Years ago, a single attorney's delay cost me millions in funding. Not because of bad legal work, because they delivered a contract five days late. By the time it arrived, my lead investor was unreachable on a yacht somewhere in the Mediterranean. When he returned, the momentum was gone. The round collapsed.

This isn't a unique story. It's every founder's story. We're great at building and selling. We're terrible at paperwork. And it's a massive hidden tax on innovation.

The Question That Keeps Me Up at Night

What if the reason many startups struggle isn't just product-market fit, but founder-bureaucracy fit?

I've been sitting on this idea for months. Every time I talk to another founder, especially repeat founders in biotech and wellness where I've spent my career it gets stronger. So I'm putting it out there not as gospel, but as a question: What if we're doing this all wrong?

The Universal Founder Experience

Over the years, I've built multiple businesses that customers wanted to pay six figures for. Getting to "yes" was never the problem. The bureaucracy of running the business? That's what kept me up at night.

For repeat founders who've been through this before, the pain is even worse. We know what needs to be done:

  • Incorporation and entity structure
  • Initial contracts and vendor agreements
  • IP assignments and protection
  • Employment agreements and handbooks
  • Fundraising documents and cap tables
  • Industry-specific compliance (FDA approvals in biotech, FTC regulations, state licenses)

We know how to do it. We've done it before. And that's exactly why we dread doing it again.

The Real Cost of Bureaucracy

Before you make your first dollar, you're looking at tens of thousands in professional services. But the financial cost isn't even the worst part. It's the time, the distraction, and the delay.

While AI has made building products 10x easier, it's created a new problem. You can build an MVP in a weekend, but you still can't sell it legally without months of paperwork. Using AI to draft contracts without proper review? That's a litigation time bomb. The gap between "I built something" and "I can legally sell something" has never been wider.

A Different Model: What If Your Job Was Just to Build?

Here's the thought experiment that won't leave me alone:

What if, as a founder, your job was just to build great products? What if, on day one, you had:

  • Finance: CFO-level expertise handling your books, forecasting, and pricing models
  • Legal Counsel: Attorneys who draft and review every contract, handle compliance
  • HR: Professionals managing hiring, culture, and employment law
  • Marketing: A team that actually opens channels and drives sales
  • Branding: Designers who nail your identity while you nail your product
  • Accounting: Experts ensure you never accidentally make a huge mistake
  • Compliance: Specialists who navigate your industry's regulatory maze

But here's the key difference from traditional models: They're not consultants. They're co-founders.

Why This Isn't Another Venture Studio

Traditional venture studios provide some services, but they're still fundamentally investors. They front-load support during the honeymoon phase, then gradually pull back. You're still largely on your own for day-to-day operations.

Traditional accelerators? They're about mentorship — telling you what you should do. That's valuable if you don't know. But for repeat founders, we know what to do. The problem is the crushing weight of actually doing it all while trying to build a product.

This model is different. It's about execution, not education. The operational team doesn't just advise on contracts — they draft, review, and execute them. They don't tell you how to set up payroll, they run it. They don't give you a lecture on cap table management, they manage it.

They're building the company with you, as equity partners, not billing you hourly.

The Service Provider's Perspective

Here's what people miss: This model isn't just better for founders. It's better for the operators too.

Talk to any senior attorney, CFO, or HR executive at a services firm. They're burnt out managing 15+ clients, billing in six-minute increments, with no real stake in outcomes. They watch clients succeed or fail from the sidelines, collecting fees either way.

What if instead, they could:

  • Focus on 3-4 companies where they're actual equity partners
  • Build something they own instead of just billing for
  • Use their expertise to drive real outcomes, not just clock hours
  • Finally have skin in the game

The best operators want ownership, not just salary. This model gives them that.

How It Actually Works: The Operational Co-Founding Studio

Here's the model I've been developing in as an outline:

The Equity Structure:

  • Founder(s): 60-70% - Maintains control and primary upside
  • Operational Studio: 20-30% - Split between:
    • Individual operators (CFO, General Counsel, HR Lead, etc.): 15-20%
    • Studio/platform equity: 5-10%
  • Investor Pool: 10% - Reserved for studio investors

But here's what makes this different: Unlike traditional venture models seeking unicorns, we're building sustainable businesses. That 10% investor allocation can receive ongoing distributions from profitable operations, not just exit upside.

The Lifecycle Model:

Phase 1: Formation & Validation

  • Builder presents validated idea with clear problem/solution fit
  • Studio team evaluates founder-fit and market opportunity
  • Pre-negotiated milestones are established (e.g., "If no revenue in 12 months, we wind down")
  • Operating agreements clarify expectations from day one

Phase 2: Launch & Build

  • Builder starts with a complete operational team:
    • CFO: Sets up banking, financial systems, unit economics
    • General Counsel: Handles incorporation, contracts, IP, compliance
    • Head of HR: Creates hiring infrastructure, culture docs, comp structures
    • Head of Marketing: Develops go-to-market strategy and channels
    • Brand Lead: Establishes visual identity and market positioning
    • Accounting Lead: Manages books, taxes, regulatory filings
    • Executive Assistant: Coordinates between all functions, manages calendars, handles logistics
  • While builder focuses 100% on product, everything else just happens
  • Operators work across 3-4 portfolio companies max to maintain quality

