Founder & CEO — Future of Skilled Work

Founders Factory builds and funds startups together with exceptional entrepreneurs and leading companies. We combine early-stage capital with a hands-on Venture Studio team across product, engineering, growth, talent and fundraising, and have built hundreds of technology companies since 2015.

We’re building a new venture around one of Germany’s most persistent economic bottlenecks: finding and hiring skilled workers.

Despite acute labour shortages, much of the market still runs on fragmented job boards, recruiting agencies, manual outreach and slow qualification processes. At the same time, most skilled workers are already employed and rarely behave like traditional job seekers.

We believe there is an opportunity to build a fundamentally better technology-enabled model for reaching, engaging and matching this workforce.

We’re looking for an exceptional Founder & CEO to shape that company with us.

What we’re looking for

• A founder, operator or commercial leader with a strong track record of building from zero to one

• Deep understanding of recruiting, staffing, marketplaces, skilled trades or the German Mittelstand

• Strong commercial instincts and the ability to win trust with both employers and workers

• Product curiosity: you can distinguish what should be automated from what still requires a human

• Experience building teams, selling to businesses and owning meaningful commercial outcomes

• Comfort working closely with technical founders and turning messy operational problems into scalable products

• Fluent German and a strong understanding of the DACH market

• Entrepreneurial ambition to build an independent, venture-backed company

Particularly interesting backgrounds

You may have built or led:

• a specialist recruiting or staffing business

• a recruitment-tech or HR-tech company

• a marketplace

• a technology-enabled service business

• a business serving skilled trades, field workers or other non-desk workforces

You do not need to come from a traditional startup path. We are particularly interested in people who have developed unusual insight into how this market actually works.

What we offer

You’ll co-build the company with Founders Factory, with initial funding, a dedicated Venture Studio team and hands-on support across product, engineering, growth, talent and fundraising.

You’ll start with existing market validation and direct access to employers and industry experts — but with real freedom to challenge the current concept and determine what should actually be built.