What are the responsibilities and job description for the Executive Assistant position at Building Ventures?
We are rebuilding how architecture, engineering, and construction firms run their marketing and revenue operations. We work with the firms that design and build the physical infrastructure around us: the buildings, bridges, hospitals, transit systems, and water plants that everyone uses and almost nobody thinks about. Our team genuinely loves this industry. AEC moves billions of dollars through workflows that still rely on spreadsheets, email threads, and tribal knowledge, and our AI-powered platform replaces that mess with software that actually understands how AEC teams pursue work, win it, and deliver it. We’re early, we’re moving fast, we’re hyper customer-centric, and we’re building the system of record for AI for an industry that’s never had one.
About The Role
This is the role for an EA who finds genuine satisfaction in being the reason everything stands up. You’ll support the CEO to start, with 1-2 additional executives added as the company grows.
Every hour the CEO spends on the wrong thing is an hour we are not winning. Your job is to find and eliminate time leakage: every 10-minute context switch, every meeting that should have been a Slack, every back-and-forth that ate a Tuesday morning. You read the subtext in a customer email and know whether it needs a same-day response or a thoughtful 24-hour one. You can tell when a leader needs 30 minutes of unscheduled thinking time and protect it without being asked. Calendar Tetris is your sport.
This is a hybrid role based in San Diego. In-office enough days to actually know the team, remote enough that you control your own focus time.
What You’ll Do
About The Role
This is the role for an EA who finds genuine satisfaction in being the reason everything stands up. You’ll support the CEO to start, with 1-2 additional executives added as the company grows.
Every hour the CEO spends on the wrong thing is an hour we are not winning. Your job is to find and eliminate time leakage: every 10-minute context switch, every meeting that should have been a Slack, every back-and-forth that ate a Tuesday morning. You read the subtext in a customer email and know whether it needs a same-day response or a thoughtful 24-hour one. You can tell when a leader needs 30 minutes of unscheduled thinking time and protect it without being asked. Calendar Tetris is your sport.
This is a hybrid role based in San Diego. In-office enough days to actually know the team, remote enough that you control your own focus time.
What You’ll Do
- Protect the CEO’s time strategically without being a rigid gatekeeper (this is the job)
- Own a complex CEO calendar across multiple time zones, with more execs added over time
- Eliminate time leakage: kill meetings that don’t need to happen, shorten the ones that do, batch the rest
- Make tradeoff calls on competing requests without escalating every one
- Build a calendar that reflects real priorities, not just whoever asked loudest
- Protect deep work blocks like they’re customer meetings
- Build automations where you can: we rely on everyone at the company to work smart with the best available tools
- Be the front door for customers, investors, partners, and candidates reaching the CEO
- Customers come first here; their requests get triaged with that bias and never sit
- Draft and send emails on behalf of the CEO
- Triage inbound: ruthlessly prioritize what gets a fast reply, what gets a holding message, what gets escalated, what waits
- Handle confidential conversations (board, fundraising, hiring, customer issues) with the discretion the role demands
- Plan domestic and occasional international travel: flights, hotels, ground, agendas, expense reconciliation
- Coordinate trips to customer sites, which often means jobsite visits, regional AEC offices, and industry conferences (AIA, ENR events, AEC tech summits)
- Run offsites, dinners, and customer visits in San Diego and on the road
- Help the people you support keep their lives running so they can keep the company running
- The judgment to know when a personal thing is blocking work and to handle it before anyone asks
- Occasionally pick up a discrete project end-to-end when it lands between functions
- Early-stage means some weeks you’ll help close a vendor contract, run point on an offsite, or unblock something for recruiting or HR
- The smallest part of the job by design, but real
- 3-5 years supporting founders or senior executives, ideally at a startup or fast-moving tech company
- You’ve supported a high-output executive in a fast environment and you kept up
- You’ve planned real travel, not just booked a flight; you know what to do when the 6am to JFK cancels at 4am
- You write well.
- You’ve held confidential information and never been the leak
- Comfortable in Google Workspace, Slack, and whatever new tool we throw at you next month
- You over-communicate by default and never make people wonder what’s happening
- You ask “why” before you ask “how”: understand the goal, then build the plan
- You don’t wait for a process to exist before you can use one; you build the process
- Nothing falls through the cracks on your watch
- You bring up problems with a proposed answer attached
- You feel a customer’s urgency the same way the CEO does
- Curious about AEC or excited to learn it; this industry rewards people who actually engage with how things get built
- Startup experience is a plus, AEC experience is a bigger plus, neither is required if you can show the judgment