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Find decision owners

Find founders and CEOs at companies matching your ICP

Everyone sells to founders, which is why a founder list is worth nothing and a founder filter is worth everything. The title is the easy half. The company underneath is the work.

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Founders are the most contacted people in B2B and the easiest to reach. The address follows the obvious pattern, the profile is public, and they read their own inbox. All of which means your message arrives next to forty others, and the only thing separating yours is how carefully the company underneath was chosen.

So spend the effort on the account. Stage, headcount, category, and what changed there recently decide whether the message has any reason to exist. Resolve the person last, and check how many founders there are: co-founders split the work, and writing to the one who does not own your problem wastes the single shot you get.

Example searches

Ask for it the way you'd say it

Every search below runs on the same hosted Tables, with the cost previewed before anything is spent.

  • Stage and segment first

    find the founder at seed stage b2b saas companies in north america that raised in the last year

    Every company filter runs before the person work, so nothing metered touches an account that failed the stage or category test.

  • Both co-founders, split

    for each company here give me every founder with what they appear to own

    Two rows come back per company where two founders exist, each with the scope their profile claims, so you can pick rather than guess.

  • Founder-led, still

    which of these companies are still run by a founder rather than a hired ceo

    The found title sits on the row, so a professional CEO never receives a message written for someone who started the company.

Plays

Three motions you can run this week

Each one is a chain of Oxygen primitives — the same hosted objects your workspace already has, composed.

  • Choose the company, then the founder

    A short founder list where every account earned its place before anyone was resolved.

    1. Tables
    2. Records
    3. Sequences
    1. 1Source companies on stage, category, and headcount, then dedupe on normalized domain.
    2. 2Resolve the founder, grade the address, and enroll only the rows that survived both.
    oxygen companies search run

  • Warm the list before writing

    Founders who already engaged with your category hear from you first.

    1. Signals
    2. Tables
    3. Sequences
    1. 1Harvest the engagers on a post in your category into a working table.
    2. 2Enroll the founders among them on a slower cadence that opens on what they engaged with.
    oxygen engagement harvest

  • Founders on the record, not in a sheet

    Every account carries its decision owner, and the numbers come from one place.

    1. Records
    2. Tables
    3. Dashboards
    1. 1Promote resolved founders onto company records so each deal has a named owner.
    2. 2Read the funnel from the dashboard instead of a spreadsheet: touches, replies, meetings, and deals, with the channel split beside them.
    oxygen dashboards summary

Who you can reach

Roles you can find at founders and CEOs

Reachability is per channel: a role marked for mobile is one the phone waterfall usually resolves, not a guarantee for every record.

RoleSeniorityReachable by
FounderOwner/FounderWork emailLinkedInMobile
Co-founderOwner/FounderWork emailLinkedInMobile
Chief Executive OfficerC-levelWork emailLinkedInMobile
Managing DirectorC-levelWork emailLinkedIn
OwnerOwner/FounderWork emailMobile
PresidentC-levelWork emailLinkedIn

Filters you can search on

  • Funding stage and time since the last round
  • Headcount band and direction of growth
  • Industry, category, and business model
  • Founder-led or professional CEO
  • Country, region, or metro area
  • Number of founders at the company
  • Title keywords to include or exclude

This is the best covered role on the site. Founders publish, post, and keep an address that follows the company pattern, so most rows resolve on the first leg of the chain. The exceptions are stealth companies with no public site and businesses where a hired executive replaced the founder, which the title column makes visible.

Data sources

What the data actually comes from

Every value lands with its provider and cost recorded on the cell.

  • People Data Labs

    Company and person records: stage, headcount, category, and who is listed as founding the business.

  • Apollo

    Founder segments your team already curates in its own Apollo account, pulled in as a second people source.

  • LinkedIn Scraper

    Public profile and post reads, which is how the co-founder split and the harvested engagers get checked.

  • Blitz API

    Opens the work-email chain, and a founder's address usually follows the company's own pattern, so it rarely runs further.

  • LeadMagic

    The later lane, worth running on the accounts you would actually call rather than across a whole founder list.

  • MillionVerifier

    Grades each address before a cadence sees it, with only accept-all verdicts escalating further.

Run these on Oxygen's managed credits, or connect your own provider keys and pay the vendor directly — the same columns, the same runs, the same provenance either way. See every integration.

Limits

Where this stops

  • A founder inbox is the most crowded in B2B. Volume is not your constraint here, relevance is, so a smaller list with a real reason to write beats a larger one every time.
  • Companies that replaced a founder with a hired executive still read as founder-led in several sources. Check the title column before you send anything that assumes the person started it.

FAQ

Questions people ask first

Why is a founder list easy to build and hard to use?
Because the contact data resolves almost every time, which removes the only natural limit on volume. The discipline has to come from the company filter instead, or you end up with a big list and no reason to write.
Which co-founder should I write to?
The one whose scope overlaps your problem, which their profile usually states. Where it does not, the technical founder takes anything touching the product and the commercial one takes anything touching revenue.
Can I get a mobile number for a founder?
Often, yes. It runs as a separate column with its own chain and price, so preview it, cap it, and use it on the accounts worth a call rather than across the whole list.
How do I know a company is still founder-led?
Compare the founder name against the current chief executive on the row. When they differ, the founder has moved on or stepped back, and that changes both who to write to and what to say.
Does LinkedIn beat email for founders?
It often does for first contact, and it needs a connected sending seat, which is a paid plan plus $30 a month for the account. Research and list building need nothing connected at all.
What does a few thousand founders cost to build?
Sourcing and contact work are metered; the table, sequence, and workflow around them are not. A new workspace starts with 10,000 credits, and a preview on your exact filters is the only number worth planning against.

Build your founders and ceos list

Start with a search, preview the cost before anything is spent, and keep the rows, sources, and runs in a workspace you own.

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