Founder Systems Advisory
Build the company without fragmenting the founder system.
Companies often become more complex faster than the agreements, decision structures, leadership capacity, and founder roles that produced their early traction.
Founder Systems Advisory is a selective operating-partner engagement for teams navigating that transition.
The work integrates business strategy, commercial direction, founder alignment, organizational design, and the human capacity required to lead under sustained pressure.
Led by Oscar Trelles through Ten & Walker.
When the company outgrows its original operating system
The need for outside advisory rarely appears as one isolated problem. It usually appears as several forms of friction reinforcing one another.
- •Strategic decisions keep reopening.
- •Founder roles are defined formally but remain blurred in practice.
- •Commercial priorities compete rather than compound.
- •Urgency is displacing judgment.
- •Organizational problems are being treated as personal failures.
- •Founder strain is beginning to shape the wider company environment.
- •The team is approaching a consequential transition without a sufficiently coherent decision process.
One system, not separate interventions
The company and the founders leading it cannot be treated as independent systems. Strategic quality, commercial execution, leadership behavior, decision architecture, and founder capacity continuously affect one another.
- Strategic direction
- Positioning, priorities, business-model decisions, market focus, and the choices the company will not pursue.
- Commercial architecture
- Go-to-market coherence, sales priorities, partnership logic, offer design, and the connection between narrative and revenue.
- Founder alignment
- Role clarity, decision rights, unresolved tensions, leadership transitions, and the patterns shaping how the founders work together.
- Organizational design
- Operating cadence, accountability, leadership structure, communication patterns, and the conditions being created for the wider team.
- Founder capacity
- The ability to sustain judgment, adaptability, energy, and leadership range without normalizing chronic depletion.
A six-month operating partnership
The engagement is designed around decision leverage, not billable hours or continuous access.
- •Two structured founder-team sessions each month
- •Asynchronous support for consequential decisions
- •Review of relevant strategy, commercial, organizational, investor, or leadership materials
- •A concise monthly operating memorandum documenting priorities, decisions, unresolved tensions, and commitments
- •One quarterly half-day strategic planning session
- •Additional in-person work, offsites, or embodied interventions where appropriate and separately scoped
The exact cadence is adapted to the company’s stage and the transition being navigated, while preserving clear boundaries around access, execution ownership, and decision accountability.
Designed for founder teams at an inflection point
This work is best suited to revenue-generating or funded companies whose complexity is beginning to exceed the operating agreements and leadership structures that supported their earlier stage.
- •Growth or organizational transition
- •Repositioning or go-to-market redesign
- •Fundraising or post-fundraise expansion
- •Founder-role redesign
- •Persistent commercial inconsistency
- •Strategic fragmentation
- •Leadership-team formation
- •Founder conflict that is affecting company performance
- •A major market, product, or operating-model decision
The engagement is most effective when the founders retain decision authority, are willing to surface real constraints, and can act between sessions.
Clear scope creates better work
- •General startup coaching
- •Outsourced execution
- •Interim sales or operations management
- •Therapy
- •Unlimited founder access
- •A substitute for accountable executives
- •Guaranteed fundraising, introductions, or revenue outcomes
Commercial experience, systems perspective
Oscar Trelles has worked across software engineering, digital transformation, startup building, sales leadership, investment, entrepreneurship, human performance, and organizational systems.
His career has included senior roles in New York’s technology and advertising ecosystem, startup and cybersecurity experience in Europe, and the development of Breathing Flame, the Reverse Aging Challenge, and The Human OS Manual.
Founder Systems Advisory brings those domains together: business judgment, commercial architecture, founder dynamics, and the human conditions required for sustained leadership.
Founder Systems Advisory is delivered through Ten & Walker, Oscar’s venture and intellectual-property platform.
Engagement structure
Engagements are typically structured for an initial six-month period.
Fees begin at €3,500 per month, depending on company stage, scope, access requirements, and the complexity of the transition.
A limited number of founder teams are supported at any one time.
Hybrid cash and equity structures may be considered selectively where there is strong strategic alignment. Equity does not replace meaningful cash compensation.
The objective is not to make founders more productive. It is to help the company make better decisions, move through complexity, and grow without exhausting or fragmenting the founder system running it.