Executive Assistant

I AM HIRING!!! 🥹🚨🤠 Fully remote with overlapping EST hours, pre-seed stage startup on a mission-driven team.

(If you're Toronto based tho then maybe we can work irl together ~)

More details: Trove is a new way to know yourself -- not just what you say, but what you do. It shows how you actually show up through gameplay — so you can find the people, work, and relationships that actually fit.

There are a few roles open, but most immediately I am looking for:

- an Executive Assistant (ideally starting April)
- a Product Engineer (ideally starting May)

Scrappy, curious, loves owning things, and doesn't need to be told what to do twice.

Sound like you or maybe know someone!?

All the details are in my hiring manifestos below. THEY ARE LONG BUT REQUIRED READING. 😅 Salaries are shown there too for transparency purposes.

Would appreciate a share or a comment to boost!!

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Hi there, I’m Helen Huang and I’m building a new way to measure someone’s character, values, and taste. In an era of increasingly more AI tools that uNlOcK eFfIcIeNcY — I’m building something that augments our human-ness, and I’m looking for your help!

🍊 About The Role

• Executive Assistant to the CEO catch-all title
  • ideally this is path to Chief of Staff
• Fully remote work with periodic in person work sessions
  • PLEASE NOTE: we will do startup full time hours (definitely not 40 hours, probably not 80 hours, but realistically you’ll end up somewhere around the ~60 hour range)
    • I will never demand a minimum set of hours from you bc it’s not actually about the hours… but if you’re someone who prefers to hold strict boundaries with work and shut the laptop at 6 (wtf?! 6?? not even 5?? haha) or if checking your messages on the weekend is blasphemous to you (both very valid things for you to feel btw), this is not gonna be the right fit for either of us
• You've worked in a fast-moving environment before, a startup, a small team, or alongside a founder, and you know what it means to hold things together without being asked twice. Side projects are cool, but we want to see that you've navigated real constraints with real teammates.
• You're not just a task-executor. You think ahead, flag what's falling through the cracks, and make things happen before they become problems.
• Targeting $40k - $60k CAD + equity TBD
  • while this cannot compare with more established companies (cuz we barely have a product in market at this point, and will likely be way more work and stress and fun), it is important for me to know that your needs are generally covered (not ramen salary 🍜) and that if it’s a good fit, there is meaningful equity for your work
• Targeting start date ASAP

🍎 The Big Vision

Trove is building the user-owned behavioral identity layer for the internet. This is infrastructure for people to be seen authentically - not through labels or accomplishments, but through revealed behavior.

Imagine a world if you could have x-ray vision for someone’s character. You could be celebrated for exactly who you are, hired for your traits that a resume can’t show. A world where the people you date and the friends you hang out with are trustworthy and genuine. How do we measure and quantify soft skills?

And in the future, as AI is embedded everywhere around us - what it cannot mimic is our character, our taste, our decision making, our actions. What can represent who we are at that point? What does a personal artifact of this future look like?

Those are the guiding principles of Trove.

🍈 More Details

This isn't a typical EA role where you manage a calendar and call it a day. You'll be operating across content, community, growth, and ops - the connective tissue that keeps Trove moving while I focus on product and vision.

Here's the situation so far: In October 2025, I vibecoded what I'd call MVP 1.0 and shared it casually around (cold, no personal audience, etc, just Reddit and FB groups). From that experience we had 1,000 players, a 65% completion rate of a 2 minute experience, and close to 30% chose to start a new game. They said things like "woah I feel seen" and "wow this is much better than a Buzzfeed quiz."

In Feb 2026, we launched a limited time Valentine's campaign (it’s done now but here’s an access link) that went really duper well: 2,000+ users, 77% D1 retention unprompted, and three companies reached out about using our platform for recruiting purposes. Zero dollars spent on marketing. So now, we want to bring in a full-time executive assistant to help us scale what's working.

