Coaching for Technical Founders
You built the thing. It worked. That is the part nobody warns you about: the company that fit you at twenty people does not fit you at two hundred, the role you loved quietly became a role you perform, and because you are the founder, there is no one inside the building you can fully say that to.
I am Peter Plötner, an aerospace engineer who launched rockets from French Guiana and simulated the International Space Station at NASA before training as a coach. I work with technical founders and senior tech leaders at exactly this point: when what you built stopped fitting, and the patches you stacked on top have started to cost more than the original problem.
The founder's version of the problem
The Boeing 737 was shaped by one requirement set in the 1960s: sit low to the ground. Sixty years later that single early spec was still steering the airframe, with consequences nobody intended. Companies and careers behave the same way. The requirements you set in year one (or inherited without noticing) keep shaping your days long after they stopped being yours. I wrote the full argument in The Thing You Built Stopped Fitting You.
Two patterns show up again and again with founders. The decision that will not move: a pivot, a hire, a hard conversation that has been “almost ready” for a year, which feels like diligence and is often a quiet failure on the ground. And the slow drift: the metric you stopped checking, the standard you stopped holding, the thing that was fine a hundred times until the day it was not.
An engineer's method for a founder's problem
We do not start with feelings about the problem. We start with the requirements under it. What is your life actually solving for now, who wrote that spec, and is it still yours? A requirements check does not make hard decisions for you, but it does something almost as valuable: it shows you the true size of each conflict. The standoff that fills your whole screen usually lands far down the list of what your life is actually about. Sizing it correctly is what releases the energy it was eating.
Someone outside the cap table
Your board has a position. Your investors have a position. Your team watches your face for signals. A coach is the one person in your professional life with no stake in any particular answer. The work is confidential, and I give no advice and no homework: open questions, a written summary after each session, and a space where the true thing can be said out loud, possibly for the first time.
What working together looks like
It starts with a free sixty-minute discovery session. Bring the real question, the one that circles at 2 a.m., and test the work against it. After that: five focused sessions around one decision or stuck point, or twenty sessions over ten months for a full redesign of the spec your life runs on. Sessions are remote, worldwide, in English, German, or French.
Frequently asked questions
How is this different from an executive coach?
Most executive coaching optimizes your performance inside the role: better delegation, better communication, better stamina. Useful, and downstream. This work starts one level up, at the requirements: is the role you are performing still specified for the person you are now? Sometimes the answer is yes and we optimize. Often the spec changed years ago and nobody re-checked it. Optimizing a role built to an outdated spec is how very capable people stay quietly stuck.
I barely have time to sleep. How would I have time for coaching?
A session is sixty minutes. Compare that honestly with the cost of the alternative: a major decision that has been circling for six months consumes attention every single day. Founders usually find that sizing one stuck decision correctly returns far more hours than the sessions take. And the cadence itself does work for you; a regular check-in finds problems while they are still small and cheap.
Is it confidential?
Completely. I am not on your cap table, not in your investor updates, and not connected to your board, your team, or your market. Nothing you say leaves the room. For most founders this is the first conversation in years where every option, including the unspeakable ones, can be said out loud and examined calmly.
What if the honest answer is that I should leave my company?
I have no agenda about what you should do, and no incentive either way. The work is to see the actual shape and size of the problem; the requirements check often shrinks a conflict that filled your whole screen down to its true dimensions. Sometimes the honest answer is a redesign of the role. Sometimes it is a successor. Sometimes it is recommitting with a clear head. You stay in command of your own mission. My job is the instrument readings.
What does it cost, and how do I start?
The first sixty-minute discovery session is free and is a real working session, not a sales call. After that there are two formats: five focused sessions around one decision or stuck point, or twenty sessions over ten months for a full redesign. Current details and booking are on the coaching page. If you want a faster first data point, the Essential Self Diagnostic takes about sixty seconds.
Start with one real reading
Not quite you? See coaching for engineers or burnout coaching for tech leaders.