Making Myself Irrelevant Was the Easy Part

From January through October 2025, I found myself in a situation that would sound absurd to my 2019 self: I was struggling to find my place in my own company. Not because the business was failing—quite the opposite. Elevantiq was profitable, growing, with an incredible team of more than 15 people across offices in Kitzbühel and Vienna, building Vendure, one of the leading open-source headless commerce frameworks in the world. The problem was that I had successfully made myself irrelevant, and I had no idea what to do with that achievement.

This article is the start of documenting my personal journey from founder to what I hope will become a true CEO. I'm writing this because during my research, I found surprisingly few public resources about this specific struggle that technical founders face—the ones who can code, sell, and market, but suddenly don't know where they fit anymore. If you're reading this and nodding along, this is for you.

The Comfort of Exhaustion

When I started Elevantiq in 2019 from rural Kitzbühel, Austria—a place dominated by tourism and construction, not exactly a tech hub, known for the famous Hahnenkamm Ski Race and loved by the millionaires and billionaires of this world—I had zero experience building a company. But I had the energy and hunger to do everything myself. In the morning I'd be building features for clients, then jump into meetings before lunch, carve out two hours for marketing, and immediately switch to emergency client support because something went wrong. Days didn't end at 5pm, they ended at 8 or 10pm, and I was exhausted. But it felt good. I could see my to-do list getting shorter, feel the progress in my bones through sheer physical exhaustion, and know that I was moving the company forward with my own two hands.

Everyone tells you the same thing as you grow: "Make yourself irrelevant. Step out of day-to-day operations. Focus on what's 2-3 years ahead, not the now." I read this in every business book, every founder biography, every leadership article. So I built a great leadership team—Max, who gradually took over more and more operations starting in 2021 and eventually became COO, and Michael, who joined our universe in 2022 through a joint venture focused on Vendure and now leads all technical work as CTO. I trusted them completely, and they delivered beyond expectations. The team was committed in ways I never forced them to be, fixing bugs late Friday evenings not because they had to, but because they cared.

Here's what made the delegation "easy" in hindsight: I had hired people who were strong enough to not need me. When my anxiety kicked in later and I pushed to reconsider our entire strategy multiple times throughout the year, Max and Michael had strong enough convictions to push back. They didn't just execute my vision—they had their own, and they defended it. The company kept moving in the right direction not because I was steering it, but because I had built a system that could steer itself. This was exactly what I wanted, and exactly what terrified me.

But this created an unexpected problem: What was my role now?

The Identity Crisis of a Technical Founder

I was left with marketing and sales. I don't dislike this work—it's necessary, and I'm decent at it—but it doesn't fulfill me the way engineering does. I did it because I'm used to doing things I don't love when they need to get done, and if it wasn't me, who would it be? But the moment an opportunity to code appeared—supporting Vendure's new admin dashboard, building the new website—I'd drop everything and dive in. Then I'd realize I was avoiding what I should be doing, force myself back to marketing tasks, but never deliver anything that felt meaningful to me because I was constantly monitoring what was happening on the engineering side.

For the first time in my company's life, I couldn't see the day-to-day progress. I wasn't in the trenches anymore, and that meant I couldn't feel how well we were working, how fast we were moving forward. My mind filled that vacuum with anxiety. Were we heading in the wrong direction? Was our strategy wrong? Was the competition pulling ahead? Should we change everything? The urge to throw everything up in the air was overwhelming because I convinced myself it wasn't working—not because of any real evidence, but because I couldn't see the daily wins anymore.

And then there was the deeper issue: my self-worth. I had this idea that I needed to be the best software engineer in the company, that everyone should look up to me for my technical skills—my speed, my ability to solve problems the moment they arose. When I stepped back from that, my value to the company felt like it had dropped to zero. What was I actually doing that moved us forward if I wasn't coding? The question haunted me.

Taking Space to Think

By November 2025, I was spinning. I told Max and Michael I needed space until the end of the year and essentially stepped away, telling the team I was focusing on a private construction project with my brother. Everyone understood. The first two weeks I did basically nothing—spent time with my girlfriend, went to the gym, read books, occasionally coded for fun. But I also started researching. Not the company's problems. My problem.

My research broke into three phases:

Are there others who experience this?
What is a CEO actually supposed to do?
And most importantly, do I really want to be a CEO?

I searched for "technical founder identity crisis" and similar terms, diving through blogs, forums, and business publications. I found maybe five articles from other technical founders describing similar experiences—not many, but enough to know I wasn't alone. Then I immersed myself in understanding what CEOs actually do: reading books on leadership transitions, listening to podcasts with founder-CEOs, watching interviews with successful technical founders who made the leap, and buying articles from Harvard Business Review on the founder-to-CEO journey. This wasn't the surface-level "set vision and strategy" stuff—I wanted to understand what world-class CEOs actually spend their time on, how they think, how they create value when they're not personally building the product.

