Well, everything you say here sounds like me to be honest. But as I've mentioned in another comment, you rarely get to a startup CTO/co-founder position without

Well, everything you say here sounds like me to be honest. But as I've mentioned in another comment, you rarely get to a startup CTO/co-founder position without recent everyday product coding experience, even if you have the big picture experience + current hands-on abilities in another field (infrastructure as code for me). That's the conundrum I'm trying to solve.