Proof of Work

JOB SEARCH STRATEGY WITH EARLY.

Last month, I was chatting with Teddy, the Chief of Staff at The Sentience Company.

Sentience is a NYC seed-stage startup building AI software to create a digital version of yourself.

Eventually, I asked the question that’s always on my mind.

“So how did you land your role?”

As he answered, a big smile started to spread across my face.

“I was put in contact with Sam, the founder, through a mutual connection. We started talking, and I thought I could help the company with some things, so I jumped in and worked with Sam for a week. I wasn’t paid or anything, I just wanted to be useful. At the end of the week, Sam asked me if I wanted to join the team full-time, and of course, I said yes.”

I was smiling because that’s exactly how I landed my role at Series B Uber.

I helped the team by handing out marketing palm cards and onboarding new drivers for about a week. At the end of the week, I asked if they had any full-time roles. They did, and within another week, I was hired as the 250th employee.

I did the same thing to land my role at Avo, a Series A startup backed by Y-Combinator and Kleiner Perkins. I went to the warehouse, gave them feedback on everything I thought could be improved in the operations, and spent almost an hour coaching the manager on the floor. I was hired later that week.

Value delivery isn’t just a strategy. It’s a mindset that can propel you to the top of the candidate list and ultimately get you the job.

This is more true in startups than in any other type of company.

Why?

Because in startups, there’s WAY less room for hiring errors.

In a massive company with thousands of employees and a robust onboarding and training process, a bad or mediocre hire won’t be as much of a drag on the company, and the infrastructure is in place to get them up to speed and at least productive.

In a startup that doesn’t exist. They need someone who can deliver value as close to day one as possible.

So, your ability to demonstrate what you’re capable of before your butt is in the seat is as close to a silver bullet to eliminate that “doubt of impact”.

Proof of work scares and confuses a lot of job seekers, so in today’s issue, we’ll demystify it, show you how to deliver value with (relative) ease in every step of the process, and even give you a free tool I built to help you create your own proof of work.

Here’s what we’ll cover…

Table of Contents

• WHY THIS ISN'T FREE WORK

• WHAT PROOF OF WORK DOES TO A HIRING TEAM

• WHERE PROOF OF WORK LANDS THE BEST

• THE FOUR MOMENTS OF PROOF OF WORK DELIVERY

• EXAMPLES OF SUCCESSFUL PROOF OF WORK

• DON’T BURN YOURSELF OUT

• HOW TO BUILD A PROOF OF WORK

• THE PROOF OF WORK FINDER AI PROMPT

3. WHERE PROOF OF WORK LANDS THE BEST

I’ve seen Proof of Work used effectively at every stage of a startup, but the role it plays changes as a company grows.

Between Seed and Series B, it’s close to a cheat code.

The founder is usually reachable, the problems are visible from the outside, and almost no one is showing up with a deliverable, both because the company is less well-known and because it’s not a method most people use.

Teddy landed his role at Sentience (Seed) through Proof of Work.

I landed roles this way at both a Series A (Avo) and Series B (Uber) startup.

The founders of Rillet (then a $100M Series A, now a $500M Series B) created a role for an Early Accelerator member after a Zoom call and a follow-up value deliverable.

In that window, a strong deliverable can win you a defined role or convince a founder to create one.

From Series C onward, the game shifts.

The process gets more structured, you’re more likely to be routed through a recruiter with a standardized interview loop, and the roles already exist with a set scope.

That said, we’ve had a member pitch a Series E startup on a new role mid-interview process, provide Proof-of-Work, and have an entire division spun up for him to run.

It happens, but it is far rarer to create a role for yourself at a later stage company. The later you go, the more it’s about increasing the gap between you and the second-place candidate, and the more sophisticated it needs to be to stand out.

Underneath all of this, the main questions are:

“Do you understand well enough where you can demonstrate value? Do you know who the decision maker is? Can you reach them?”