As a founding product designer here, you'll:

As the EA here, you'll:

• Own tangle writing & testing: help draft scenarios, playtest tangles, and flag what feels off before launch. You have good instincts for tone and human behavior. You're the first line of defense before something goes live
• Run community management: engage with users, gather feedback, coordinate test cohorts, keep the early community feeling warm and alive. You're the human face of Trove to our earliest believers
• Lead social media & content: own the posting cadence, collaborating with a designer to produce weekly tangle launches. You set the voice, they execute. You know what sounds like us and what doesn't
• Drive growth ops: track retention and growth metrics week over week, flag what's working and what isn't. You don't need to be a data person, but you need to care about the numbers and know how to read a story in them
• Coordinate freelancers: manage any artists, creators, freelancers and more, , keep deliverables of track, and make sure nothing falls through the cracks
• Handle general ops & admin: investor scheduling, inbox triage, research, whatever else comes up. You're the reason things don't slip
• Own means…
  • Staying close to the product, playing through tangles regularly, understanding what's live, what's changing, and what's coming next
  • Proactively flagging things: a tangle that doesn't feel right, a community thread that needs attention, a metric that looks off
  • Not waiting to be asked. You see something that needs doing, you do it or you surface it
  • Managing up, keeping Helen informed without her having to chase you, and knowing when something needs her eyes vs. when you can just handle it
  • Closing loops. Following up with freelancers, users, investors, whoever and making sure nothing quietly disappears
  • Being the institutional memory for things that don't live anywhere yet: notes, summaries, context that would otherwise live only in Helen's head
  • Capturing how community and content efforts perform and letting that inform what we do next
• Shape what Trove as a company becomes - It's us figuring out together what makes people understand themselves better… and who else can help us get there (and even what your own role will look like then)

🤠 Who Am I?

I want people to live authentically as they are, find people they trust, work on missions they believe in, grow in the way that works for them. All of that starts with understanding oneself.

📹 Here’s the pitch that I did for Betawork’s demo day (which I’ve actually never shared anywhere, haha): https://youtu.be/dccgYHIDdXc?si=H6ta8B34fY7BAGHG (old name!)

This is my second company! Here is my first which is still ongoing! Oh also we are backed by the same VCs as Hugging Face, Granola, and The Browser Company. Yes, I did raise a pre-seed as a non-technical solo founder.

• A longer ramble on why this in particular
  1. why behavioural identity?
     • because it’s important to understand who we are, and who each other are.
     • we do not understand who we are. we think we do, but we really don’t. we’re blind to ourselves.
     • who we are is ultimately a combination of what we say, what we do, and what we think. how do we capture all of those aspects and nuance?
       • we currently don’t think about the latent personality of individuals
         • what do we keep inside? what ideas do we have that we never share? what do we think but never say?
  2. why do we need a layer for the internet?
     • are you not sick of inputting the same information over and over again? think of a job application, where you keep answering “tell me a time when you problem solved”?
     • another example here would be HR tools - it keeps track of so much of your professional lives and networks but what happens if you get laid off? that’s not your info.
     • if you needed another example, just think of Tiktok understanding your algo but you don’t (and hence you can’t use it)
  3. why do we need a behavioural identity layer for the internet?
     • job platforms, dating platforms, learning platforms —> these are the initial three categories where understanding the self and one another is key
     • as ai becomes more prevalent we will need a way for them to understand us to live/work effectively together — imagine a “HOW TO HUMAN” handbook for AI to use when it comes to interacting with each of us uniquely
     • as ai becomes more embedded around us, we will need some proof of humanity
       • imo ultimately the only thing that ai cannot copy (after it can copy our words) is our intentions and what is carried out by our actions within specific environments (our reactions) — things that we can consider our human edge
  • here’s a linkedin rant: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/heyohelen_trove-is-an-interactive-fiction-game-meets-share-7432485626895216641-pil_

🍇 Your First 30 Days

Right now Trove is a mobile-first web app where people play through scenarios that reveal their behavioral patterns. Think bandersnatch, interactive fiction, choose-your-own-adventure, personality assessment… but with real-world payoff and actually fun. A gamified experience where the user builds up their own character sheet through daily play, and then can level up their skills in a variety of ways.

Week 1

• Play through every existing tangle, learn the behavioral framework, and get familiar with how Trove works and feels. Get up to speed on what's live across community, Troves priorities, each team members role, and Helen’s calendar. By end of week you already have opinions - something you'd fix, something you'd try, something that could land better.

Week 2-3:

• You're contributing to a real tangle draft and have flagged UX or copy inconsistencies without being asked. You've taken over the social posting cadence and are coordinating the designer on weekly launches. You're in the community — responding to users, gathering feedback, making people feel heard. You’re helping Helen stay on top of Investment meetings by researching investors, creating briefs, and preparing documents.

