I only hire people smarter than me — Nicolas Baron (MeilleursAgents.com)

With an extremely detailed heatmap of Paris real estate prices (one building, one price) and a home valuation tool, MeilleursAgents.com lets you get a very precise estimated price of your property.

Founded: 2008 by Julien Cheyssial, Pascal Boulenger, Sébastien de Lafond & Jordan Sanial
City: Paris, France
Funding: 7M Series B in December 2016
Company size at time of writing: 130
Tech team composition: 15 in the tech team, split between data/data science and web (front, back, mobile) and 5 in the product team

What’s on your pizza?

Egg / Ham / Tomato / Mozzarella at Il Campionissimo, 26 Rue Léopold Bellan, 75002 Paris

You and the VP of Engineering job

I only hire people smarter than me.

Tell us a bit about your background

I come from a generalist engineering school where I got into programming during the last year only. I then started a company to build microfinance software for an NGO. The product got adopted by several NGO since then, and we open-sourced it.

I then did about 8 years of IT architecture, tech consulting and projects delivery at OCTO Technology, during which I worked for a year in Morocco to start the office there.

I became the CTO of FollowAnalytics for about 2 years through a referral — I arrived in the early days when it was 4 of us, and a year later we had a team of 40. Exciting ! I was back to building things, after having done many years of consulting. The company raised some serious money in the US to grow before I left.

How did you join MeilleursAgents?

The same friend that referred me to FollowAnalytics referred me to MeilleursAgents. I met with Sébastien (the CEO) on a sidewalk, and the fit was obvious. After one discussion, I knew I was excited about the product and the team.

I joined to manage the data team, but after refactoring the tech team’s structure, I became the head of tech.

What is your job of VP , in a few words?

To grow the team. Grow in different ways :

Hiring: literal growth in number of employees
Methodology and tools: make sure the team is as efficient as can be
Make sure we stay on top of the architecture we need for the business forecasts

In the daily life, it’s really about making sure things are done well. To achieve that, I only hire people smarter than me.

Have things changed since you started?

There’s a world of difference between a product where two guy has authored the vast majority of the commits, and a full team working together. We exposed possible methodologies that could be adopted so that everybody could contribute to how the team would work and its objectives. It got people really involved.

We try to create a continuous improvement culture in the team. For instance, we use the “red bin” method from Toyota: we have a post-it board where people put anything that went wrong during the week, and once a week we go through it to explain what happened and why, and how to fix it.

We try to use this method with real transparency, as a team. I don’t want anybody to take anything personally , we need criticism to be constructive. It’s something that is done way better in the US than in France, I believe. It was easy to achieve at MeilleursAgents because it was already in the culture.

Let’s talk about tech

We’re moving towards a very modular, microservices oriented architecture

Your stack?

We have a heavy PHP history. It was fine at the beginning, when everything was small and needed to go fast. It was pure PHP with homemade framework, no Symfony or anything.

We replaced everything about a year and half ago, moved to Python — Flask for the web part — and microservices. We also heavily use PostgreSQL with PostGIS because we have strong geographical needs in our queries. On the search side, we also heavily use Algolia.

Have you changed it or are you planning to?

We moved from bare metal to Google Cloud right after the architecture & code refactoring. It’s much better for scaling, being able to spin up machines in one click and it forced us to standardize everything regarding apps packaging and deployment.

In the future, we’re planning on moving more and more towards a very modular, microservices oriented architecture. We also need to split the database, as it’s for now one huge blob of data.

We also have some serious UX rework to do. All that ends up being a lot!

Have you ever faced a crisis ?

Nothing too major, really.

We once had a Redis server that was exposed to the public and that got hijacked and gave access to the underlying server, but after deep analysis of what was done with it, it ended up that some guy installed a Bitcoin mining software.

The life of a VP of Engineering

We prefer having a few brillant teammates than a lot of people that just execute well.

What is the hardest thing you are facing right now?

Hiring. We have an “all star or nothing” spirit, which makes it difficult to hire. We are at a size where we could actually hire only average developers, and a lot of them. But we won’t do that, we prefer having a few very smart people than a lot of arms that just execute.

It’s hard in our field, because young people don’t really care about real estate — so they don’t necessarily know about us. So we have to show up in meetups, shows, or go through head hunters.

We can’t compromise between not having enough people to execute, and the quality of those people.

What is your most important responsibility?

Build the best possible team + ensure that everything works, with strong performance needs: We have a very strong SEO presence, and part of it is because the site is fast. So we need a really good availability time, and a great response time.

Anything you’d want to change in what you’ve done at MeilleursAgents so far?

Yes, definitely. I would have started to work on the little details from the daily life a lot faster. Those details are easy to deal with in a small team, but as soon as the team grows they become way harder to cope with. They just don’t have immediate added value, so you keep pushing them to later.

An example is a developer workstation. Now, we finally have some docker containers that contain everything that’s needed for the new developer to start fast. It took us way too long to get that done.

The people at MeilleursAgents

Communication is key, and information needs to flow everywhere in the company.

Describe your tech team in a few words

The tech team has a very wide span of competences. If goes from heavy machine learning and data science to detailed front-end development to build the best UI.

The average technical level in the team is high. Everybody is very passionated, but also has an equilibrium with their personal life. They also take the time to do something else than coding, which allows having different subjects to talk about than just work, and makes the whole team friendlier.

What is the main thing you look at when hiring?

I completely trust my instinct. So the first thing that comes to mind is the human feeling. Do I like the guy? Do I want to work with him or her?

Then comes the ability to think and to explain a problem or a situation. Communication is key, and information needs to flow everywhere in the company. I don’t want to have people that stay 12h a day behind their computer without talking to anybody.

The last part is that you want to hire motivated people. You want their eyes to shine when they talk about joining the project!

One hiring tip?

If you are a CEO searching for their tech cofounder, try to see if the person you are looking at is deeply interested in the problem your solution is trying to solve, and not only the tech part. Have them talk and explain what they would do, not just what technologies they would use.

I think that this trick of finding out if the person really cares about the problematics behind the product can keep being applied quite late in growing companies.

Back to the future

To follow our strategy plan, will need to grow the team and accelerate at the very same time. This is quite a challenge.

Where do you see MeilleursAgents in 2 years?

There will be a lot more customers on the site, as well as the vast majority of the real estate agencies in the country. Real estate is what weighs the most in the French economy and it’s a local business, so we still have a lot to do here before thinking of going international. Maybe we will someday, but I don’t think that it will be within 2 years.

What are the biggest problems that you will face to reach that point?

Scaling at the right pace: architecture challenge + speed to execute — we already have 1.5M UVs, and doubling or tripling that might incur some serious architecture challenges.

We will also need to keep our capacity to stay on top of innovation, and to execute fast. We already have the strategy written down, but we will need to handle the speed needed to follow it. That’s going to be the hard part.