Co-Founder
CTO

A big-picture thinker with hands-on technical leadership. Someone with vision who knows how to translate it into architecture, decisions, momentum, and who builds with the right people around them, not just alone.

You're alert, sharp, and independent. You know when to build it yourself and when to bring in the right person to do it better. You lead with clarity, move with intention, and understand that the technology you build is in service of something larger than the product itself.

You prefer to work in close collaboration, but also know how to hold your own line. You sense when it's time to push through, when to align, and when to simply say "no", even to Lisa :)

You are someone who:

• Can independently architect, build and lead the development of technically ambitious MVPs, while knowing what must be built properly from the start and what can remain deliberately lean
• Has meaningful experience building AI/LLM-based products beyond basic API integration, ideally across areas such as orchestration, retrieval, structured knowledge, memory, personalization, evaluation or model behaviour
• Can reason clearly about the boundaries between user data, system observation, AI inference and product logic, especially when technology is interpreting complex human input
• Is strong across modern web and backend architecture and understands how mobile should fit into a scalable product ecosystem
• Has a strong eye for UX/UI design and user flows
• Knows when to build in-house and when to delegate, and leads a lean network of developers, designers, and QA specialists within an agreed budget
• Is actively engaged in personal growth and conscious living
• Stays connected: wants to inform and be informed
• Commits as a co-builder through sweat equity with ownership, vision, and genuine involvement
• Sees themself leading and scaling a development team as the company grows
• Has experience building or scaling digital products (international experience is a plus)
• Is comfortable working alongside a first-time CEO who is ambitious, fast-learning, and full-on

From day one, you'll be the co-architect and technical leader of a product whose complexity goes significantly beyond adding AI to a conventional platform. Together with Lisa (CEO) and the CFO, you'll define the functional, technical and strategic foundation of the company.

The challenge is to create an intelligent system that can learn from interaction, adapt meaningfully over time and support deeply personal exploration — without becoming reductive, opaque or falsely authoritative.

You lead the technical vision. That means deciding not only what gets built, by whom and in what order, but also which parts of the system must remain structurally separate, traceable and controllable as the product becomes more intelligent.

• Technical leadership & architecture: define the technical foundation, system boundaries and architectural principles that allow the product to evolve from an MVP into a sophisticated, scalable intelligence platform.
• AI & intelligence architecture: architect and oversee the systems behind conversational AI, knowledge retrieval, personalization, memory, bounded inference, evolving pattern recognition and intelligent routing — without collapsing them into one opaque AI layer.
• Data, trust & system boundaries: design for traceability, user control, privacy, safety and clear separation between what a user explicitly shares, what the platform observes and what AI may infer.
• Cost-aware AI architecture: design intelligent model routing, memory and context retrieval, and usage monitoring, with infrastructure choices that balance quality, safety, performance and unit economics as the platform scales.
• Web, mobile & product infrastructure: ensure the web platform, future mobile experience, backend services and AI systems evolve as one coherent architecture, with strong testing and quality standards.
• UX/UI and user experience: bring a strong instinct for intuitive, beautiful, purposeful design.
• Team and budget: build and lead a lean, high-quality network of developers, designers, and QA specialists.
• Product contribution: actively contribute to the revenue model and translate commercial decisions into technical solutions.

You're not joining to integrate AI into a product. You're helping define how an entirely new kind of intelligent product should work.

• Real co-founder equity, with involvement and ownership (structure shared after an initial alignment conversation)
• Part of the core founding team (CEO, CTO, CFO): shared ownership of the company's success, with distinct areas of leadership and accountability
• Freedom to architect: genuine ownership of the technical foundation, AI architecture and long-term evolution of the product
• A clear budget framework to build and lead your own development network from early on
• Shared decision-making: we build together, based on mutual respect and equal voice
• Transparent communication and processes
• A vision-driven team with courage, speed, and a bias for action
• Bold ambition: positioning The Imperfect Self for a €100M+ strategic acquisition within 5–6 years
• No politics: just direct communication, fast execution, and deep conversations
• A well-developed concept and initial investment capital provided by the CEO

Human Design is one optional reflective lens used within The Imperfect Self to explore collaboration dynamics, decision-making styles, energy rhythms and long-term founding-team coherence. It is not treated as factual proof of compatibility and does not replace experience, capability or execution.

It's used to explore:

• How founders make decisions under pressure
• How energy is exchanged within the team
• Where natural strengths and friction points may arise
• Whether long-term collaboration feels coherent and workable

No single type or authority is required. What matters is self-awareness, emotional maturity, respect for each other's decision-making processes, and the ability to communicate and take responsibility.

As founder and CEO, I assess potential co-founders across multiple dimensions, reflecting both the ambition of the company and the responsibility of building a resilient founding team.

• Technical capability: the ability to build and lead what the company needs now and in future phases
• Experience: operating at a level appropriate to a pre-seed, high-growth environment
• Commitment: time, availability, ownership, willingness to carry responsibility
• Founding team coherence: how decision-making, communication, pressure, and energy dynamics function within the team

All four dimensions matter. Strong technical skills alone are not sufficient for a founding role, and alignment in vision without coherence in execution creates long-term risk.