Founder’s Office market appears when compensation gets low enough.

Marketing Makhni recently advertised an unpaid Founder’s Office internship. The role included research, presentations, tracking business metrics, coordinating across marketing, HR and operations, helping with partnerships and representing the founder's office in meetings.

The posting acknowledged that the internship was unpaid, but argued that the exposure to founder-level strategy and decision-making would be worth more than a stipend.

Focus Realm has advertised another unpaid Founder’s Office internship as a “Shadow CEO” programme, offering mentorship and performance-based perks.

Dalton Prep recently advertised plans to build a 10 to 15-person Founder’s Office intern team. The positions were unpaid. The pitch was straightforward: do not join primarily for money, join for exposure, learning, network and responsibility.

This is worth paying attention to because it changes the normal employment bargain.

Most jobs compensate people with salary, benefits, equity and future promotions.

Founder’s Office increasingly adds something less tangible: access.

You are supposed to value the opportunity to watch a founder make decisions, attend important meetings, understand fundraising, see the company numbers and build a relationship with somebody who might help your career later.

That access can have genuine value. A junior employee in a large company might take years to see a board deck or fundraising negotiation. A Founder’s Office associate at a 50-person startup could see both in the first month.

But “learning” is also wonderfully difficult to price.

It allows a company paying nothing to compete, at least rhetorically, with a company paying ₹15 lakh by arguing that its founder offers better exposure.

The market therefore has two very different versions of founder access.

Good companies pay you well and give you access. Weak offers sometimes use access to explain why they do not need to pay you well.

That difference will matter more as the job becomes fashionable.

Nothing shows how far Founder’s Office has travelled better than business schools.

Masters' Union's 2023 placement report listed Founder’s Office and Chief of Staff as a separate category. It accounted for 19% of offers, with an average CTC of ₹34.76 lakh. Consulting and strategy accounted for 21.2% and averaged ₹35.79 lakh. Product management was at ₹33.26 lakh.

In other words, Founder’s Office had become large enough to sit beside consulting, product, marketing, finance and sales as a formal career path.

The school now has a FOCOS Club specifically for students targeting Founder’s Office and Chief of Staff jobs. Its career pages feature alumni working in Founder’s Office roles at Zerodha, Tata 1mg and Nexstem, and a Chief of Staff at Ather.

Mesa School of Business has pushed the idea even further.

Its current outcomes page says graduates earn an average CTC of ₹26 lakh, with the top quarter averaging ₹36.5 lakh. More interestingly, it says 58% of graduates are in “founder-facing roles.” That category includes Founder’s Office, EIR or Chief of Staff, growth, product, revenue, category and BizOps.

Think about what has happened here.

Proximity to the founder is no longer merely a feature of a job. It has become a category in which career outcomes are measured.

A product manager and a growth manager can be grouped together because both sit close enough to the person running the company.

Mesa's programme also says students learn directly from more than 100 startup founders during the year. Its positioning is quite explicit: get close to founders, learn how startups are built, then take high-ownership roles inside them.

This is a meaningful change from how Indian management careers were sold twenty years ago.

Earlier generations chased Hindustan Unilever management trainee programmes, investment banking, consulting and large-company general management.

The startup generation increasingly wants a seat next to the person making the decisions.

It would be easy to dismiss all of this as job-title fashion, but that misses the actual reason Founder’s Office roles exist.

Startups create important work faster than they create departments.

A 30-person company may need to launch in a new city. Nobody owns “new city launch”.

It may suddenly need to prepare for fundraising. Nobody owns fundraising operations except the founder.

A new enterprise channel may look promising but may not yet justify hiring a VP.

A payments problem may sit between product, finance and operations.

A large partnership may require somebody to coordinate five internal teams.

This is exactly the work a Founder’s Office can absorb.

Balderton's recent guide to Chief of Staff hiring describes a similar pattern. At companies with roughly 10 to 50 people, a strong Chief of Staff can handle board material, investor updates, cross-functional initiatives, hiring and company goals. At 50 to 150 employees, the role can become an incubator for new functions. The person builds finance operations, revenue operations or people systems, runs them for a while, and then hands them to a dedicated leader.

That last part matters.

A good Founder’s Office should not become the permanent home of every difficult problem.

It should take something messy, make it work and then give it away.

Otherwise the company starts developing a second organisation sitting on top of the first one.

There is the official structure with heads of marketing, sales, product and operations. Then there is a second group of young generalists carrying messages that begin with, “The founder wants this done.”

That may speed things up for a while.

It can also mean the company has failed to build proper management.

For investors, the size and role of the Founder’s Office can therefore tell you something about organisational health. A three-person Founder’s Office incubating new projects may be useful. A 300-person company that still needs ten people in the founder's office chasing every department may simply have an unusually expensive coordination problem.

There is another reason this job is arriving at an interesting moment.

A large part of traditional junior knowledge work involved gathering information and turning it into something useful.

Research a competitor. Analyse a spreadsheet. Summarise customer calls. Draft a presentation. Build a basic financial model. Write follow-up emails. Prepare meeting notes. Create a simple workflow.

Those are exactly the tasks AI has become good at speeding up.

Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index found that 83% of surveyed leaders globally believed AI would let employees take on more complex and strategic work earlier in their careers.

Founder’s Office job descriptions are already reflecting this.

