I had to jump on the train at full speed — Valentin Baudot (YouScribe)
CTO.Pizza summarizes daily challenges of great startups CTOs or tech leads, heard directly from their mouth during an informal discussion around a pizza. Follow us to stay up to date or register to the newsletter.
YouScribe is a digital library which fits in your pocket, and is a community platform for sharing and selling digital publications as well.
- Founded: 2011
- Founder: Juan Pirlot de Corbion
- Funds raised: 4.5M$
- City: Paris, France
- Company size at time of writing: 10
- Tech team: 1 CTO, 2 Full-stack, 1 designer/front-end developer.
What’s on your pizza ?
Truffle oil, Mozzarella, arugula and fresh cherry tomatoes at Il Gufetto, Paris. This huge pizza was for the two of us.
Background and the CTO job
I had to jump on the train at full speed, which is never easy! So the first few months were really about soaking in as much information as possible
Can you tell us a bit about your background before YouScribe?
I come from the consulting world, where I spent 11 years in an IT services company. I have a software engineer masters’ degree from ESME Sudria and San Jose State University which was a quite intense part of my life.
I then worked for a long time at SOAT, where I moved from Java to ASP.NET, and worked for about 7 years on financial software for Natixis. I moved up the ladder (tech lead, project manager…) there and then switch to a heavy traffic e-commerce site (FNAC.com). I was responsible for maintaining the application and making sure things were up at all times, working with an offshore team in Morocco.
It wasn’t the most interesting job even if I learnt a lot, because it was a lot of managing incidents. I then moved for a short time to vente-privee to lead the front-office dev team, and then to YouScribe in October 2016, so it’s pretty recent!
How did you join YouScribe, then?
I arrived in October 2016, and started in a team in which the oldest person joined a few months before. Pretty fresh start! I was hired through a recruiting firm to replace the former CTO who was leaving with all the knowledge of the team.
He left in good terms though, so he spent a few months with me to transfer as much knowledge as possible.
And so what’s your job like, a few months in?
I had to jump on the train at full speed, which is never easy! So the first few months were really about soaking up as much information as possible. Now I’m starting to take over the commands.
My goal was to first adapt to the existing organization, to then work towards giving the team full autonomy.
Tech concerns
Can you describe your architecture?
It is quite rich but we’re mainly based on a Microsoft stack.
On the web side: API and sites are in ASP.NET MVC, Web API, and AngularJS on the front. We use RabbitMQ as an async middleware, coupled with a task processor written in .NET for decoupling Front and Back code. We use PostgreSQL to store data and SolR for the search engine.
For the cart system and any high written rate data, we use MongoDB, and Cassandra for analytics. We use a distributed file system (CEPH File System) to store the books.
About the architecture: We use HA proxy and NGINX load balancers on IIS servers to handle the load, as we can have some seriously heavy traffic after the baccalaureate when people are searching for the solutions online, for example.
Are you going to change anything, since you’re new and all?
Everything’s hosted on bare metal servers in an OVH datacenter, but we’re currently migrating to Google Cloud Platform from an infrastructure that was slowly decaying. We’re working with a partner on this migration, and they will fully manage the infrastructure after the migration is complete.
It’s a quite big and complicated task so we will need some downtime in September to complete it. Not the best scenario, but a necessary one.
Microsoft Azure would be cheaper than Google Cloud Platform, but their instability in 2016 made us choose a more stable platform. We are planning on having about 40 instances, which would be too expensive if we decided to use AWS.
Have you ever faced a crisis?
We had a full morning of the site being down because of instabilities due to our hosting provider (OVH). They did something that killed our service and blocked it from coming back up normally. It took us a while to realize it wasn’t coming from us, and we had to go through several people of their customer service to have somebody that did the right thing.
We also really needed to move out of bare-metal servers because of scalability issues. Whenever we had surges of traffic, we needed to disable some parts of the site and make them read only so the rest of the site wouldn’t go down.
We are an agile team that ships to production several times a week, so we can definitely miss something and break production from time to time. But it’s very rare and we can easily roll back. We will build more and more automated tests to avoid any failures of this kind in the future.
The CTO life
What is your hardest challenge as of today?
Making sure we keep shipping features while staying in a small tech team, as we had to reduce the number of people to grow the business and sales teams. The transition with the former CTO was quite a challenge as he was the pillar holding all of the information of the tech team, but now it’s behind me!
There’s no miracle recipe when it comes to transferring information. He tried to transfer me as much information as he could but I had to hit the wall myself on some areas to learn what things were all about.
In my opinion, every CTO should have a possible transition plan in mind at all times and should not link anything directly to himself.
For example: never use your own professional address to create accounts (APIs, back office services or whatever you use), create generic emails like tech@xxxx.com… so when you need someone else to use your account, you can just add them to the collaborative inbox.
It might be pretty dumb, but it’s flexible and useful.
What is your biggest responsibility?
- Making sure everything runs smoothly and we keep moving forward, no matter what.
- Stabilizing the tech team: My goal is to make sure everybody feels good enough to stay and be as productive as they can. t takes too much time to find developers so I focus mainly on retaining this solid team.
Would you change anything you did since you started?
I should have put my hands in the code faster. We have about 20 tools, either on the platform or in the back-office and I keep finding new ones every day, some of which I don’t even have the credentials for.
So if I had made my hands dirty faster, maybe I would have discovered all of them by now!
People of YouScribe
Describe your tech team in a few words
I have a very new eye when it comes to startups. I was expecting NERF gun battles and bouncing balls everywhere, but it’s not really the spirit here! It’s quite calm and people actually get work done.
- We have Philippe, who’s our lead developer that arrived in November 2016. He’s also coming from the consulting world and worked at some of the companies I was at. He has 7 years of experience on the Microsoft stack.
- Aymeric arrived in July 2016 and is a friend of the former CTO, Yann. 5 years of experience, he’s a great full-stack developer. He’s not always following all the rules but he can help basically anywhere in the architecture.
- Aurélien is our multi-task designer, webmaster and front-end developer, getting more experienced in Javascript. He is also our legacy storyteller as he has been here for 4 years.
Everybody is between 28 and 37 years old, and there’s a great cohesion within the team. I joined with some management experience, so we quickly added some processes like a daily stand-up meeting, and making sure most of our discussions get written down to keep a trace of everything.
What’s the main thing you are looking for during an interview?
I want somebody that understands things quickly. I’ll mostly test the soft skills and the way the person can fit in the team.
It’s quite easy! Make them talk about a project they participated in, and you will quickly see if they understood all aspects of the project or if they stayed in their enclosed area, and try to ask some questions with your fresh eye to see how they react to external input.
Then you can start talking about your infrastructure and go deeper in tech details, to see if they interrupt you when they get lost.
The last part would understand how they worked with their last team, to see if they can take initiative while staying humble.
Take your time, and hire the right people!
Future
Where will you be in 2 years?
We’re in a pretty stable market for now even if the reading industry is a few years late compared to music or video. I would love to have 500k recurring customers in the next few years, but that will likely not be in France alone.
Any big problems in sight to reach 500k users?
It’s a market with a bright future (note: Scribd, their American competitor, has 500k users) but the USA are 10 years ahead of France in any area. The book and publishing industry is getting hit by the same waves music majors had to face 10 years ago!
