Director, Strategy

Job Description Key Highlights - Position: Director of Strategy & Growth CXO in 3-4 years - Location: In-office (Gurgaon) - Experience: Minimum 8+ years of experience of working in fast-paced environment with strong stakeholder management / people management skills. - CTC Range: Need-basis CTC + up to Rs. X crore in ESOPs, depending on past work experience and skills. This role is a high skin-in-the-game role. - Note: This role is high on rigour and is valuable for you only if you are looking to create incredible value from ESOPs, while having a founder-like mindset. We are looking for an entrepreneurial Director of Strategy & Growth who can help us go to $50M in ARR / 10 million successful business entrepreneurs in the next 3 years. You will be owning the growth & product charter for both the existing products and future new products we aim to launch for making our entrepreneurs successful. About Airblack & Zudo Airblack is India's largest alternate skilling platform, helping people become microentrepreneurs and creators. Our mission is to help the next 100 million people in the workforce get access to meaningful opportunities. We currently operate in sectors such as beauty, fashion, nutrition, digital & home businesses, impacting over 1M learners every month. Our flagship school in the beauty space is India's #1 Beauty Academy brand, with an alumni base of over 40,000 entrepreneurs in 300+ cities in India. Our apps consistently rank in top 10 education apps in India with 1M+ users and 40M+ minutes of learning content being consumed every month. Airblack has raised over $11 million from marquee investors such as Elevation Capital, Info Edge Ventures, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, Blume Founders Fund and Better Capital, and leading angels such as Vidit (Meesho), Kunal (CRED), Deepinder (Zomato), Harshit & Shashank (Razorpay) and so on. One of our new products, Zudo, is now India's fastest growing apps in the skilling / content space. Built with the mission of helping people get access to meaningful opportunities, it offers microcourses at Rs. 250 per month. Few numbers - 180 days since launch - 3M downloads / 1.5M MAU / growing 100% MoM - High repeat rates & retention rates - Over 50,000 businesses already launched in beauty / fashion / nutrition / digital sectors What makes you a preferred candidate Must Have - Clarity: First and foremost, you are clear that if you don't start up yourself, you want to be a part of a founder-like role with founder-like upside. A typical job is not for you. Hence, you would rather partner with an ambitious & resilient team and build with them. - Ambition: You are an ambitious individual with an impressive track record of having high-ambition experiences in the past, - Strong first-principle thinking: You love looking at problem statements from fresh lens - Strong team management / stakeholder management skills: You can coach people and bring out the best in them. You can get things done from teams coming from various heterogeneous backgrounds and motivations. Good to have, else you can pick these up in first 90 days - Experience in owning growth charters: You have led budgets of at-least Rs. 5cr a month to grow digital consumer apps as a strong preference. You are a curious growth-mindset individual with a geek-like first principles understanding of how creatives are made, how spends on Meta & Google work, how various AI tools can be leveraged to drive rapid experimentation and prototyping; growth hacks & organic content ideas excite you, you sometime spend hours on a weekend trying a new product. - Product-first thinking: You care most about what users want, or may want. You get excited by new cohorts of data, and have a childlike curiosity to unfold insights and learn. You have past experience in building and working with high caliber engineers & designers, who care about fast shipping speeds (think in days, not weeks) and quality design. Some other preferences - Tier 1 educational background, or past entrepreneurial experience is strongly preferred - Must have experience in team building & cross-team collaboration About the Team at Airblack We are a 150+ member team with a high curiosity quotient and talent density. We like to partner with highly ambitious people who like to set high benchmarks for themselves, and have backed it up with actions in the past. Current management team: - Videt: Founder; Product & Business; Ex-Elevation Capital, BCG, NSIT, 2X founder - Vaibhav: Founder, Engineering; Ex-Goldman Sachs, IIT Roorkee CS - Nirmal: Business & Category; Ex-Urban Company, Vedanta, IIT Madras - Harleen: BD & Culture; Ex-Spicejet, Education Entrepreneur - Hrishikesh: Operations, Ex-Teach for India