The bet

Gong is worth over 10 billion dollars and it sells access. You buy it, your reps never open it, and you renew anyway because nobody wants to admit they wasted the budget. That is the biggest shelfware business in software.

Zell charges for results. We listen to real sales calls, score reps against the manager’s own scorecard, and send coaching back automatically. Every correction a manager makes trains that customer’s own model. Gong structurally cannot copy this without breaking the cross-customer benchmark its whole product rests on.

We are pre-seed, with 14 customers, €7.5K MRR, and 20% month-over-month growth. Small enough that you will shape it. Real enough that people pay us.

The job

You are our first sales hire and you carry the number yourself. Not a manager who inspects a pipeline someone else built. You prospect, run discovery, demo, close, and renew.

Once you are winning, you hire a BDR under you and teach them how you did it. Then another. If this goes the way we think it goes, in eighteen months you are running the sales organization you built—and you will have earned it by closing the deals first.

What year one looks like

Months 1 to 3: Own outbound and inbound end to end. Break our current conversion rates. Find the two or three plays that work against legacy mid-market buyers in Italy and Germany.

Months 4 to 6: Hire your first BDR and turn those plays into something teachable.

Months 7 to 12: Build the team, keep closing the big ones yourself, and own the revenue plan with Alberto.

Comp

€80–100K OTE. €50–65K base depending on experience, €37K variable, uncapped, with accelerators above quota.

That is roughly 25% below what a strong closer gets at a funded Berlin company, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The gap is paid in equity.

Equity

Cofounder level, if you earn it.

0.5% to 1% time-vested over four years with a one-year cliff as your floor for doing the job well. Performance tranches are added on top, tied to retained ARR measured 90 days after signature: +1% at €250K, +1% at €500K, and +1.5% at €1M. Hit all three and you are at cofounder ownership.

We will show you the full structure in writing before you sign. No verbal promises.

Who this is for

You have closed B2B software yourself, full cycle, ideally into non-technical mid-market buyers who do not care about AI and do care about their reps hitting quota. You are fluent in Italian or German plus English. You would rather own a real piece of something you built than take a comfortable base at a company where your name is on nothing.

Who this is not for

Anyone who needs a marketing team to feed them. Anyone who wants to manage before they sell. Anyone who reads “pre-seed” and thinks “job.”

The honest part

Most startups at our stage die. We might. You will do work below your pay grade, hear no more than yes for a while, and there will be months where the number is ugly and we fix it together.

The upside is that if we are right, you were the first commercial person at the company that made shelfware coaching software obsolete—and you own a real piece of it.

How to apply

Send Alberto the hardest deal you ever closed and what nearly killed it. Then tell him who else you would have sold that same deal to, and how you would have found them. Two paragraphs. No cover letter. Email alberto@getzell.com.