4. THE FOUR MOMENTS OF PROOF OF WORK DELIVERY

A normal startup hiring process gives you several moments to deliver Proof of Work, from a cold outreach before you’ve spoken to anyone, to a follow-up after you understand the role inside and out.

The difference between them is information.

The earlier you move, the less you know and the more assumptions you’ll need to make, so your Proof of Work leans on showing general capability.

The later you go, the more you’ve learned, so it can be aimed at their exact problems.

You can deliver at almost any of these moments.

Just match the deliverable to how much you actually know.

Cold Outreach: I call this “shooting your shot”. This is where you craft something based on the research you’ve done on the company and send it off to get the attention of the founder and hiring team before you’ve had any touchpoints with them. You’ll have less information, but sending it in your initial outreach is a way to stand out from the pack. The best version of this often uses an outside project, something you’ve already built, to show what you’re capable of before you even understand their specific problem.

Networking Calls With People Inside The Company: Treat these as reconnaissance. You’re learning what the company is actually struggling with, which is the raw material for everything you’ll build later. The way you stand out here is by building rapport with the person so they see you as someone who would fit on the team, then following up with any Proof of Work that solves the problems they mentioned. Then send that same deliverable to the hiring manager, the skip-level, and the recruiter. Reference the conversation that prompted it, and be clear that you want to drive impact for the team. Name the role you’re interested in, or simply ask or suggest where you might be able to help. If you haven’t gathered enough information for a strong deliverable, don’t force it.

Phone Screens: These are still mostly reconnaissance, with higher stakes. Use the call to confirm the real problem behind the role and to understand how the team defines success in it. Every detail you gather here makes the deliverable you build more surgical and harder to ignore. There’s nothing you necessarily need to bring to the conversation, but you could allude to the deliverable you’re building to address the problems or opportunities they raise.

Interviews: This is where Proof of Work can make you stand out in the conversation. You could send a deliverable focused on a specific problem you’ve uncovered before the interview, highlighting the work you did, why you chose that problem, and offering to walk through it.

Follow-Ups: In my opinion, this is where Proof of Work is all but mandatory. After you’ve spoken to the team, understood their approach to this role, and asked clear questions about the work to be done, you have everything you need to make the deliverable a true Proof of Work. Spend a day or two after the interview leveraging all the information you’ve gathered to create the Proof of Work and send it over.

5. EXAMPLES OF SUCCESSFUL PROOF OF WORK

Here are a few pieces of Proof of Work that landed real offers, ranging from a few hours of effort to a few days.

The point is to find the version that fits you, then aim it at the company’s real problem.

New Employee Onboarding Plan

One Early member learned from the recruiter that the team had no new-hire onboarding process in place.

So he built one.

He created a detailed, automated onboarding workflow and sent it to the hiring manager before his interview.

She opened the conversation with, “This is really great. I’ve never received something like this from a candidate before.”

He got the job.

Detailed 30-60-90 Day Plan

Another member, a Sales Director, built a 30-60-90 day plan that read like he already had the job.

It included his prospecting strategy, a worked prospecting research example, a stakeholder map, an account map skeleton, a marketing collaboration plan, opportunity stages, KPIs, a handoff process, and a sales collateral database.

The hiring team didn’t have to imagine his first quarter because he had already mapped it out for them.

Detailed Case Study Highlight

A third member built a detailed case study of a relevant example of his past work which he used in his cold outreach messages.

That approach earned him four offers, one of which was the Rillet offer I mentioned above.

The AI Workflow

The highest-leverage version I’ve seen this year is the AI workflow handoff.

The premise is straightforward.

You find a manual, repetitive process inside the company you’re targeting.

You build a working AI workflow that handles that process for them.

You record a short demo of it running.

Then you give the company everything they would need to install and run it themselves, regardless of whether they hire you.

The delivery line that makes this work is what I call the “with or without you“ framing:

That framing accomplishes three things in one move.

It removes the risk for the company, it demonstrates that you can deliver outcomes by handing them the working artifact, and it makes turning you down feel like leaving value on the table.

This deliverable lands the best at companies between Seed and Series B, where operations are still messy, and AI adoption is uneven across the team.

