Modularity is key — Frédéric Rivain (Dashlane)
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Dashlane makes identity and payments simple and secure everywhere
- Founded: 2009 by Bernard Liautaud, Guillaume Maron, Jean Guillou, Alexis Fogel
- Funding: 52.5M$
- Company size at time of writing: 110
- Tech team composition: 45 (Dev & QA)
What’s on your pizza ?
Salame piccante at La Favorita
Let’s see who you are
I’m more of a “people manager” CTO
Can you tell us a bit about your background?
I went to college at Centrale and Cambridge with an IBM fellowship — so I worked at IBM for a few years out of college!
It was a great experience — 4 years of learning quite a lot.
I then moved to the gaming world for 6 years at Visiware, from where I switched to vente-privee for a short experience, working on something called the ‘digital factory’, that got shut down a bit early.
I continued with 3 years in the gambling world at Betclic, which implied managing people in Paris, Malta and Minsk. Enriching but Betclic was a quite complicated company. Then I moved to Dashlane, where I’m having a blast so far!
How did you end up at Dashlane?
Through head hunting. I’ve been a Dashlane user since the early days , and the feeling went well with the CEO and founders during my interviews. The hiring process was pretty heavy and I met a lot of people. That gave me a quite good idea of what the company looked like from the inside.
Dashlane is also a beautiful story, as Bernard Liautaud (note: who sold his company Business Objects to SAP) asked a few students (Dashlane’s founders) to work on a project during their studies, which he would profite funding for. The project actually worked well and became what Dashlane is today.
How would you describe your current job?
I’m more of a “people manager” CTO. I haven’t coded in a while, but still have legitimacy when it comes to tech decisions because I keep up with the new trends, so I am heavily involved in the company’s tech decisions.
My job is cut in tiers: 30% operations, 30% people and 30% tech. 10% for all the extra.
Dashlane is a password manager, which means that part of the complexity of the job is how you scale and how you stay data-driven while keeping privacy and security first.
Has your job changed since you started?
Not really. The 30/30/30 repartition of my role has been the same since I was at vente-privee, I feel like it’s a winning combination. When your team grows, you need to let the pure tech side of things go a bit and since vente-privee, I’ve always lead teams of several people (up to 120 at Betclic).
I’m more of a CTO that helps a company scale than an early days one.
Let’s talk about tech
Can you describe Dashlane’s stack?
The infrastructure is on AWS, pretty classic. The backend is in NodeJS, with Typescript. We have a semantic engine on top of it, which is our secret sauce.
The Dashlane semanticengine used to be in C++, but we moved to javascript because we wanted people to be able to use the service purely on the web as well. All of our client apps are made in the native language of the device they will live on (Swift for iOS, Java for Android, etc.). The web version has a React front-end.
Did you have to change a chunk of it and why?
We’re actually changing parts of the stack quite often! The latest changes were the migration to Swift and front-end to React coming from a Jquery webapp. There’s been quite a debate to decide between React and other JS frameworks we could use. We ended up going for React but it’s a quite shaky environment with moving parts, so we’re following along.
We mainly chose React for its modularity. We have the web platform which includes extensions on five different browsers, so the global web application totals 6 or 7 apps. Modularity is key.
Have you ever faced a crisis?
Not really at Dashlane, nothing too bad. We realized that the B2B businesses needed to share passwords in a very different way than B2C customers did. At the beginning, companies were using the B2C feature that we built to share passwords to their employees — it became a performance issue quite quickly. Security and encryption don’t work the same if you share a password to 1 person or 300!
We were using a blockchain type of architecture, even if at the time it wasn’t called blockchain. And that didn’t work for group sharing, so we had to switch to another architecture, while keeping the whole thing at least as secure as the blockchain version did. And we started working on it a bit too late for it to be comfortable!
The CTO life at Dashlane
What’s your biggest challenge?
- We just reorganized the teams a few months ago. We used to have an iOS team, an Android team, etc. Now we switched to feature teams, meaning that one team has all of the skills necessary to work on a feature or project. So we have a B2B team, a B2C one, etc. We have to build completely different roadmaps and that’s a real challenge.
- How can we do more with less? The revenues are growing but we can’t go in a hiring frenzy. We’re very data driven so we take decisions cautiously and don’t want to invest too much in something that will likely fail.
- A global challenge for the entire company is to evangelize the use of password managers. All password managers together have something like 50 million users, which is basically nothing compared to the number of people on the internet. We need to make this niche market become a mass market!
Is there anything you’d like to have done differently? Something you did or somebody did before and that’s causing problems now?
That’s a tricky question! But it’s mostly a matter of timing. There are things I wish we had done earlier. Sometimes you need to follow your intuition and take the bull by the horns. It’s hard to take a breath and look at the big picture when you’re head deep in your work. So it took us 9 months extra to actually start working on the B2B group sharing feature, which we deeply regretted when we got to it.
It’s hard to switch between short term and long term needs. For example, our Windows would benefit from a full rebuild but we also needed to add the group sharing feature fast. A hard choice!
The people at Dashlane. The Dashlaners?
Can you describe your team? How’s the spirit?
The tech team is really open to change, which is nice. There’s a great team spirit, and the human value is at the heart of everything. That means that when we interview candidates, the human value has a huge part to play as well.
There’s a very good tech level on most of the platforms that we build on. Our API has been presented to Google and they loved it, so we’re now partners. We’re also speakers in quite a few events. A lot of the people from the early days are still around, like the cofounders and the first developer.
When you’ve got a good culture, interesting stuff to work on and a company where people can grow, it’s easy to stay!
What are you looking for when hiring?
The human value, mostly. Can that person fit in the team? A very good developer without a team fit is a blocker.
We want people that can listen, that are ready to discover new things and keep learning. I interview all candidates, and my questions are mostly checking the human fit. The CEO also sees everybody, and a candidate sees 6 to 7 people on average, which is heavy but provides good results.
Any tips for a startup looking to hire good devs?
Hiring an engineer is hard. It’s basically a marketing funnel, with a conversion rate inferior to 1% . So you need to get as visible as possible in the tech community, to make yourself known as a place people want to work. If a candidate knows about you when you contact them, that makes things so much easier!
The Future
Where will Dashlane be in 5 years?
Very good question. We would really like to be at the heart of identity management as a whole for our users. People are used to having ID cards and passports, but there are digital assets that are worth protecting as much — and for now it’s not really widespread.
The vision is that we keep providing great benefit for our users’ privacy and security while improving access, speed of new features and convenience.
We’re putting together the first pieces of the puzzle with the password manager, as there’s no real standard. But there will be.
Any big challenge to achieve this vision?
We need the business to work, as we got funded and VCs will start asking for specific results. So we first need to reach critical mass where the business is completely sustainable.
Then all futures are possible! Being bought, an IPO, or staying by ourselves… Anything can be a scenario.
We also need to stay clear of any hacking or security issue, as this could be fatal for a business like ours.
Any last words?
Please use a password manager!
Any of them, even if I’d prefer if you use Dashlane of course. People really need to understand how vital password management is for global security.
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