For Investors

Your bet is placed.
Now protect it.

You've backed a great hardware product. But the months after the check clears are where hardware investments may quietly stall. Timelines slip. Visibility drops. The founder is underwater doing work that isn't their core strength and you have no real view into what's happening. I step in at exactly that moment.

Do you know who is actually running operations in your portfolio company right now? Not who is responsible — who is doing it, day to day, with accountability for outcomes?

If the answer is "the founder, alongside everything else" — that's the gap.

Classic pain points at Seed funding / post prototype stage:

Timelines slip quietly: A week here. A month there. Then a quarter. Production milestones get reframed with explanations that are technically accurate but operationally vague. By the time it's visible, the delay is already expensive.

Hiring takes too long: The ops team you need doesn't exist yet. The founder knows they need to hire but the founder is the person who needs to run the search, and the founder has no time since they are building everything else as well. The gap compounds itself.

The founder runs operations alone: Supplier negotiations. Quality loops. Hiring. Production scheduling. All urgent, all on the founder who is simultaneously trying to be the builder you invested in. One of those jobs suffers. Or both.

Visibility disappears: The founder is too deep in operational AND development work to report on it clearly. Updates come  but the clarity that existed during due diligence starts to blur. Not because they're hiding anything but because they have no bandwidth left.

The right engagement for portfolio companies that need senior operational presence without the cost and commitment of a full-time hire - I instantly work across the operation making decisions, building team structure, keeping road to production moving while giving the founder back the bandwidth to do what their strengths is while in parallel growing from founder to leader. 

You don't get a consultant. You get someone with accountability for outcomes, available to you and the founder with full transparency.
  • Operational infrastructure built and running within weeks, not months
  • Founder focused on product and growth, not supplier calls
  • Real visibility: not more reporting, but actual operational clarity
  • Permanent ops team hired and onboarded before I leave, final decision with the founder, time intense vetting run by me
For portfolio companies that need full-time operational leadership now, I step in as interim operations lead owning the floor, making the calls, and building the team that replaces me. The engagement ends when the permanent structure is in place and running independently (usually after 6-8 months)

This is the right choice when the gap is urgent and the timeline to a permanent hire is too long to wait.
  • Immediate operational stability focus, no ramp-up period
  • Road-to-Production on track with accountability at every stage
  • Full team build: scoping, hiring, onboarding, handover
  • Founder mentoring through the leadership transition in parallel
  • Clean exit: permanent team in place with no dependency left
Book a free 25 min Exploration Call on Calendly or contact me at n.noack@taivr.net or LinkedIn

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