Considering Entrepreneurship?
Want to Learn Directly From a Founder?
Robel Yemane is looking for an ambitious, early-career professional to become his daily counterpart across his businesses and community organizations.
This is not a traditional internship. You will work directly beside a founder whose career spans architecture, real estate development, construction, lending, marketing, entrepreneurship, and community building. You will help manage the work, relationships, projects, and ideas moving across his organizations every day.
About the Opportunity
As Robel’s Founder’s Apprentice, you will support him across real estate, architecture, lending, marketing, events, business operations, and community initiatives.
Your work may include:
- Organizing Robel’s daily priorities, meetings, and follow-ups
- Maintaining Excel spreadsheets, contact databases, and project trackers
- Conducting real estate, company, market, and property research
- Preparing meeting notes, presentations, and briefing documents
- Supporting development, brokerage, lending, and architecture projects
- Coordinating with clients, partners, vendors, speakers, and team members
- Assisting with marketing campaigns, events, and community programs
- Creating systems that help multiple organizations operate more effectively
- Making sure important commitments turn into completed action items
This is a hands-on operating role. Some assignments will be exciting and highly visible. Others will require patience, organization, and careful administrative work. Both are essential to understanding how a founder builds and manages multiple organizations.
Who This Is For
This opportunity is designed for someone at the very beginning of their career who wants to become an entrepreneur, developer, real estate professional, architect, marketer, operator, or community leader.
You should be:
- Based in the Houston area
- Highly organized, dependable, and discreet
- Proficient in Excel or Google Sheets
- Comfortable handling administrative responsibilities
- Curious, proactive, and able to think ahead
- Open to direct feedback and changing priorities
- Willing to take ownership rather than wait for instructions
- Interested in learning how businesses are built from the inside
- Humble enough to complete basic tasks and ambitious enough to grow beyond them
Previous real estate experience is not required. Character, consistency, judgment, and follow-through matter more than an impressive résumé.
Get to Know Robel
Robel’s story began in Khartoum, Sudan, where his parents were seeking safety from civil war. His family moved to the United States when he was five, and his early years were shaped by the challenges of assimilation, learning English, and finding his place in a new country.
After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture from the University of Kansas, he graduated into the Great Recession. With few opportunities available in architecture, Robel worked in drafting, tax preparation, call centers, warehouses, construction, teaching, engineering, and consulting.
Rather than viewing those experiences as setbacks, he treated each one as a training ground.
That mindset helped him build a career that now includes more than 16 years of experience across design, development, construction, real estate, and finance. He is the Managing Principal of Core Design Impact, a Realtor and developer with Marathon Real Estate Group, and a licensed Texas mortgage loan originator.
He has helped move projects from initial vision and site acquisition through design, engineering, permitting, financing, construction, and final sale or lease.
But what most differentiates Robel is not the number of industries he works in. It is the philosophy connecting all of them.
Whether he is developing real estate, designing a building, producing marketing, or building organizations such as OpenGround and SoleTies Run Club, his work is rooted in:
- Creating access to information and opportunity
- Building transformational rather than transactional relationships
- Helping people create wealth and protect what they have earned
- Making people feel seen, supported, and connected
- Using business as a tool for community impact
- Remaining humble, hungry, consistent, and willing to serve
OpenGround, for example, was created to replace gatekept industry conversations with education, transparency, genuine relationships, and a seat at the table for people at every stage of their careers.
Robel believes people are not dollar signs and that real community requires more than exchanging business cards. This apprenticeship is an extension of that philosophy.
What Makes This Opportunity Different
You will not be placed inside one department or separated from important conversations.
You will learn directly from someone who has personally worked across the full lifecycle of business and real estate—from finding an opportunity and structuring the deal to designing, financing, marketing, building, and creating a community around it.
You will gain:
- Direct mentorship from an experienced founder
- Exposure to real estate, architecture, finance, marketing, and entrepreneurship
- Access to Houston’s real estate and business community
- Increasing responsibility as you earn trust
- Experience working on active businesses, projects, and events
- A clearer understanding of what you may eventually want to build yourself
The role is demanding, and the compensation is modest relative to the level of commitment. The value is in the rare access, practical education, professional relationships, and real responsibility that most people do not receive this early in their careers.
Schedule and Commitment
Candidates must have flexibility between 9:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m., Monday through Friday, depending on the day’s meetings, events, and priorities. Occasional Saturday availability will also be required.
This does not mean working twelve hours every day. It means the right candidate must be able to operate around the changing schedule of a founder managing several businesses and organizations.
This is a paid internship requiring a minimum commitment of 12 months with the possibility of a full-time role.
Experience Level: Student, recent graduate, or early-career professional
Keywords: paid internship Houston, real estate internship Houston, founder’s apprentice, entrepreneurship internship, executive operations internship, real estate development internship, architecture internship, business operations internship, marketing internship Houston, community engagement internship, intern.
Pay: $1,000.00 - $1,200.00 per month
Application Question(s):
- Why do you want to learn directly from a founder?
- What do you hope to accomplish during the next 12 months?
- What makes you someone Robel can depend on every day?
- What business, organization, or idea would you eventually like to build?
Work Location: In person
