Be pragmatic — Antoine Porte (Lydia)
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Lydia’s iPhone and Android apps enable you to pay anyone very easily and for free.
- Founded: 2013
- Founders: Antoine Porte, Cyril Chiche
- Funds raised: 13M$
- City: Paris, France
- Company size at time of writing: 40
- Tech team: 10, split between mobile developers and fullstack back-end developers
What’s on your pizza ?
Goat cheese and tomatoes at Bianco
Let’s see who you were before starting Lydia
I stopped coding as soon as I felt more legitimate somewhere else.
What’s your background?
Right before starting Lydia I was a tech lead at MyLittleParis for about a year. Beforehand, I worked on a lot of different web projects for about 3 years — that I cannot really call startup for most of them. These projects really trained me as I am not a originally a tech guy.
I studied project management at school and became a consultant for a while — that’s where I first dove into technology. I was at ease instantly because I loved the creation opportunities that coding gave me. Once your first program runs it’s like your are an artisan that built his first chair and sees somebody sit on it. Amazing feeling.
I started a social network about “apéro” (note: french term for having drinks) that took off quite well. It quickly became one of the main guides for hitting bars in France, and the code was completely custom-made and quite dirty.
This drive to build projects defines the man that I am today. My apéro project made me meet a girl who became my wife, as well as Cyril with who I co-founded Lydia. I also got hired at MyLittleParis because of my experiences on this project and learnt a lot there because the company was growing quickly from a very small team.
What is the job of the CTO at Lydia?
I learnt at MyLittleParis that a company can be great when the founders keep a strong hand on how it operates, so that is what we are doing at Lydia.
We basically manage the company and check every detail. We have the exact same status today than when we were just 5 people: we have our nose in everything but we are mostly here to help.
I focus mainly on managing the tech and product teams. One of my missions is to make sure newcomers understand what the company is so that they can join smoothly — that can mean wash the dishes in the kitchen to show that everybody has a responsibility for it.
I’m basically trying to make sure that everybody is pragmatic like the rest of the company instead of being ‘cool’ and following trends.
Has your job changed since you co-founded the company?
I stopped coding as soon as I felt more legitimate somewhere else. When you hire somebody better than you at something, you understand that you are better somewhere else and that’s where you need to be. So I switched to being a manager instead of a developer.
When you manage a team, you need to understand the people who compose it. If you keep coding, you don’t really want to get interrupted if you’re trying to fix a bug for 3 days — which means that you can’t take enough time to get to know your team deeply and understand their issues.
My goal is to make people grow quickly in their job so I can focus on something else. It’s again a question of being pragmatic.
Let’s talk about tech
It’s better for your problems to be where you’re better than anybody else to solve them
What’s your stack ?
We use native languages on the mobile applications since the early days — as when we started the other options (cordova, react native, etc.) were not really good enough for the experience we wanted to offer.
We’re aligning all the products to be exactly the same — meaning that we don’t have a UX for iPhone users and a UX for Android users. It’s the same for both worlds.
On the backend, we run PHP with a light framework called FuelPHP. People tell us that it can have an impact on hiring but if a developer only comes because we work on ‘cool’ technologies, that might not be somebody we want in the team. We’re pretty satisfied with our choice so far!
Any specific choices you made?
We decided to concentrate on where our strengths are. We externalized all of the hosting from the start, as managing an infrastructure does not add value to what we do. We prefer to excel in one thing than be average several.
We let Octopuce manage our infrastructure — and they are very challenging and useful. We don’t even have to think about the infrastructure, only tell them if we have major upcoming code or features changes. It’s better for your problems to be where you’re better than anybody else to solve them.
CTO life in a fintech
What’s your biggest challenge?
How to find people that are adapted to your mission and to the current situation? It’s not a matter of being the best at something, but a matter of correlation between what we need and who the person is.
Another major challenge is to manage the information flow in the company. How can you tell what you really need to know and how do you integrate a team where some people have been for 5+ years?
Your biggest responsibility?
One of the big responsibilities is that we have employees. These people have mortgages to pay off, kids to raise, etc. So we need to make sure we can sustain the company comfortably.
We have a real responsibility now that we have a million users. If the service stops, some businesses can be hurt and that’s a real difference with being a small startup where errors don’t have as much of an impact. I’ve seen a few companies join bigger corporations that killed the product (Sparrow, Sunrise…) and made hundreds of thousands of users orphan. I still haven’t found a decent calendar app since Sunrise!
Would you have done anything differently?
I try not to have any regrets in life. If there’s one thing, it’s that I did not dive into knowledge management fast enough and it’s primordial in a company.
I believe that there are a few things that need to be quite rigid: knowledge, security and recruitment. When it comes to hiring, you need to be able to predict what your needs are going to be and start your hiring process ahead of time.
When you grow from 16 people to 40 in a year, you need to make sure that everybody manages their knowledge in a similar way or you’ll lose information.
A few things to put in place:
- Change how people communicate — write everything. Nothing important should be only oral.
- Use a threading discussion tool instead of a chat. Slack is great for small talk, but you will lose information if important things are only there.
- We’ve installed an internal StackOverflow-like to have an extensive knowledge base: if anybody has a question, anybody else should be able to see the answer that was given — even years later. We use Confluence’s Questions module for that. It’s a great on-boarding tool: people can then see answers to questions they didn’t know they had yet, making things a lot faster for everybody.
What do you look at in a candidate that you want to hire?
I look at everything. The resume isn’t that important in the end — tell me who you are in a synthetic way! I want to see what you’ve gained from your past experiences. Are you going to talk about your companies, projects or personal experiences?
I’m searching for people that can listen and ask the right questions to fully understand a problem. The human fit is the most important by far.
If somebody needs challenges, is exigeant and can listen, they will likely grow in the team faster than an expert with a rigid spirit.
Any hiring tips for our fellow startuppers?
Word of mouth and referrals are the best way to find people that can fit your company culture. Humans are the most diverse thing there is in a company, so there’s not right recipe to find the ones that match.
The best way that I’ve found is to create your network beforehand to be able to activate it when you need it the most. When I meet with somebody that I’d like to work with, I keep him or her in mind for a later day.
Future
If you know where you’ll be in a few years, it means that you are not challenging yourself hard enough
What’s Lydia in 2 years?
Alive, I hope! We keep challenging where we are going. If you know where you’ll be in a few years, it means that you are not challenging yourself hard enough.
I can tell you where we’ll be in a week, but 2 years is simply too far in the future. But we’ll still be working on mobile payment stuff, for sure!
Your biggest upcoming challenges?
Financing. For now we’re still running mostly on external money and don’t have any financial troubles but we need to stay focused.
Our big questions: How do you keep doing what you do best at scale, while keeping a good customer experience and a strong innovation mindset? How do you scale from 40 to 200 in two years?
I believe this all goes through information management. If you can give everything they need to the new employees for them to jump in quickly, you’ll be able to keep the DNA of your small company alive. If you don’t you’ll lose your capacity to innovate and will get killed by hungry competitors.
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