The Kind of Founder We’re Looking For — An Atypical Entrepreneur

4 min readApr 12, 2025

By Dimitris Tsingos
Founder & CEO, Starttech Ventures

Why the Startup World Needs a Reset

Somewhere along the way, we started mistaking fundraising for building.
Pitching replaced customer discovery. Valuation replaced value. Success became a stage show.

At Starttech Ventures, we’ve always chosen a different path. One where the only thing worth celebrating is solving a real problem — for real people — in a way that’s sustainable, scalable, and capital-efficient.

And now, we’re looking for someone to build the next great company with us.

Let’s be clear:
— This is not a job offer.
— This is not a grant.

This is an opportunity to become a co-founder of a new B2B SaaS company — alongside us.

Who This Is (and Isn’t) For

We’re not looking for rockstars, hustlers, or hype artists. We’re looking for quiet executioners — thoughtful, product-obsessed builders who value learning over theatrics.

You might be the right person if:

You prefer building to pitching.
You’d rather talk to users than to VCs.
You’re comfortable with ambiguity — and energized by customer signal.
You (or your co-founder) write code.
You can go full-time, with full focus, and without distractions.

We offer full financial support — so you’ll never need to worry about runway.
That said, your salary will be modest but sufficient. Enough to live and focus — nothing more.
This is not for those seeking “startup life” with a corporate safety net. It’s for those who want the real thing.

Why We Don’t Believe in the Usual VC Model

We think the current system is broken. Here’s why:

In most VC-backed companies, the founder — the most valuable resource of all — spends months, even years, fundraising. Time that should be spent understanding the customer is spent understanding the investor deck.

At Starttech, we flip that model. We co-found with you, fund the venture internally, and stay focused entirely on building, validating, and growing the business.

You never need to build to impress us — because we’re in it with you.

The Five-Stage Journey We’ll Take Together

We believe in structure, commitment, and shared purpose. Here’s how the venture building program works:

1. Induction (1–3 months)

We train you on Lean Startup, Customer Development, Design Thinking, and Practical AI.
You’ll also learn from the success and failure stories of those who’ve been here before.

2. Customer Discovery (3–6 months)

Together, we’ll iterate on your value hypothesis, growth hypothesis, and early adopters — until we find a problem that’s genuinely must-have to solve.

3. Customer Validation (3–9 months)

You’ll prototype both the product and the growth engine. The goal? Paying customers, real value, and fast build-measure-learn cycles.

4. Customer Creation (6–18 months)

Once you have signal, we scale it. Traction becomes predictable. A sales and support muscle starts to form.

5. Company Building (12–30 months)

You graduate with a lean, focused company that no longer depends on us — because it’s profitable, capital-efficient, and ready to grow on its own terms.

What We’ve Done Before

This isn’t theory.

It’s how we built Epignosis and Yodeck, two global SaaS success stories from Athens.

In both cases:

We validated growth and value hypotheses in parallel
Our co-founders were engineers deeply involved in product and support
They never relied on user interviews — they relied on analytics, customer tickets, and usage behavior to understand what to build and why

It’s an atypical path. But it works.

Why Now: The Gen AI Acceleration

We’ve always believed in automation over headcount. Now, with the rise of Gen AI, that principle becomes even more powerful.

Small, committed teams can move faster, do more, and build better products with less. Gen AI is not a trend — it’s a profound validation of the capital-efficient philosophy we’ve lived and breathed for over a decade.

Now is the time to make things — and to make things happen.

What We Believe In

We’re not just looking to build profitable companies.
We’re looking to build companies that create real, multidimensional value.

Value for customers
Value for employees
Value for suppliers
Value for society

We believe in entrepreneurship as a catalyst for positive change — and in stakeholder & responsiblecapitalism as its north star.

That’s the world we want to help shape — one product, one startup, one founder at a time.

Still Interested?

If you’re nodding as you read this — if this resonates on a deeper level than most startup pitch decks ever do — then maybe this opportunity is for you.

We’re accepting applications for the 2025 cohort until June 15, 2025.
This is your chance to build something exceptional — with full support, no ego, and a team that knows how to get you from 0 to company.

Apply here → https://www.starttech.vc/become-a-co-founder/