Techne Ventures · Founding Network
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A small note · Cohort 01 · Read at leisure

For the operator who has quietly outgrown the structure.

You're good at your craft. You know it. The people around you know it. What you've started to suspect is that the structure containing your work is now the limiting factor — not your ambition, not your capability, not the market.

A note before the offer.

This page is not for everyone. It probably isn't for most of the people who land on it. If after a few paragraphs it doesn't feel uncomfortably specific about you, you should close it without guilt.

We are recruiting a very small number of people to co-architect agentic firms — proper founding roles, real equity, significant capital backing, none of the hedging language that usually surrounds offers like this. The firms are built on Decidr's operating system, and the founding members do something most senior practitioners have never been asked to do: break their own craft into typed structures, configurable entities, and continuously-evaluated outputs.

Most senior practitioners shouldn't do this. They should keep being excellent at their craft inside structures that already work. A small number should — and they tend to recognise themselves in a particular set of sentences.

· · ·

What follows is mostly a mirror. If you see yourself in it, the apply step at the end is short, honest, and routes to a real conversation. If you don't, no harm done — the page is short and the bottom is close.

§ The mirror

If three or four of these lines feel uncomfortably specific, keep reading.

i.
You're genuinely good at your craft. You've stopped needing external validation about that, though you still appreciate it when it comes from someone whose judgement you respect.
ii.
You're not unhappy. You just notice, more often than you used to, that the structure you're inside isn't designed for the size of the thinking you're doing.
iii.
You've thought seriously about going independent. You've run the numbers on it more than once. What's stopped you isn't capability or ambition — it's the cold-start problem. Clients. Infrastructure. Credibility from scratch.
iv.
You have some kind of initiative running outside your job. A side project. A community you built. A sport you take more seriously than people expect. Something that reveals to anyone watching how you're actually wired.
v.
You don't wait to be told. Agency is a default state for you, not an occasional performance. You've made consequential decisions without permission and owned the outcome.
vi.
You've said out loud, at least once, that the way your industry organises knowledge work is structurally outdated. You weren't wrong, and saying it didn't make you popular.
vii.
You're more interested in owning a piece of something built right than being a senior employee of something built badly. Title and tenure have stopped being currencies you accept.
viii.
When you describe your work to someone who doesn't do it, you instinctively break it into pieces. You can see the inputs, the judgements, the outputs, the criteria. You've been quietly doing systems thinking your whole career.
A name for the pattern

You're a founding operator. You just haven't had a firm to found.

The pattern above isn't a personality type. It's a profile that emerges when someone with serious craft has spent long enough inside other people's structures to know what good architecture would feel like — and has the agency to want to build it themselves. It's not common. It's not rare either. It's specifically what we're looking for.

§ Two versions of your work

What your week looks like, then and now.

Where most of you are now

Excellent inside someone else's frame

  • Your hours are the unit being sold, even when the contract names a deliverable
  • Your best thinking ends up trapped in matters and clients rather than compounding into the firm
  • Quality varies by who's available on the day, not by what the work actually requires
  • Your judgement is the firm's product but your equity in it is small or notional
  • Capacity is bounded by your calendar; growth means hiring more people who do what you already do
  • Improvement is a phrase used at performance reviews, not a structural property of the work
§ Who this isn't for

In honest order, with real alternatives.

Disqualification here isn't about being lesser. It's about being differently-shaped. Each of the routes below is a legitimate, well-paid, genuinely good path. They are simply not this path.

i.
You want a salary uplift and a better title. The market pays well for senior craft right now. Take that money. The role we're describing trades cash certainty for ownership upside, and that trade is wrong for most people.
Better fit A senior move at a firm that values you
ii.
You want clarity about what you'll be doing on day 90. Founding members operate in defined ambiguity for the first twelve months. The architecture is being built in real time, with you, around your craft. If that sounds destabilising, it will be.
Better fit An established practice with clear scope
iii.
You'd rather optimise an existing role than design a new one. This is a real strength. The world needs people who improve what's already running. The founding role is the inverse — designing what isn't running yet.
Better fit An operator role at a scaling business
iv.
You want strong infrastructure and great clients but not architectural co-build. This is the most common honest answer. Techne runs a separate programme — TechneOne — for exactly this profile. You keep selling your time, expertly, with the network behind you.
Better fit TechneOne · ask us about it
v.
You believe your craft is fundamentally un-decomposable — that breaking it into typed structures loses the essential thing. That belief might be right for your craft. It's just incompatible with what we're building.
Better fit Boutique practice or partnership track
§ The terms in one breath

No hedging. Read it twice before you tell us either way.

Equity
Up to 20%
In the new co you co-architect. Vested over time against contribution. You're a founder, not a partner.
Cash
Sweat by default
No cash equity unless you want to buy in early at the founding valuation. That's a separate conversation.
Capital
Significant
Techne invests materially. You're not bootstrapping. Capital and infrastructure are deployed from day one.
Your role
Founding operator
You sit at the top. Clients, judgement, taste, standards — yours. The agentic firm runs underneath.
Cohort 01
Starts now
Law and accounting first, this quarter. Other categories follow as founding members are confirmed.
Process
Seven questions
A structured application that synthesises your fit honestly. Founding route or TechneOne route — both are real.
One question to sit with

What's the version of your career that would make you genuinely proud in ten years — and what's stopping you from doing it now?

If the answer to the second half is "the cold-start problem" or some honest variation of it, that's exactly what this programme is designed to solve.

If this was uncomfortably specific, the next step is short.

Seven structured questions. A real synthesis at the end. A response within a working week, written by humans who read your answers.

Begin the application →

Cohort 01 is intentionally small. We read every application. If the synthesis points toward TechneOne instead, that route opens immediately and pays well — it's a different fit, not a lesser one.

Want to read the full programme architecture first? See the Founding Network page →