I think the best thing you can do to gain some startup experience (since you have some good engineering experience) is to go for a Principal/Founding Engineer r

I think the best thing you can do to gain some startup experience (since you have some good engineering experience) is to go for a Principal/Founding Engineer role at a company. This will give you a respectable amount of cash and equity such that you will not need to make drastic changes to your lifestyle. This is better than joining an angel-investment stage startup. However, if you are hell-bent on becoming a technical co-founder, make sure that you bring some other skills to the table. You will need to make sure that you have the resources to pay your AWS bills, be able to hire people and then fire them when necessary. Furthermore, you will need some measure of product skills (because at this stage, you will need to determine the featureset of the products). So this is why you should go for a PE role, and then if you find the right idea, go for a co-founder role.