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Find the right people — Nicolas Cosme (Tripndrive)

by Alban Dumouilla

Tripndrive — Instead of paying for parking at the airport or station, Arthur leaves his car with Tripndrive, car sharing for travellers. We rent the car to Myrtille, a traveller who’s just landed at the airport or arrived by train. Tripndrive therefore makes it possible to rent out your own car to someone else while you both travel

What pizza are you having ?

Pizza parma: Parma ham, mozzarella di buffala, roquette salad, tomatoes

You and the CTO job

I knew that the most important part of the adventure is to find the right people

What’s your background?

You won’t be surprised: Engineering school (ENSEIRB) with a specialisation in telecommunications. I then turned to software development, and graduated in 2006 and joined an IT services company in JAVA/J2EE.

There, I worked on very different but great missions: I helped build the infrastructure that registers the electronic signatures to print French passports, pretty much from the start of the project. I switched in 2008 to join the early stages of what would become Velib, the bike sharing system in Paris — I was basically the first developer there. It was real bootstrapping at the time: they had a ton of bikes but no back-office to manage the fleet. I worked there about 2 years to structure the back-office.

I then moved to the Française des Jeux but I was starting to feel frustrated with working for big companies. I started working part-time to be able to join my parents’ delicatessen shop for about 2 days a week, but ended up not liking it.

I started my first company with a friend in early 2012, something about social shopping. It crashed pretty fast in 2013.

How did you meet your co-founders and start Tripndrive?

After my first startup experience, I knew that the most important part of the adventure is to find the right people. So I networked for about 3 months, going to pretty much all the events I could. I ended up meeting FX and Arthur at meetup between project owners and CTOs and liked that they knew what they wanted, were ambitious and no bullshit.

The idea of hanging around airports’ parking lots at night wasn’t the digital business I first was considering, but they convinced me pretty fast. We started working on it in May 2013, and rented out our first car in September of the same year.

What do you consider your current job to be?

We’re a small structure, so my job is quite schizophrenic. The first duty is to manage the tech team, serve as an architect and stay up to date about technologies in general.

My second role is to be the ‘VP of product’, as we don’t have one yet. I also take full part in the strategy of the company with my cofounders.

Has your job changed since you started?

Not that much, actually. We haven’t reached the critical size for me to have a completely different job yet. We added processes to our development cycle quite early, using Agile methods like SCRUM since the first developer joined.

When we’ll have 2 products in parallel, then I’ll have to change the way I work, but for now everybody works on the same things and we all manage the same information.

Let’s talk about tech

“We might have to switch from Angular to something else in the future if we end up having a hard time finding developers.”

What is your tech stack, and why?

We’re on Java, with Spring Boot. I had been working with Java for 6 years before starting Tripndrive, and our added value is about accountability, invoicing, etc. I knew Java was a good candidate to manage these non-web based features.

For the rest, we use Angular 1 for the front, and the regular Redis/Mysql/AWS suite.

Have you had to change your stack or are you thinking about it?

Not yet. But we’re looking closely at containerization and microservices. And we might have to switch from Angular to something else in the future if we end up having a hard time finding developers.

Have you ever faced a crisis? Site down, etc.

We had some performance problems once, and the site went down at night. We have nobody on call, nothing was absolutely critical, so we fixed it in the morning.

Your life as a CTO

I have a team of purists, and I want to hire purists. They are hard to find !

What is the hardest thing you’re facing right now?

Hiring, definitely. I have a team of purists, and I want to hire purists. They are hard to find ! I need to enter the ecosystem where I can find them, stay on top of my coding skills to be credible and it’s very, very time consuming.

What do you consider your most important responsibility to be, as a CTO?

First, making sure the infrastructure of the information system follows the operational and marketing needs of the company. We’re pretty much not using any pre-built tool, so that our tools can stay very close to our needs.

Second, making sure we stay in the middle ground between productivity and legacy code. We don’t want to keep refactoring stuff, but we have to move fast as well.

If you had to change something since the beginning, what would it be?

I should have spent more time on devops problems at the beginning. When the transaction volume grew, I still didn’t take that time and now it’s way harder to migrate some parts because of that.

People

“What makes you smile in the morning when coming to work?”

Describe your tech team in a few words

They’re all trustworthy people. We wanted exactly them, and we didn’t pick them by default because we couldn’t find anybody else. They are all passionated about tech and what they do, and they challenge each other, keep themselves up to date, go investigate new things… There’s kind of a snowball effect happening.

One hiring tip?

I always ask this question : “What makes you smile in the morning when coming to work?”

If they answer something about trusting their coworkers, they have a bonus ;)

Where do you see Tripndrive in 2 years?

Several cities opened internationally, 2d or 3d fund raising done, and double the team size.

What are the hardest problems you’ll face to reach this point ?

Tech wise, answering the promise that we’re making with a new product we are going to launch soon. It’s super exciting, but we will have to connect cars online with a super smooth UX, about scanning people’s driving licences and all that. It needs to be seamless.

On the operations side, we’re slowly shifting from a fleet of random people’s cars to managing our own fleet in partnership with car manufacturers. That’s a huge difference in the logistics that we’ll have to be smart about.

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