I run the operations
so you can build the product.
A part-time Founder's Associate for early-stage founders in Europe. Investor relations, supplier deals, hiring, daily firefighting — all your operations run smoothly, reported back weekly, and autonomously.
You're not stuck on strategy.
You're stuck on execution.
Your product works. Your customers believe in you. The thing you're missing isn't a coach, a co-founder, or another tool. It's an operator who picks up the work that doesn't need your unique judgment, and runs it cleanly.
“The founder's job isn't to do everything. It's to make sure everything gets done.”
Founder's Associate as a Service.
One operator, embedded part-time, running the work that pulls you out of the product. Not consulting. Not advice. Execution — with the judgment of someone who's spent five years on the other side of the table.
A part-time Founder's Associate, retained monthly. I sit in your operations — investor inbox, supplier threads, hiring pipeline, grant proposals — and run them on your behalf. You stay the decider. I do the work that gets the decisions made.
Not a coach. Not a course. Not an agency that drops a deck and disappears. Not a COO (you're too early). Not advice you have to action yourself. The work leaves your plate.
The work that keeps you out of the product.
Pick what's bleeding the most hours. Whether that's the investor update, the open supplier decision, or the role you haven't posted. Same retainer either way.
Fundraising
Venture rounds, investor relations, public funding. From first warm intro to signed term sheet, plus the grant programmes that don't dilute you.
- ✓Pitch deck and data room kept current — numbers, milestones, team
- ✓Monthly investor update written, sent, tracked
- ✓Pipeline of warm intros run through to first call
- ✓Grant calendar built and monitored (Horizon, EXIST, BMWK, etc.)
- ✓Grant applications drafted, reviewed with you, submitted on time
Six founders. Same playbook.
Specific work, specific outcomes, in the founders' own companies. Same retainer, same operator.
Took over supplier negotiations. Built and ran the go-to-market in a regulated medical category.
Owned recruiting and onboarding. Wrote playbooks for ops, recruiting, finance, and execution. Stood up financial reporting and controlling.
€600K in non-dilutive grants approved across two proposals; third in flight. Stakeholder management across university partners, suppliers, and team. Investor pipeline for Seed in build.
Built the data room, pitch deck, and financial model. Then built an automated outreach engine that produced 40+ investor conversations.
Supported the company through its M&A process and acquisition. Now back as fractional CFO and operational right hand: financial reporting, controlling, and forecasting.
Grew the team to six and managed it. Owned recruiting, onboarding, client delivery, sales outreach, and consulting engagements.
After one month of work, founders go back to building.
- 01Technical founder running everything alone
- 0260-hour weeks, weekends in the inbox
- 03Three supplier proposals undecided for weeks
- 04Pitch deck two rounds out of date
- 05Two open roles unfilled for months
- ✓Investor materials updated and ready to be sent out
- ✓Supplier decision made. Ops running smoothly.
- ✓First hire screened, interviewed, onboarded in 4 weeks
- ✓Founder back in the product, full-time
- ✓Operating cadence runs weekly without escalation
What it costs to stop being the bottleneck.
You can hire someone full-time, retain me part-time, or keep doing it yourself. The real cost of the third one is the one founders never put in the spreadsheet.
This works for some founders. Not all.
- ✓You're post-revenue or post-seed, building something real
- ✓Operations is your bottleneck, not strategy
- ✓You can describe what you want done, even roughly
- ✓You're ready to give someone real authority — not just tasks
- ✓Headquartered in DACH or operating across Europe
- −You haven't found product-market signal yet
- −You want a coach to help you decide what to do
- −You need a full-time hire and have the runway for one
- −You can't make time for a 30-min weekly sync
- −You want someone to do the work but never decide anything
The FounderOS Claude Playbook.
The prompts, workflows, and rituals I use to run founder operations with Claude. Free PDF, plus my newsletter FounderOS Notes.
- 01The Folder StructureRoot, projects, subfolders. The setup Claude reads before every session.
- 02CLAUDE.md in Six SectionsWho you are, your projects, rules, triggers, priorities. Under 300 words.
- 03Three Commands That Run Your Business/exec-assist, /content, /ops. The slash triggers that replace your morning routine.
- 04Anatomy of a CommandFrontmatter, role, instructions. One markdown file per recurring workflow.
- 05Wire It Up With MCPGmail, Calendar, Drive, Notion, Slack. Claude stops describing, starts doing.
- 06Six Traps That Kill Your SetupWhere founders break their own system, and the five-minute fixes.
Elias Maier —
Founder's Associate.
Five years on the investor side at (corporate) venture funds evaluating early-stage startups across various industries. I've read several hundred decks, sat in dozens of due diligence calls, and watched the same operational mistakes break promising companies again and again.
Now I work hands-on with the founders building those companies. Fundraising, supplier management, hiring, grant applications — the work that doesn't need their judgment but absolutely needs to get done. Based in Prague, working remotely with founders across DACH and Europe.
The questions founders ask in the intro call.
Stop being the bottleneck.
This is a working session, not a sales call. We look at where your hours actually go, spot the bottlenecks, and figure out what to hand off first. You leave with a list either way.