Here are some of my raw notes that I took while researching:

As founder to need to shift from operator to architect
The founder finds value in their own output; the CEO finds value in the system's output
Founders manage employees; CEOs lead leaders
The founder is a firefighter, addicted to the urgency of the next crisis. The CEO is a strategist, focused on the five-year horizon
Founders believe the best product wins. CEOs know the best culture wins, because it can build any product
Founders equate speed with doing things themselves, CEOs see scale in systems that run independently
As a founder your self-worth becomes a function of your to-do list
Becoming a CEO from a founder is ultimately about pulling away from daily operations. The discipline is in resisting the lure of the urgent.
Instead of being the best worker in the room, the founder must design the system that makes work flow without them. This is the essence of the founder to CEO transition. It is not abandoning responsibility but elevating it.
The 5 most important shifts from founder to CEO
- doing→designing systems
- deciding→coaching decisions
- managing→leading leaders
- short-term→long-term
- product→culture obsession
A founder brings an idea into the world. A CEO sets direction while building and motivating an entire organization to capitalize on the opportunity.
Disseminate Culture from the Top by holding team discussions and view it as a strategy session
Getting mentors for different areas is incredibly important to always self-reflect and learn
Creating space to reflect is massively important (aka taking vacation)
Recruiting must be a top priority - the CEO sets the tone. The people you hire are your brand.
Create alignment by establishing overarching corporate goals and empower each "unit" of the organization to create their own under this umbrella

The last question took longer. I tried to remember why I started this company in the first place. I went back through old notes and emails from 2019, when I was still freelancing. What I found was revealing: I had told everyone back then that I wanted to build a team because I was tired of working alone on someone else's projects. I wanted to work with others on our stuff—building a team, building a company, building products, delivering unique services.

The hilarious realization: where I am now is exactly what I dreamed of back then.

I had achieved my first major challenge—building a profitable, stable, growing company with an incredible team. But I had no next challenge focused on me as a person, on my own growth and development. The crisis wasn't that I had failed; it was that I had succeeded at the first mountain and couldn't see the next one to climb.

Redefining Value

Somewhere along the way, I had gotten the equation backwards. I thought making myself irrelevant meant making myself worthless. But the dream was never to be the best engineer in the room—it was to build something bigger than myself, to have a team executing a shared vision.

I decided my next challenge would be to become the best CEO I could be—measured not by traditional metrics, but by whether I'm genuinely learning new skills and staying out of my comfort zone of software engineering, even when coding feels easier. Success means resisting the pull back to what's familiar and mastering an entirely new set of skills, behaviors, and ways of thinking.

The shift required reframing everything: My value isn't measured by my personal output anymore, but by the company's output. Founders equate speed with doing things themselves; CEOs see scale in systems that run independently of them. I need to figure out how to make these systems visible to myself—what metrics, processes, and markers of progress matter when I'm not personally shipping code. I don't have all these answers yet, and that's part of the work ahead.

Going Forward

My focus is shifting entirely to what only a CEO can do: Culture. Systems. Recruiting. Strategy. Vision. Alignment. I'll still code occasionally, but with clear goals and oversight from others—otherwise I know I'll relapse and disappear into the flow state for weeks.

Hiring will become a major focus, not to suddenly scale to 40 people next year, but to invest seriously in employer branding, building a network of potential talent, and establishing ourselves in Vienna's and Europe's tech scene. I'm also hiring an experienced Growth leader to take over marketing entirely so I can focus on sales—something I actually love and get amazing feedback on, partly because my technical knowledge lets me connect dots quickly and give qualified answers instead of generic sales talk.

Most importantly, I'm being open with my team about this journey. Being vulnerable about the fact that nobody is born knowing how to be a CEO, that I'm learning too, and that this is completely normal.

The Fire Returns

My fire is back. My hunger is back. I'm more motivated going into 2026 than I've been in a while, knowing that this year will mark the next major step—for the organization, but also for me as a person.

But this isn't a success story yet—it's the beginning of one. I don't have the systems figured out. I don't know if I'll succeed at becoming a true CEO. I might discover I hate it, or that I'm terrible at it, or that the role doesn't suit me. What I do have is clarity on the challenge ahead and the fire to pursue it. That's enough to move forward with purpose.

I plan to write a follow-up article in July 2026 to share what I've learned, what worked, what didn't, and how this journey has evolved. Taking these two months to step back and think was the best decision I've made for myself and the company in years.

I keep coming back to one insight that reminds me daily why I'm doing this:

A founder who continues to define their value by personal effort inevitably caps growth. A CEO, by contrast, defines value by the systems they design and the leaders they empower.

If you're a technical founder struggling with similar questions about your role, your value, and your purpose as your company grows—you're not alone. And the answer might be simpler than you think: the dream you're living now might be exactly the one you started with. You just need a new challenge to chase.

This is the first in a series documenting my journey from founder to CEO. Follow along at dlhck.com for updates.