Head of Commercial - Agent Economy & API

The first commercial owner of the agent economy, the person who gets Product.ai paid when a machine, not a human, does the shopping.

I'm Michael, founder and CEO of Product.ai. I've been building commerce technology for 17 years. Bootstrapped, 100% founder-owned since 2009, profitable, with no outside investors and no board.

Product.ai is the verified truth layer for shopping, the intelligence that tells a shopper, or an AI agent shopping for them, what is actually true about a product and a price. SimplyCodes is our first proof at scale, the code verification service that makes sure the codes you use at checkout actually work. It runs at roughly $22M in revenue and about 60% margins. A small team of fewer than twenty operators outbuilds companies 10x our size.

I'm writing this letter myself because this is the seat I'd want if I were you, and I want the right person to recognize it.

Why This Role Exists

For 17 years this company has made money the same way. A shopper finds a code that works, buys, and an affiliate network pays us a commission. That engine still runs, and it's healthy. But the buyer is changing.

AI agents are starting to do the shopping. When an agent needs to know whether a discount is real, or whether a claim about a product is true, it reaches for a data source. I intend for that source to be us, and for us to get paid when it happens. That is a new revenue line, and right now it has no owner.

I own the strategy; that doesn't change. What I can't own is the outward-facing commercial work while I build the company. This seat does. You'd be the first commercial owner of the agent economy here, the person who turns "agents should pay us" into signed pilots, priced access, and partners who ship us inside their product.

The System You'll Need to Model

• Cortex, the brain you'll work inside. Cortex is the shared AI brain this company runs on. Every operator, me included, works through governed AI sessions over a base of 8,600+ internal documents. You will not be selling a demo of something we don't use. We run on what we sell.
• A two-sided market that pays for certainty. Shoppers and the AI agents shopping for them consume verified codes, proof a discount is real before checkout. Merchants pay to protect their own brand. A free brand-integrity signal converts into a paid remediation relationship. Your problem is pricing both sides without breaking either.
• The agent-commerce shift. The buyer is turning from a human into a machine. AI agents are starting to choose their data sources the way Google once chose which pages to rank. Everything turns on being the verified-commerce source an agent reaches for, and the window to be chosen is open right now.
• The keyed-API lane and its one live deadline. Anonymous access to our API ended August 15, and the paid door is now the only door. The free legacy codes expire September 30. Keyed developer access is sold in metered tiers. Both dates are public on our developer docs, so you inherit a countdown rather than a blank page.
• The affiliate-network engine. A real revenue engine already runs underneath this. Affiliate networks route roughly $22M a year in commission to us, concentrated among a handful of major networks. This is a relationship surface: network reps, two conferences a year, the escalation call when something breaks. It is not a spreadsheet you optimize from a desk.
• A second line forming. Verified research, sold as a product. It ships first as simple self-serve billing; you own its commercial side as it scales, from pricing to the buyer motion to the service relationship. The buyer relationships that will sustain it start with the ones you build now.

If reading that energizes you, keep going. If it feels overwhelming or underspecified, this isn't the right fit.

What You Will Own

• The agent-economy revenue line, end to end. Today it has no owner. You're the first. You own whether Product.ai gets paid when a machine uses it.
• API and MCP monetization. MCP is the protocol AI assistants use to call outside tools like ours. You own the packaging and the migration off free access. The free door is already closed; your job is to fill the paid one with paying, keyed accounts before the legacy free codes expire on September 30.
• The merchant revenue program, as it forms. A free brand-integrity signal that converts into a paid remediation relationship. Not live yet. You'll shape its commercial side as it comes online; your first number doesn't wait on it.
• Distribution experiments, run as a lane. You'll run paid-access experiments inside the major AI assistant ecosystems, subordinate to our standing search-first strategy; surface strategy stays a company call. You bring back signed deals and usage data instead of a new doctrine.
• The affiliate-network inheritance. The ~$22M/yr commission business runs through partners who need a human they trust. For now, that human is you. You keep the inheritance healthy without letting it become the job. You are not measured on it; your number comes from the new line.
• A co-signed seat charter. Within your first quarter, you and I co-sign a charter for this seat: one machine-checkable number that proves the seat works, and a written split of what you decide freely versus what you bring to me first. This is the model we run here. A seat is a promise you can measure rather than a title.
• A first-quarter number that points at paid, keyed revenue. Signed, paying keyed accounts and the first keyed-API dollars on the board by the end of your first quarter. The charter we co-sign ratifies the exact figure, named now and made precise there.

One boundary, drawn now. A revenue-architecture seat, working with me, sets revenue direction and the economics. This seat owns the outward commercial motion and the signed deals.

Who You Are

You think in systems and money at the same time. You can keep the two-sided market, the agent shift, and a pricing table in your head at once, and you reason from first principles when the map runs out, which here it will, often. You update fast when the market tells you you're wrong, including killing a pricing idea that was your own.

You close. You've carried a deal from a cold relationship to a signed contract yourself, and you like the part where it's hard. You treat AI as a force multiplier. You'll run agents against your own pipeline, your own drafts and research, and you'll check what they hand back rather than trust it on faith. You can move between a partner dinner and a pricing model in the same week without dropping either thread.

You've taken a technical product from zero to its first paying customers, and you can point to the deals. Maybe you were the first commercial hire somewhere and built the motion from nothing. Maybe you founded something and sold it yourself before you could afford a sales team. API, developer, or platform revenue is familiar ground, and so is a room full of partners who each want something different. We care about what you've actually closed and how you reasoned about it more than where you did it or how long your resume is.

Who this isn't for. It's the wrong seat if you need a quota, an accelerator, a comp plan, and a defined territory to work. This is an ownership seat, not a commission chase, and the number you own is yours to define and defend. It's wrong if the draw is a big-logo title on your profile, because the work is unglamorous first-revenue building and the market will not be impressed by your last employer. It's wrong if you only do one slice, just partnerships or just closing, because you'll own pricing, developer packaging, merchant conversion, and network relationships all at once. And it's wrong if your instinct is to manage upward and narrate progress. Here the signed pilot is the story, and there is nowhere for activity to hide.

How We Evaluate

I don't run traditional interviews. I run a process that respects your time and shows you ours. Every stage is demonstrated performance on real, work-relevant tasks.

An async video screen. About fifteen minutes, on your own time. I want to see how you reason, not how you present.

Calls with company stakeholders. Short conversations with the operators closest to this seat.

A conversation with me. How you model the business, where you push back, and whether you can hold a revenue argument live.

A paid work trial. Real work, on our real problems, for about two weeks, paid at a rate that respects your time. You might build the pricing model for keyed access, open a real partner conversation, or take the merchant program from idea to a first outreach. I watch four things: how you get grounded, whether you can find the revenue, how honestly you assess your own work, and whether you're someone I want in the room. We advertise the trial openly because it filters for people who'd rather do the work than talk about it.

If the work above reads like yours but your resume is unconventional, apply anyway. We hire on the work and the reasoning, not the pedigree.

Compensation & Ownership

Total first-year compensation runs $400,000 to $500,000 - base, plus performance-based ownership and profit-share programs. The base is $220,000 to $275,000, top of market for a commercial leader.

There is no commission plan and no OTE ladder, and that's deliberate. Instead: eligibility for the company's ownership and profit-share programs - grants are performance-based, with terms discussed at the offer stage. We cover 100% of your family's premiums.

This structure is built to mint partners.

Based in Santa Monica, Los Angeles - in person, five days a week. The rooms are real rooms.