End of month 1:

• The content and community engine is yours. You're pulling weekly growth metrics and flagging what the numbers are saying. Ops and admin feel handled. Helen feels noticeably less stretched because real things have moved off her plate and into yours, so she can focus on ideation and investment.

If that pace excites you, keep reading! If it stresses you out, no hard feelings! Maybe you know someone that would be a good fit? ૮₍ ˃ ⤙ ˂ ₎ა

Current tech stack: TypeScript, React, Vite, Tailwind CSS, shadcn, Convex (backend), Clerk (auth), PostHog (analytics). Hosted on Cloudflare. David owns the majority of engineering, but this is here so you know what you’re working alongside.

Organization tools: Notion, Google Workspace, Discord, whatever you use to make things move!

🥝 Collaboration Musings

• Fast loops. Things are shifting basically every few days as we get new evidence and learn more, so this is an era where direction will likely change often. Broader mission won’t but specifics likely will. That means I think it’s better for us to see progress in small amounts, even if it’s not perfect.
• Fun matters. I want you to enjoy what you’re working on. If something feels like a drag or a burden, I’d honestly rather we cut scope or change things up than force it. I believe energy and vibes and creativity are a huge part of work.
• Transparent alignment. It makes me feel most comfortable when we’re explicit about what we’re working on and when it’s expected to be done or reach the next phase. It’s not cause I don’t trust you, it’s more that I wanna make sure things are still aligned or can readjust in real time if needed especially cause some things take longer than we expect. That said, I also respect heads-down focus time so it’s not like I’m pining for updates every 5 minutes.
• Explain the problem, brainstorm separately, come together again. I’m not actually a big “let’s sort it out on a call” type of person. I’d really prefer to either just type, or hop on a call where we talk about the issue itself, but then get to go away to think about any solutions or thoughts after on our own.
• Very adaptable. I share the above which is true for myself, but I’m pretty open to whatever gets the job done as a collective. Ultimately I really value cohesion!
• I’m a typer. The reason why I’m slow to pick up a tool like wispr flow is because I type fast… this means you should be OK with reading comms and updates and to-dos and whatnot.

My typeracer stats out of 225 games since 2009.

• Full ownership. To me the job is not done until the the product is in market and in the hands of users. That includes customer discovery, speccing, design, development, testing, launch, marketing, customer support and the loop starts anew. I’m genuinely interested and driven by learning all of these things myself but am aware of the amount of hours it takes. Sometimes though we just have to spend that time. If you’re this kind of person too, that would be a very interesting thing for me to know about you. Though I’m not at all saying I expect you to do all those things…
• Why is this doc so long? So non-standard? This is a non-standard company and it requires a non-standard application process. Also right before I wrote this I was inspired by the Kiki hiring manifesto so this doc is actually considered short imho. I’d also rather get someone who enjoyed reading this than some AI resume builder that’s just gonna mass submit resumes. 😭

Kiki hiring doc. This is one of 4 docs!!! Love it.

🌽 You May Be a Fit If You:

• read this and think “woooow this kind of job exists?!? i have so many ideas!!!” and not “wtf”
• like working in ambiguous environments and figuring out what’s needed
• use AI in your day to day workflows and are excited to go even deeper
• are excited about juggling every single hat as the second full-time team member
• build your own side projects or volunteer out of love for the game
• have a vibe of “bigger company experience” aka structure and professionalism and “startup experience” aka understand what it feels like to grind, be scrappy, and change directions extremely fast
• have range and taste — you like playful, opinionated, experimental and interactive design ⚠️ this is not a verticalized SaaS type of company
• care about craft, but know when “good enough” is the right call
• enjoy gaming and psychology and personal development and fandoms and anime and reading
  • personally i love cult of the lamb, league of legends (i watch esports) and visual novels, haikyuu 🏐
• you want to work on something magical, novel and sparks joy — something the world has never seen yet but once they do they’ll just get it, and things will never be the same
• want to be friends

🧶 How to Apply

Please complete this form if you’re interested: [click apply]

Anticipated Process

1. Form review
2. 30 min vibe chat
3. Test exercise
4. Exercise review call
5. Team chat
6. Decision