Phase 3: Scale & Transition

  • As revenue grows, company begins hiring full-time replacements
  • Operators help recruit and train their successors
  • Think of it like "sending your kids to college" - the goal is independence
  • Operators transition to advisory roles, maintaining their equity
  • They return to the studio to help launch the next company

The Operational Mechanics:

How Operators Work:

  • Each operator can handle 3-4 early-stage companies simultaneously
  • They're not spread thin because early-stage companies don't need full-time CFOs/GCs
  • As companies grow and need more attention, the ratio adjusts
  • Operators may receive base salary from the studio to offset initial cash needs
  • Their real upside comes from equity across portfolio

Quality Control:

  • Senior partners at studio level oversee performance
  • Regular reviews ensure operators maintain standards
  • Underperformance addressed through graduated interventions
  • Ultimate accountability: everyone's equity depends on success

Conflict Resolution:

  • Portfolio companies are selected to minimize competitive overlap
  • When conflicts arise, studio has established protocols
  • Information barriers between competing portfolio companies
  • Operators recuse themselves from specific decisions when needed
  • Pre-agreed frameworks for handling disputes

The Financial Innovation:

Traditional VCs need unicorns because only 1 in 10 succeeds. We're playing a different game:

  • Target: Profitable businesses aiming to do $10-20M ARR to start
  • Studio owns 30% of multiple profitable businesses
  • Investors receive quarterly distributions from operations
  • Not dependent on exits for returns
  • Creating a portfolio of cash-flowing assets, not lottery tickets
  • Sell the 100x opportunities IF they appear

What This Means Day-to-Day:

Day 1: You arrive with idea and validation. Team is ready. Week 1: While you build, incorporation is done, banking is set up, initial contracts drafted Month 1: First customer contracts executed same day. Books are clean. Hiring can begin. Month 6: At $25k MRR, company starts contributing to operational costs Year 1: At $100k MRR ($1.2M ARR), you're hiring your first full-time operators Year 2: At $250k+ MRR ($3M+ ARR), most operators transitioning to advisory Year 3+: Full internal team. Original operators in advisory roles, on to next ventures

Handling Failure Fast:

If a venture isn't working:

  • Pre-agreed milestones trigger discussions
  • Same team that started it handles clean shutdown
  • Proper dissolution, no lingering liabilities
  • Founder walks away clean, ready for next venture
  • No legal messes following anyone around

The Alignment Difference:

  • Hourly lawyers want complex, long negotiations
  • Our lawyer wants fast, clean deals that grow the company
  • Traditional CFO consultants bill for every model iteration
  • Our CFO wants accurate numbers that close funding fast
  • Everyone rows in the same direction because equity aligns incentives

This isn't theoretical. Every mechanism has been thought through based on real experience with what breaks companies. The goal is simple: remove every administrative barrier between a builder and their market.

Build Fast, Sell Fast, or Kill Fast

This model enables something crucial: speed in all directions.

Build Fast: When you're not drowning in bureaucracy, you can actually focus on product.

Sell Fast: When contracts are ready the same day you need them, deals close faster.

Kill Fast: When an idea isn't working, the same team that helped you start can help you shut down cleanly. No lingering liabilities, no messy dissolutions, no personal exposure, no zombie startup.

The ability to fail fast and clean is just as valuable as the ability to succeed.

Who This Is Really For

Let's be clear: This isn't for the 0.5% of founders who've already had massive exits. They have their own attorneys on speed dial and can self-fund operations.

This is for the 99.5% of founders who:

  • Still need to raise from friends and family just to cover basic legal costs
  • Have built before and know the pain that's coming
  • Want to focus on product, not process
  • Understand that execution beats ideas every time

It's especially powerful in regulated industries like biotech and wellness, where the compliance burden can kill you before competition does.

The Questions I'm Wrestling With

I don't have all the answers. Here's what I'm still figuring out:

  • How do you maintain quality when operators work across multiple companies?
  • How do you handle conflicts between portfolio companies?
  • What's the optimal number of companies per operator?
  • How do you structure transitions when operators hand off to full-time hires?
  • How do you attract the best operators to this model initially?

These are solvable problems, but they need to be solved.

A Fundamentally Different Approach

This isn't about making incremental improvements to the venture model. It's about recognizing that the fundamental assumption, that every founder needs to be a full-stack CEO from day one might be broken.

In a world where AI makes building easier but running a business remains brutally complex, maybe it's time to specialize. Let builders build. Let operators operate. Align everyone with equity.

The venture world is littered with great products that died in paperwork. What if we could fix that?

The Invitation

I'm not launching anything yet. I'm not raising money. I'm exploring an idea and looking for others who see the same problems.

If you're:

  • A builder tired of being forced into bureaucracy
  • An operator wanting equity, not just billable hours
  • An investor interested in sustainable, profitable businesses
  • A skeptic who sees fatal flaws I'm missing

I want to hear from you.

Because if we're right, if we can separate building from bureaucracy we might unlock a wave of innovation that's currently drowning in paperwork.

The question remains: What if builders could just build?

Let's explore this together.