Startup Wise Guys (SWG) is one of Europe’s most active B2B accelerators. Through Founders Club, experienced builders form teams, validate market pain, and ship the first scalable product version in a 12-week online execution program.

If you’ve spent your career making systems reliable, scalable, secure—for someone else, this is your chance to build your own platform venture.

This is a co-founder opportunity. The goal is to help you become (or join) a founding team and launch a venture.

• Validate platform/infrastructure pain with real buyers (Dev, IT, Sec, Ops)


• Define MVP with clear ROI (cost reduction, uptime, compliance, speed)


• Build the product foundation: infra, observability, deployment, security baseline


• Make smart build-vs-buy decisions to ship quickly


• Prepare a credible scaling story (architecture, reliability, unit economics)

• 7+ years in backend/platform engineering, DevOps/SRE, or cloud architecture


• Strong grasp of reliability & scale (observability, CI/CD, infra-as-code, cloud)


• Ability to prototype quickly (not just design)


• Founder-level ownership mentality (you want to build a company)


• ~10–12h/week for 12 weeks

• Ship in 12 weeks: validated problem + MVP + iteration loop


• Execution rhythm & accountability (~10–12h/week, deliverables)


• Access to 500+ mentors (B2B, pricing, GTM, fundraising)


• 440+ alumni startups / 40+ countries (benchmarks, intros, learnings)


• Founder-grade CTO toolkit: scoping, architecture narrative, investor readiness

Note: Participation includes a ticket after acceptance to ensure commitment and quality.

Apply if you want to stop being “the platform person behind the scenes” and build your own venture.