Product Manager

Anvara is the marketplace where brands discover, evaluate, and close sponsorship deals across sports and live events. Brand customers include Delta, Brex, Kalshi, GoPuff, and BeReal. Properties include the Chicago Cubs, Colorado Rockies, LAFC, the Wynn, and Major League Pickleball. It has raised nearly $7 million, including from Game Changers Ventures, Marquee Ventures (the Cubs ownership group), Sequel, and angels from early Robinhood, ClickUp, Carta, and a founder who sold a company for $250 million.

Sponsorship is a $100 billion-plus global market still run on cold emails, spreadsheets, and handshake deals, with no centralized way to buy it the way people buy digital media. Anvara is building that. The culture is moonshot goals, customer obsession, full ownership, and high agency. Seed stage, about 11 to 50 people, founded in 2025, in New York.

Anvara is hiring its first product manager to take the deep product work off the founder who currently lives in it, and to raise the bar. That founder spends the day iterating on mockups and prototypes, including listing creation and core features, with AI tools, studying how strong products such as Ramp, Klarna, Rocket Money, and Polymarket handle flows, then handing versions to design in Figma and to engineering to build. Being that deep in the product is the bottleneck, and it is not the best use of that time. They want two things from this hire: free up the specific, time-consuming parts of the product, and bring better product, UX, and UI judgment than the founder has, from someone who has built a great product elsewhere for several years. You are a thought partner. You help manage the engineering and product teams alongside that founder, spend time in the data, and take the product fires that keep pulling the founder in.

The core of the job is prototyping and data, not user interviews. Some of your own research is fine. They want someone deeply data-driven, with excellent product taste, who can make something complex feel clear and effortless. What you buy on Anvara is complicated, but the listings have to sell the inventory, so clarity and persuasion matter. The work runs both ends. At the top of the funnel you investigate the data, find the problem, and shape a solution with the founder. At the bottom, the founder asks you to redesign a specific flow and you execute. It is a heavy prototyping role, with Claude Code, Figma, and AI tools. You scope and write specs for a fast-moving engineering team. Being AI-native is essential. The risk they want to avoid is someone from a great-product logo who was not part of the culture actually changing things, someone who cannot make large sweeping changes with real ownership, or someone who cannot get extremely deep in the weeds.

You own the roadmap. Customer feedback, data, and company direction become a prioritized plan the team believes in. You write short, specific specs engineers can build from without a follow-up meeting. You prototype fast, with clickable working versions, before engineering time is committed. You live in the data and turn how customers actually use the product into decisions. You run launches end to end, measure what happened, and decide what is next. You partner with go-to-market so field insight shapes what gets built. You help build the product function as the company grows.

Bar: about 2 to 5 years in product, ideally at an early-stage startup, a marketplace, or B2B SaaS. Ex-founders and engineers who moved into product are welcome. Straight out of school is a miss. You have shipped real product to real users and can point to what changed because of it. You prototype without waiting on design. You write clearly. You are deeply data-driven and fluent in product analytics. You have strong product taste. You are AI-native: you use the newest AI tools and design and engineering libraries, and that curiosity is not something they can teach. You understand marketplaces, or you are obsessed with learning them. They want web-app product depth. High agency is a requirement. You figure it out when something is not working and you write the playbook when there is none. You make large sweeping changes, not one-button tweaks. You can get extremely deep in the weeds, with patience and attention to detail. You care about what Anvara is building for its own sake. Sports fandom is not required. Sports, live events, media buying, or ad tech is a plus. A great logo with a stagnant product, only small tweaks, low patience for detail, not being AI-native, a mobile-only focus, needing to learn on the job, or being here for the money or the logo is a miss. Ramp, Figma, Coinbase, Airbnb, and Apple are the backgrounds they name, when you were part of the change.

In office five days a week in SoHo. Visa sponsorship is limited. Equity is about 0.1% to 0.5%. Lunch, a travel and entertainment budget, and personalized perks. Posted work intensity is 9-9-5. The process is an intro with the founder who owns the product, a case study on a working version of the product where you make specific changes and explain your reasoning, a design and taste round, then a culture conversation with a founder.