Validate the human fit with the team before anything — Pierre Gielen (Captain Contrat, GFP)

Founders: Pierre Gielen
Funds raised: 1M€ (Captain Contrat)
City: Paris, France
Company size at time of writing: 3 cofounders, 10 people
Tech team: 3 interns from Ecole 42, hiring in progress

About you, as you’re starting something

I was about to travel for a few more months. But instead, when pushed to start the next Monday, I changed my plans and I went ahead with this new adventure

Tell us a bit about you

I studied at EPITECH, then followed a masters in entrepreneurship at Kent University. I did a few internships, always in startups with a tech role, never in a big company. In 2012, for my final internship, I worked 6 months at SPEAR, launching the first version of the service. At the end, I took some time off to find a new project to conduct.

That’s when the Wagner brothers contacted me through LinkedIn, to talk about Captain Contrat. We got started quite fast, and raised about 1M€ four years later, which finally allowed us to start recruiting a tech team.

By the end of 2016, it felt like it was time to let go the tech role at Captain Contrat to allow the company to expand further, so I went on and took some vacation. I met Ivan on the way back who had a clear vision at 5+ years, about a service that would help any entrepreneur, small and medium businesses, to start, grow and run their business in France and internationally. In the future this platform would evolve and provide offices, tools, contacts and finances.

This implies a few specific tech needs like billing services, invoice management, digital signing, OCR, bank, finance and insurances APIs, etc.

How did you start the company or join the project?

We met through Nicholas Stock — who consults as an external CTO (https://www.gembani.com) — and who introduced me to 2 people who wanted to create a company to help anybody incorporate their company in 2h.

It was a bigger project than Captain Contrat in terms of traffic, applications and technologies, where my abilities to build and manage a big architecture were going to be questioned..

So it took some thought process to tell myself that I had the shoulders to handle such a responsibility. But we had a really good feeling, both personally and on the project itself. I was about to travel for a few more months but instead, when pushed to start the next Monday, I changed my plans and I went ahead with this new adventure.

In a few words, what’s your current job then?

I’m super excited about the project, mainly by its potential, size and all the challenges implied.

My job right now is to imagine and conceive the architecture needed for such a project — technology choices, conception of the APIs, hiring (planning 4 to 6 hires before end of 2017).

Let’s talk about tech

What’s your tech stack and why?

There are several Ruby on Rails projects to set the base of the APIs, which will be micro-services. We’re starting to use AWS Lambda quite heavily, and the front in either React or Ember.

On the opposite, Captain Contrat was only one impressive Ruby on Rails application (150 controllers, 80 models) with five different user spaces.

Have you had to change your stack before? How did you manage?

Captain Contrat started in 2012 while Ruby on Rails 4 was still in beta version and we stayed up to date through the upgrades.

For GFP, we did a POC with a bunch of technologies. NodeJS, Docker, etc. I tried a few technologies to realize what would make it easy to build and deploy multiples APIs. There’s still a lot of things that I don’t know much about, so I’m documenting myself and looking to hire people that can bring in core competences.

Have you ever faced a crisis?

We’ve had a few times where payments were processed twice, and we had to reimburse the customers. For a while we didn’t have tests and I was the one reading all the pull requests, but we ended up dropping data in production with this method…

The CTO life

When hiring, validate the human fit with the team before anything

What’s your hardest challenge, right now?

Hiring. I’ve been hiring for 1.5 years now between the 2 projects, trying to find the right profiles. I’m for example using Hiresweet, and added some scripts to automate the emailing part, and plugged the whole thing to Hubspot to track what’s happening.

If you had to change something you did in the past, what would it be?

To better communicate and better manage. There’s a lot of tech decisions that can be taken with experience, and building your own experience is sometimes too time consuming: finding external knowledge can sometimes be a better solution.

The most important thing is to explain the project and the vision to the entire team, which I did not necessarily do well in the past.

When hiring, what are you looking at specifically?

I’m trying to find people that will get into the project, and not people that just want to code for the sake of it. I always hire for specific needs, preferably on a specific stack, but on the Global Fintech Platform, I’m really open to anything regarding technologies.

Any hiring tip?

Validate the human fit with the team before anything! It’s way too expensive to have a mismatch, and it’s too easy for both candidates and the team to sell something they’re not during an interview.

Future

Where are you in 2 years?

That’s a bit far for me to answer, we’re not yet incorporated! But we’ll be a service provider for a lot of SMB and big companies. With a big tech team, a bunch of IA, text-to-speech, identity verification, etc.