Good developers need to feel challenged — Benjamin Netter (Lendix)

Lendix is an online marketplace for business loans, enabling investors to lend money directly to small- and medium-sized enterprises.

Founder: Olivier Goy
Founded: 2014
Funds raised: 27M$
Team: 60
Tech team: 8 (Developers: 2 back-end, 2 front-end, 1 mobile; 1 designer; 1 CTO; 1 Project manager)

What’s on your pizza?

Regina at Pink Mamma

Let’s talk about you

I went to the meeting thinking that it would be another guy showing me an Airbnb for beach towels

Can you tell us a bit about your background?

You know this interview is going to be tough, right? I usually end up asking a lot of questions instead of talking about me, so sorry in advance. I went to EPITECH, then for about a year in Montreal to study Artificial Intelligence at Concordia.

I then worked for about 3 years in the fashion industry, then 2 years in the travel industry and now I’ve been in FinTech for a bit more than 3 years. I’ve always been in a tech position — any sector needs to be disrupted. My fashion experience was not very technical but very well paid and there was a lot of beautiful girls!

I met Olivier (note: founder of Lendix) through Partech ventures. Olivier founded a fund when he was 26. After 15 years working on it, he was looking for a new challenge. Following a new law regarding crowdfunding in 2014, he had the idea of Lendix.

I had a travel startup at the time, but was always open to opportunities. I only met HEC alumni pitching an Airbnb for beach towels… I ended up meeting Olivier and it worked out quite fast. He’s very clear minded and full of charisma so he ended up convincing me.

What’s your current job?

I have about 3 different jobs —I used to have 5 so it’s getting better.

Hiring: clearly the most time consuming but fascinating part of the job
Quality Assurance and code reviews: No code goes to production without me reading it
Project & team management

In three years, I managed to delegate 2 other jobs which were development and design, but we now have a development team and a designer. My goal is to be able to focus only on project management in a little while.

The vision of the company is quite clear, we know where we’re heading and what we have to focus on so we don’t have a lot of strategic decisions to take. The first two years were all about building the best experience for worldwide lenders, and now we’re focusing on making the perfect experience for borrowers.

Let’s talk tech

There are 2 types of tools for development: opinionated or not. There’s one way to use it, or a myriad.

What’s your stack and why?

We’re full Javascript. Node for the back-end, EmberJS for the front-end. We also use React Native for the mobile app, which is great.

We originally chose Ember because I had worked with it and the community is great — but I have to say that it’s actually making it harder to hire. The only chance we have right now is that AngularJS is falling apart so we’re able to hire some great Javascript developers that want to switch from Angular to something else.

There are 2 types of frameworks: opinionated or not. Ember is opinionated — if you’ve worked with it once, you just know how to work with it and there’s only one way to do things right. On the other side, with React there’s always several different ways to do things, so you never know if you chose the right solution.

Has this stack changed a lot? Or are you planning to change it?

We add stuff pretty much constantly. We’re also migrating from Heroku to AWS because the auto-scaling features of Heroku tend to react too late: when a project goes live on Lendix, we have a peak of thousands users rushing to the site. Heroku takes 10 minutes to adapt, while most of our projects are funded in less than 10 minutes.

The CTO life

I review every single line of code that goes live

What’s your biggest challenge?

Hiring and building a strong team. Making people in my team happy. There’s a shortage of good developers in Paris, so we’re looking into other cities (Milan and Madrid) where we have offices as well.

I’ve heard Zen.ly (note: acquired by Snap) might start hiring developers with salaries similar to the ones in the Silicon Valley, which will make the market even tougher. We don’t have that kind of money!

Your biggest responsibility?

Not losing the money! We’ve had more than 110 million euros flowing through our bank account over the last 2 years. That’s why I review every single line of code that goes live, even the tests go through extensive code reviews.

I’m also very cautious about not producing too much technical debt. If I see something that might break in 6 months, it won’t pass. On an e-commerce website, you can do mistakes, the worst that can happen is losing a few orders. On Lendix, a mistake could mean sending several million euros to the wrong bank account — we can’t take the risk.

Anything you would have done differently?

I would have hired a designer earlier, definitely.

People of Lendix

Can you describe your team?

We only hire people that have the ‘startup spirit’. During interviews, we usually talk about Revolut or Trainline and if the candidate has never heard of them, we can tell it’s going to be a rough ride.

We mention these companies because their mission is quite similar to ours: transforming an experience without necessarily making things cheaper.

For a dev role, they also need to be OK with the fact that we won’t push new code to production twice an hour. There’s a 1 week delay because of the code reviews and security concerns, so the slower pace is necessary.

People in the team pretty much all have an interest in the product. If you tell us you hate finance, you probably won’t get in.

What are you looking for when hiring?

Technical excellence. We actually lose a lot of people on a simple question: What’s the difference between == and === in Javascript ? (note: Answer is here if you want to work for Lendix ;) )

Any hiring tips for our fellow startups?

Hiring is the hot topic at Lendix right now, so we still have a lot to learn as well. Most of the time you know in 5 minutes if the candidate is a good fit.

But if they don’t feel challenged during the interviews, they might just think that you’re a bunch of morons and that they won’t be challenged during their daily work either. Good developers need to feel that things are challenging behind the scenes.

I would also recommend having coherent technical tests. We have 3 phases: a phone screen, with 2 tech questions and a few generic ones. Then there’s an on-site interview with live coding and some database modeling problems. The last part is a longer problem to solve at home that usually takes a few hours.

Future of Lendix

Where are you going to be in 2 years?

We’ll have more than 5 countries open — compared to 3 today.

On the tech side, we’ll double the team I believe. We don’t need to become huge to scale.

Any big challenges ahead?

Increasing volume without increasing the team or the quality of service too much will be our biggest challenge, I believe. That necessarily goes through tech and hiring more developers without altering the code quality.

An example we’ve had was to build a tool that made the work on any given lendee file go from 4h to 1h — that’s what we’re trying to achieve on the tech side.