A current Founder’s Office automation job at Offline pays ₹15 lakh to ₹20 lakh plus 0.1% to 0.25% equity and asks the person to automate applications, onboarding, renewals, CRM workflows and member matching using AI.

That changes the economics of being a generalist.

Five years ago, a smart business generalist who wanted to automate a process might need engineering help. To analyse a large dataset, they might need an analyst. To create something usable, they might need a designer or product person.

Today that same employee can get much further alone.

AI therefore creates an interesting split inside Founder’s Office.

It hurts the person whose main value is summarising meetings, researching competitors, preparing basic decks and following up with teams.

It helps the person whose value is deciding what needs to be done, using AI to do much of the first-pass work and then getting humans across the company to act.

The first person was a coordinator.

The second starts looking like a very small operating team.

The strongest argument for taking one of these jobs is not a salary table. It is what can happen afterwards.

Aayush Agarwal worked as Chief of Staff at Zepto. He later left to start Snabbit, the on-demand home-services company.

By March this year, Snabbit was discussing a $50 million to $60 million funding round at a post-money valuation of roughly $350 million to $400 million, according to ET. It had been valued at about $180 million only months earlier.

It is almost the perfect Founder’s Office career story.

Work beside the founder of a hypergrowth startup. See how a new consumer category is built. Learn city operations, speed, supply, hiring, customer behaviour and fundraising. Then leave and build something yourself.

There is broader evidence that genuine Chief of Staff roles can be strong career accelerators.

McKinsey studied roughly 250 chiefs of staff across about 300 organisations. The median tenure was only 2.3 years. Four out of five moved into their next role within the same industry, usually at the same company. Two-thirds were promoted after the Chief of Staff stint. Only one in ten moved straight into another Chief of Staff job. On average, people moved up more than one organisational level.

That is important because it suggests the best version of this job is not supposed to be permanent.

It is a bridge.

The problem is that McKinsey studied genuine Chief of Staff roles around the world. We should not assume the same outcome for every 22-year-old Indian with “Founder’s Office Associate” on LinkedIn.

The label may be identical. The experience is not.

This creates another career problem.

After three years in enterprise sales, somebody can say they closed ₹20 crore of contracts.

A performance marketer can talk about ad spend, CAC and ROAS. A product manager can explain which product they owned and how usage changed.

A Founder’s Office employee can sometimes end up saying they worked on “strategy, operations and special projects”.

That sounds impressive until somebody asks what actually changed because of them. This is why the best Founder’s Office jobs eventually need to produce ownership.

“I helped the founder evaluate new markets” is exposure.

“I launched Hyderabad and reached ₹4 crore monthly GMV” is experience.

“I worked on fundraising” is exposure.

“I built the investor pipeline and helped close a ₹50 crore round” is experience.

“I worked across functions” is exposure.

“I built the revenue-operations process and handed it to a team of eight” is experience.

The risk is not being a generalist. Generalists can become excellent business leaders. The risk is staying general long enough that nobody knows what you are unusually good at.

This finally gets to the most important part of the decision.

Someone taking a normal job evaluates the company, salary, function, boss and promotion opportunities.

Someone joining the Founder’s Office should spend much more time evaluating the founder.

The role is an apprenticeship whether the company calls it one or not.

A good founder delegates decisions, not just errands. They explain why something matters. They let the employee disagree. They give them credibility with senior teams. They allow mistakes that do not destroy the business. Eventually, they hand over something important and say: you own this.

A weak founder can offer exactly the same job title while doing none of those things.

They can keep every decision to themselves, ask the Founder’s Office to make decks and chase departments, message at all hours and sell the experience as “high ownership”.

This is why founder access itself may be the wrong thing for candidates to optimise for.

A person can sit next to a founder every day and learn very little.

The scarce asset is not access. It is delegated authority.

That is what separates the ₹3 lakh Founder’s Office job from the role that creates a future COO, business head or founder, even when both job descriptions use the same words about ownership, ambiguity and working directly with the CEO.

There is something useful happening underneath all the noise.

Indian startups need people who can work across boundaries. Young professionals want to learn faster than traditional corporate jobs often allow. Founders have real problems that are too small for a department but too important to ignore.

Founder’s Office sits neatly between those needs.

At its best, it may be one of the best early-career jobs in the startup ecosystem. A 25-year-old can get exposure to pricing, sales, product, hiring, investors, finance and operations within two years. Most large companies would not give them that view in six.

At its worst, the same title can put an MBA graduate on ₹28,000 a month to manage calendars and follow-ups while telling them they are receiving founder-level exposure.

Both versions exist at the same time.

That is why Founder’s Office is becoming more than a fashionable title. It is turning into an informal apprenticeship market, with schools preparing people for it, employers competing for talent through access, candidates trading some certainty for faster learning and AI allowing smaller teams to take on more work.

But the market has grown faster than its definitions.

There is no standard salary, no standard responsibility, no qualification and no obvious career path. An unpaid intern and someone earning ₹80 lakh can both say they work in the Founder’s Office.

For someone considering the job, the title should therefore be the least interesting part of the offer.

The useful questions are much less glamorous. What will I actually own? Which decisions can I make? Which numbers will move because of me? What happened to the previous person in this role? Which functions have people from this team gone on to run? Does the founder delegate judgment or only workload?

Those answers tell you whether you are getting an apprenticeship or merely a better title.

And as Founder’s Office becomes a bigger part of India's startup labour market, that distinction is going to matter much more than how close your desk is to the founder.