Founding Team

We're building Towpath, a new financial advice firm, and we're looking for our first two hires: brilliant generalists who want to own some of the gnarliest problems in building a firm from scratch. We're having informal chats now, ahead of interviews starting in January.

Hello from the founders

We're the three founders of Otta, the job search platform on a mission to make job search less soul-crushing. We grew it to over 2 million users in the UK and US before being acquired in 2024.

We knew we wanted to build something together again. And from Otta, we knew what we were looking for. A chance to help people through the big moments in their lives. A market where brand could be a powerful force in moving people forward. A great business as well as a great product. Time and again, we came back to how people make their biggest money decisions. Like job search, it's high stakes, emotional and easy to put off. And unlike job search, there are plenty of strong business models.

We're backed by LocalGlobe, Otta's earliest investor. Individual investors include leaders from breakout companies like Monzo, Wise and Deliveroo, and Europe's biggest financial institutions, such as UBS, Santander and Julius Baer.

At Otta we learned that the first few people after the founders shape everything. So we're being patient to get the early team right.

• Sam Franklin on LinkedIn
• Theo Margolius on LinkedIn
• Xav Kearney on LinkedIn

What we're building

There's no chapter of life where money isn't in the room. Whether it's deciding how much to invest in your pension, what property price makes sense for the next family home, when to retire, or how much to set aside for expensive care costs.

These are hard problems, and money decisions just hit different. That's because it's not just about numbers, scenarios and technicalities. It's also about what makes us human. Excitement about our next steps in life. Feeling the tension between spending today and saving for tomorrow. Feeling so stuck you can't even start. Dread, regret, disagreements. The list goes on.

Today, the most involved help with these decisions comes from a financial adviser. Too often, that help is mediocre. We saw this up close with our parents, where their adviser would spend an hour on how the portfolio performed, and ignored the questions that were keeping them up at night. But when an adviser gets it right, they provide a huge relief. A couple who've gone round in circles for years on when to retire land on a plan they both believe in. Money can go back to being a means to an end.

We talk about big money decisions, not financial advice, on purpose. Our world is much bigger than investments and portfolio performance.

And all of this is shifting fast, from where people turn for help to what technology can now do. But we're thinking long term. Helping people with these decisions will still matter in 20 years, whatever happens with AI. And we're excited to build a firm where relationships and trust can compound over decades.

So we're building Towpath, with an ambition to change how the UK makes its biggest money decisions.

Where we're at right now

We've chosen to be the advice firm itself because we want to own the whole experience and drive real change. A bit like Monzo and Starling deciding to build a bank from scratch a decade ago, rather than selling software to other banks.

We'll start advising our first customers in 2027. Our first service will be (human) advisers working with people who are coming up to retirement or already retired. We're starting here as it addresses the life stage with the most complex financial decisions. It also has the least market risk, with hundreds of thousands of people already paying for advice.

Our quality bar is simple: a service we'd be proud to recommend to our parents. We're using AI to give advisers back the hours usually lost to admin, so they can spend them with customers on everything that brings peace of mind, not just investments. And we're putting real care and craft into designing moments of delight.

Over the next few years we'll be tackling how to best help people as technology, regulation and consumer behaviour move. Answering questions like: Where does a human relationship add the most value? Where would people rather interact with technology? What could help look like for people who'd never think to see an adviser?

How we're building the team

We've been thinking a lot about what our company will look like because of AI. We believe the best companies will have much smaller teams, where the lines between roles blur and the bottleneck moves from doing the work to deciding what to build.

That's why we're deliberately taking a bet on generalists, people who don't want to stay in one lane. We're looking to hire two right now, and want them to have different strengths.

The three of us founders don't stick to rigid titles or responsibilities, and we throw ourselves at many things (e.g. two of us took the Level 4 Diploma in Investment Advice exams to be able to advise customers). So we think having a team of generalists will feel very natural.

We think these are the types of skills that are needed now:

• Judgement: you pick the problem worth solving, have a good sense of the right direction, can tell great from good enough
• Creativity: a point of view, an unexpected angle or a bit of flair, and inspiration from completely different worlds
• Understanding of customers: so much of the value in building still comes from knowing deeply what people need
• Running lots at once: with the leverage AI gives you, keeping many things on track is now a real skill
• Bias to action: you know when to just solve it and when to bring others in

Careers will look different too. It's not as clear that a team gets bigger and bigger as the company gets bigger, so the path from individual contributor to manager, then manager of managers, is going to change. Your responsibility and ownership might keep scaling without many more people around you.

What the job involves

In the next year you'll be in the middle of launching a consumer brand and building a regulated firm, with the room to think and build for the next decade, not just the next quarter.

We're deliberately loose on the specifics, as these will change as the business grows. But in the next 12 months you'll be taking ownership of problems like:

• How do we make breakthroughs in getting new customers, in an industry that's mostly grown through word of mouth?
• How do we build a network of the best advisers, in a market where the best people rarely move?
• How do we talk about money in a way that doesn't sound like everyone else?
• How much of the advice journey can we automate without cutting into the value of the service?
• Which new parts of the service and product would make the biggest difference to customers?

You'll own the work end-to-end: work out what's really going on, form hypotheses, test solutions, measure what's working, then double down or move on.

And you'll do it working closely with all three founders. We've worked together for nearly a decade and been through the whole journey once, from the first hire to a team of 75 and an acquisition. So we've built up a strong sense of which problems matter now and which can wait, and plenty of things we'd do differently second time round. We'd love to pass those lessons on to the people who join us early.

Who might suit this role

We're open-minded on what you've done in the past. That's because AI has drastically changed how we all work in the last 12 months, so nobody has a long track record of working this way.

You might come from marketing, design, operations, commercial or somewhere else entirely. The people we're most excited about often started in one lane and kept drifting outside it. A product designer who ended up running a launch campaign. A marketer who ended up redesigning how customers get onboarded. An operator who ended up closing the company's biggest partnership.

We look for people who hold themselves to a higher standard than anyone asks of them, and who are regularly asking "is there a new way?" during this moment of change.

Whilst we are open-minded we think there are a few things you'll need:

• Real depth in at least one area of work, and the range to go well beyond it
• At least a few years of professional experience to hit the ground running with the level of ownership we expect
• Comfort doing a lot of the work yourself for the next few years, rather than looking to manage a team as soon as possible
• Clarity on why now is the right time in your career to join an early-stage technology company
• Excitement about raising the bar on how people make big money decisions

Salary, equity and how we're hiring

• £70–100k + 0.5–1.0% options. The range is wide because we're open on experience. We've deliberately made our options offer strong as we believe in a small and exceptional team who own more of what they build
• We're still working on the rest of our benefits package (e.g. health insurance) and will develop it with our early hires
• We'll get back to everyone who applies, but we won't be able to give individual feedback unless you interview with us
• We're starting to meet people now, and will be doing proper interviews and assessments from January
• We believe in flexibility and autonomy when it comes to time in office. We'd expect you to be in the office (Clerkenwell) at least two days per week
• We'd be excited to tell you much more about our story and progress, and answer any questions you have