At later stages, the workflow needs to be sharper because the team may already have parts of it handled internally.

That said, the pure demonstration of AI fluency will likely be enough to impress the hiring team regardless of the stage.

This shift is already changing how the sharpest people hire.

A VC he knows was down to two finalists.

He passed on the candidate with more experience and hired the one who was building AI agents on her own time.

He even offered to keep paying her to build if she automated her own role away.

Hiring teams want to see what you’ve built, what you’re building, or what you’ve built for them.

Proof of Work gives them all three.

DON’T JOB SEARCH ALONE

If you’re reading through this thinking “I want help creating my Proof of Work step-by-step” that’s exactly what the Early Accelerator is built for.

Here’s what our members get:

One Early member recently landed a remote senior leadership role at a $500M startup that wasn’t even hiring.

Another went from VP to a COO role less than 90 days after joining.

These are the result of the playbooks, mentorship, coaching, company research, and community we provide.

It’s the best way I’ve found to cut through the noise and land a role at the next generation of world-changing startups.

Learn more and apply today (click here).

6. DON’T BURN YOURSELF OUT

You don’t need to ship a major deliverable at every step of your search.

If you try, you’ll burn out within a week, and the quality will drop across the board.

The early conversations are for listening and learning, not for building.

You stay in the running by showing up prepared, asking sharp questions, and following through on what you say you’ll do.

The details you gather along the way feed the deliverable you’ll build later.

Save the real builds for the moments when they carry the most weight, usually the interview and the follow-up.

7. HOW TO BUILD A PROOF OF WORK

Here’s the full process in four steps:

1. Identify the problem the company is actually hiring to solve. The job posting often hints at it, and the conversations you have during your networking calls, phone screens, and interviews will tell you more.

2. Match that problem to your specific skills and the work you’ve done elsewhere.

3. Build the deliverable. This could be a plan, a deck, a teardown, a prototype, or an automation.

4. Time the drop. The interview and the follow-up are usually your moments, and you’ll want to match the size of the deliverable to the weight of the moment.

8. I BUILT YOU A TOOL FOR THIS

The hardest part of building Proof of Work is usually figuring out what to build for a specific company and how to actually create it.

To help with that, I built a free prompt called the Proof of Work Finder.

You give it the company you’re targeting, your background, the job description if one exists, and any notes or transcripts from conversations you’ve had with the team.

It researches the company, identifies the real problem worth solving, hands you a few ranked ideas for deliverables, and then builds the one you choose alongside you.

Click here to get a free copy of the Proof of Work Finder AI Prompt.

Just remember: There’s a built-in Slop Review, but don’t trust the output 100%. Use your judgment and check whether you agree with the AI’s strategy.

If you want hands-on help building Proof of Work that gets you pulled into the room, that’s the work we do inside the Early Accelerator.

Let’s go get you that job! 🏆

Kyle

Founder of Early

P.S. Whenever you’re ready, here are the four ways I can help you most this week:

1. Use the Proof of Work Finder (FREE) - find the highest leverage Proof of Work you can create for a target startup builds it with you, and pressure-tests it so it doesn’t read as generic. Send your Proof of Work to the team and create a huge gap between you and the second-place candidate.

2. Download the Clarity Playbook (FREE) - the exact process I walk every Accelerator member through to lock in their Role, Impact, and Company before they ever write a post or send a resume. Start here!

3. Download the Master Interview Prep Playbook (FREE) - the 47-page playbook full of prompts covering everything from behavioral prep to case study panels, used by Early members landing roles at YC, a16z, Google Ventures, and Sequoia-backed startups.

4. Apply to join the Early Accelerator - Get coached directly by me, surrounded by a community of hundreds of badass startup operators. This is everything I learned when landing my role as Uber employee 250 and transitioning post-layoff to a Series A with top VC investors. We give you everything you need to make your startup job search a success. Structure, accountability, strategies, investor-grade company data, target company lists, negotiation assistance, everything to help you win.