Technical co-founder for founding teams in Germany

What a technical co-founder does

A technical co-founder is the founder who owns the technology. The business founders win customers and raise money. The technical partner decides what gets built and on which systems, builds the first version and leads the developers who join after the first round.

A hired CTO joins as an employee. A technical co-founder holds shares and carries the risk of the company together with the other founders.

Technical co-founder, founding engineer or freelance developer

Founders who look for a technical partner choose between three seats. The table compares them from the founders’ side.

	Technical co-founder	Founding engineer	Freelance developer
Joins as	A shareholder, often before the first round	One of the first employees	A contractor for a defined project
Decides the technology	Yes, and answers for it to founders and investors	Builds within the decisions of a founder or CTO	Builds what the order describes
Writes code	The first version, and less as the team grows	Most of the week	For the length of the order
Hires developers	Writes the profiles and leads the team	Takes part in interviews	No
Faces investors	In pitches and in due diligence	Rarely	No
Paid with	A share in the company, set in the shareholder agreement	A salary, often with options	A fee per day or per project
Stays	As long as the agreement and its vesting say	As long as the employment contract runs	Until the order ends

I take the first column. A team that wants to know me first can book the third for a defined task, such as the concept of the first version, and decide on the seat afterwards.

Eight questions founders settle before a technical partner joins

Founders answer these questions before a technical partner signs. An open answer does not stop a first call: we mark it and decide who answers it.

1. Who is the first customer, and which job must the product do for that customer?
2. What exists already: a prototype, code from an agency or a freelancer, a spreadsheet?
3. Who holds the code, the domain and the cloud accounts today, and do they move to the company?
4. How many hours a week does each founder put in, and from which date?
5. Who decides on the product, the technology, hiring and spending?
6. What does the current or the next round pay for, and what must the product show by then?
7. How are shares and vesting set, and which lawyer writes the agreement?
8. What happens to the shares and the code when a founder leaves?

I answer questions 2 and 3 in the first weeks by reading the code and checking the accounts. Questions 7 and 8 belong to your lawyer.

My roles in the technical seat, newest first

I have held the technical tasks of a young company as an employee and as a managing director.

• On a client’s platform I help break up a monolithic application with Claude and Codex. Agents and developers follow the same rules, and a person confirms each production change.
• At a Frankfurt fintech I was Head of Decentralized Finance and Node Operations, then Chief Information Officer with procuration. I ran blockchain nodes in several data centers, moved them from Azure to another cloud with failover and wrote the concept of a real-time market data product.
• At a Frankfurt company in the secondary market for life insurance I was project manager and web developer. I programmed the Angular front end of a contract management portal, connected an existing CRM and hosted the portals on AWS in Frankfurt and London.
• As project lead and developer I built front ends and back ends of online shops, among them shops for Lidl and REWE, and ran their conversion optimization.
• At a company that built a global real estate database I was developer, managing director and CTO. I programmed the websites and the databases, hired people, led the teams and pitched to investors. KfW and the venture capital investor Neuhaus Partners invested several million euros.

Who I am

I am Michael Wutzke, and I live in Frankfurt. In a team I see myself as a sparring partner: I learn who does what best with whom, and I give the reasons for each proposal. I hold a training authorization from IHK Frankfurt, which allows me to train apprentices in application development and system integration. I teach practical work with Claude at Claude Hacker House, and I work in German and English.