_Primer

As humans, we’re doing a really good job of collecting data and a really bad job of digesting it. Having the internet at our fingertips has inundated us with so much information every hour of every day that we alternate between burnout, gut-decision-making or just plain apathy. Primer wants to change that. By training machines to understand our language, parse our vast streams of data, pull out the most relevant information, fact check and eliminate biases, then create bite-sized chunks of content, Primer helps us absorb data more effectively. With just one click, Primer gives us a briefing synthesizing all the information we need to know about any given subject, freeing our brains to focus on analysis and make better decisions. Imagine the real-world implications of making the best-informed environmental, biological, geopolitical, etc. decisions this next decade. These decisions could fundamentally shift human life as we know it.

Sean Gourley

CEO

"Let's say you're an intelligence analyst covering the Middle East. Oil tankers have been attacked in the Strait of Hormuz and you're tasked with figuring out the truth. Is this an act of war? Who is responsible? At the moment, you have a torrent of information coming in but you know you haven’t seen everything. You also know that you are under extreme pressure to produce briefings and reports and get them out to decision makers. At Primer, we are able to help pull out bits of information to create the first draft of the report, giving you, the analyst, the confidence that everything that can be seen has been seen – that the important stuff has been surfaced. You can then spend more time drawing conclusions. Afterwards, we can even tell you the peripheral aspects that may be really important – like additional data streams from Chinese chatter that is impacting the region, to give us an even broader picture. How we interpret the intelligence in the Gulf, and the alleged Iranian attacks, will dictate people’s lives. The analysis to get this right is crucial, especially if there is misinformation being propagated – there are dire consequences to getting this wrong." – Sean Gourley, CEO

_The Vision

_Why Now

We’re at the inflection point between a startup and a company and need to think about our future org structure and evolving our processes. We need someone who has been through high-growth to help us see what’s coming up ahead and help us get in front of it. Someone who can grow and develop our executive team, and who can take us through the changes to get us ready for scale.

From the business perspective, we’re embarking on a fundamental shift from a technology company with a sales component to a product company with sales and technology arms. This means global expansion into 3-4 countries, 5-10 new corporate deployments, bringing more public awareness to our product and its applications, and launching a consumer and other verticals.

We’re launching our search now so our VP People can focus on building versus firefighting.

"Our people are our greatest assets – every single person we hire has to be great, never mediocre. [Qualities we look for:] Fundamentally we’re hungry to bring the future to the present; where the betterment of machines makes humanity better. Where machines and humans live in unity. We’re so very proud of what we do, the company we work for, and the difficult problems we’re solving. We know that we don’t know what we don’t know. Which is why we are all here. If we do our job, we get to tell the people we love what we’ve done – it’s never about just picking up our paycheck and going home.” – Ben Jones, Chief Product Officer

Ben Jones

Chief Product Officer

_Your Impact

Philosophy. We want to create a place where people can do their best work. Where we have the right kind of infrastructure, code, customers, and data to successfully solve the hard problems. Where we like the person we report to and the people we manage. It doesn’t mean life is always easy or that there’s no uncertainty, pressure nor stress—rather, that we work in an environment where this is okay.

Talent Management. We do a pretty good job of identifying and selecting exceptional talent, having brought onboard some of the greatest minds, experts and intellectuals across finance, media and government. We’re proud that our bar is high, yet this also means that our employees become targets for other high-growth startups almost as soon as they onboard. We now need to thoughtfully create a challenging and meaningful employee experience at scale, including talent development, coaching and mentoring early managers, infusing diversity and inclusion across the business, designing the total rewards strategy to reflect our people philosophy, and setting up our people metrics and analytics.

Executive Coach. We see huge value in having an advisor who can proactively guide our leadership team on all things people while helping us preserve our DNA.

Ed Harris

SVP Engineering

“The cool thing is that all the founders are insanely smart and yet they’re also refreshingly coachable – they have to be after taking harsh criticism from advisors and thesis critique boards for their PhD’s! The fact that they’re bringing in Heads of Engineering, Product, Revenue and People [at this stage] shows their high EQ and their openness.” – Ed Harris, SVP Engineering