Don’t solve problems you don’t have — Justin Ziegler (Priceminister)
CTO.Pizza summarizes daily challenges of great startups CTOs, heard directly from their mouth during an informal discussion around a pizza. Follow us to stay up to date or register to the newsletter.
PriceMinister offers an online e-commerce and marketplace website that provides new, used, and collectable products at fixed prices. Justin is one of the founders and is now an angel investor.
- Founded: 2000
- Founders: Justin Ziegler, Nathalie Gaveau, Olivier Mathiot, Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet, Pierre Krings
- Funding: Raised 700k$ early, then a few other rounds.
- Acquired: by Rakuten for 250M euros in 2010
- City: Paris, France
- Company size at time acquisition: 250
- Tech team: 100+
Let’s talk about you
A CTO is the person that understands tech very well, is a good manager and knows how to communicate
What’s your background, before Priceminister?
I’m originally English. I arrived in France at the age of 5 where I started coding at 12 — basically when the first PCs where coming out. I coded a little app for my father and got passionated quickly.
I spent days learning languages and built my first program in C when I was 16. I played around with Pascal, Basic, Assembly… I ended up starting my career in 93 in internet security as an intern. We were the first ones to create a payment solution that actually worked online — We basically built something like PayPal, but too early. Nobody bought anything online at the time… Nevertheless we managed to sell the product to Paribas (now part of BNP) that operated a service called Kleeline. Things were a bit slow and I left with my few years of experience as a tech project manager and team lead.
I wanted to ramp up on Microsoft technologies so I got a job where I knew I could learn. After a year, the job wasn’t great and I met Pierre KM and Pierre KR who were searching for an associate CTO.
Pierre KM saw that Half.com that got acquired by Ebay in 2000 and wanted to do the same thing in Europe. At the beginning we started with books, DVDs and CDs and video games as not a lot of people were buying online — so we focused on products people already bought online
We got lucky enough to have a lot of opportunities that put us under the spotlights. It was right after the bubble burst and it was hard to raise money, so we had to be smart and not burn much cash.
What do you think a CTO should be or not be?
It’s the person that understands tech very well, is a good manager and knows how to communicate. S/He’s the bridge between the tech side of the company and the business. S/He’s able to translate any technology standpoint with any level of details, depending who s/he is talking to.
In a startup, s/he’s a manager, lead architect and product manager. I was also co-founder and shareholder which are no small tasks! The goal is to make sure we use technology to make money. At PriceMinister we managed to create a new revenue stream!
Did that definition change since the 2000s?
There’s a lot more technologies to deal with today than before. Like, a lot more. Things used to be straightforward — even for hosting! Now there are so many pre-made solutions and so many languages that it makes the ecosystem a lot more complex to apprehend.
Everything’s more dense. People tend to understand less and less some technical constraints because they can’t see under the hood of the SaaS solutions they use.
Mentoring and experience
There’s nothing worse than solving a problem you might never have !
Francis Nappez (CTO at Blablacar) told me you were a great mentor to him. Did anybody mentor you?
No. I was maybe too young and dumb — I felt like I knew everything I needed to do in order to succeed. The mentoring culture didn’t really exist anyways and now it’s almost part of building a startup. I would have been upset if somebody told me I needed mentoring.
I had worked with a bunch of people and could tell I worked faster than most of them so that made me too full of self-assurance to accept mentoring. The specificity of PriceMinister is that we had 5 cofounders, which allowed us to mentor each other when needed.
Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?
On the tech side, we faced some serious issues when we decided to handle more types of products on the site. I would have implemented the search engine a lot faster than we did because we had a hard time for 5 years with the native Oracle database search engine. We’ve also had our share of scalability issues.
We’re quite happy about most of our technological choices. I would build things now quicker and dirtier than I used to — because I know now that if you’re not quick & dirty, you’re not going fast enough and if you anticipate problems, you end up solving fake problems.
There’s nothing worse than solving a problem you might never have !
With tech changing so much, has it gotten easier or harder to get out of the pack?
You can find help basically anywhere now. Mentoring, funding, unemployment, etc. It’s amazing how many things you can trigger to help you get started !
Now you can tell your father in law that you’re an entrepreneur without being kicked out of his house. So I’d say it’s gotten easier.
People
To hire the best people, you need to be sincerely convinced that it’s better to work for you than anybody else
What are you looking at the most, during a hiring process?
I’ve lately only taken part of the last round of interview, so any candidate that I see has already passed through a some filters. So I only see 2 or 3 candidates for each position.
I usually ask them to present their view of PriceMinister to check their capacity to listen and learn, as well as their motivation.
Then I ask them to describe the job they are being hired for — as they’ve been through several interviews before, they should know by now. Then I ask them to summarize their experience in 10 minutes. Some need 3, some need 30 — That tells a lot about their capacity to give the right level of information.
Any tips for startups currently hiring developers?
Get help from a hiring firm. Depends on the time you have on your hands though! Being a startup is a real asset. A lot of people prefer working in a small, fast-paced structure than at Google.
You need to be sincerely convinced that it’s better to work for you than anybody else. If you have doubts about your product, you’re not in a good position to sell it.
At the very beginning of PriceMinister, people where here for the adventure. A startup is a human adventure before being a business, because everything’s possible and you need to reinvent yourself every six months. And be aware that as a CTO, you’ll have to be a different person every year.
Why 5 cofounders?
The two Pierres were getting along really well. Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet is a very optimistic person, full of ideas. Pierre Krings was the man in the shadows that made sure everything was fully operational. Nathalie had a huge financial network and was in charge of business development. Olivier came in a few months later to help with marketing.
So very early on we all had very well defined and complementary roles. We were not 5 engineers building a company.
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