Not one CTO is like the others— Mario Matar (Monbanquet.fr)
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.
Monbanquet.fr specializes in the delivery of buffets designed by artisans for professional events.
- Founded: 2016
- Founders: Hugo Rivière, Mario Matar, Maxime Renault
- Funds raised: 3M€
- Team: 30
- Tech team: 5
Background
I studied computer science at UPMC (Paris 6), and then worked for 2 years at Sopra Steria on projects for the police and social security. They were big projects with a massive architecture, so very interesting but I got tired of the structure of the company.
I had already started Monbanquet.fr at the beginning of my internship there — it was called Dubonpain at the time. But after I went to a conference about IA, I got excited about it and joined Influans to work on a great product.
I was working basically every night and weekend on Monbanquet.fr and we ended up raising the first 500k euros round in June 2016, so I quit my job to go full time on the project.
CTO Job
Can you describe your job as a CTO ?
That’s way too difficult to answer! I have to split the 2 aspects of being a CTO and being a founder, because it implies different responsibilities.
Not one CTO is like the others. Some are very product-oriented, others are pure tech masterminds, while other are better at project management. People tend to say that a CTO is doing great when he stops coding and spends most of his time hiring good developers. I personally don’t enjoy the hiring process too much, so I tend to try to keep coding.
The other aspect of my job is being a founder: I need to always ask myself how tech can serve the business.
A good example is when we tried to ramp up the recurrence of our customers. We first thought about the business and how the product could serve it before thinking about the tech architecture, splitting the tasks, allocating resources, etc. We for example had to switch to React to handle server side rendering for our SEO, and this implied a architecture changed as well as a switch in our hiring process. But it didn’t impact the business negatively in any way during the switch.
On top of all this I also follow the OKR of the company on each pole and take advantage to think about the long term tech strategy. I also sometimes handle some configuration & office management tasks because most of the problems that employees lose time on, I can fix in a few minutes max. So I handle the little things so make the whole company run faster.
Is your job changing over time?
My own understanding of what’s happening has changed quite a lot. When your team grows, management has to change as well. You don’t manage 2 people the same way you manage 15 !
With 2 people, talking to each other is often good enough to communicate clearly. After that, you need to start using rituals to make sure everybody has the right level of information to avoid any tensions and frustrations when hard decisions have to be taken.
I had to step down a bit from coding the main features of the site and start thinking about the big picture a lot more. Don’t get me wrong though, I still code quite a bit, simply not on main features. I’m usually the guy who works on a small topic weeks before it really bursts and passes it over with enough info so that people can start tackling it as quickly as possible.
Everyone has their own responsibilities in the company, in their own field. We all know that everybody else in the company is better than we are in their field. So I got over time a lot less involved in things that are out of my scope, and I spend more time coordinating the business side with the tech part of the company.
Let’s talk tech
Can you run us a bit through your stack ?
Java 11, Spring Boot 2, Angular 7, React on the customer interface, running through NextJS and Gatsby.
On the devops side of things we run Kubernetes on AWS with EKS completely deployed on Terraform, with our CI on Drone.io, but we’ll switch to Gitlab CI soon. Our entire stack is developer centric and based on Docker. One of our rules is that when you build anything, you have to generate a Docker image in the end
CTO Life
Can you walk us through a crisis you had to manage ?
We have problems all the time, but who doesn’t? The main thing to do is to make sure your team is always the right one to tackle any of the issues that might arise. The team’s values need to be strong enough so that nothing will blow up when a real problem shows up.
That means being very transparent about the company’s roadmap and making sure the team accepts it. If you miss this part, it can be quite dramatic. People just need a few weeks with a feeling of not being listened to to pack your bags and leave !
Your biggest responsibility?
For the business to run well! If your technology is all nice and shiny but your logistics suck, you won’t go very far. We (the founders) take responsibility about everything that can go wrong, because if something goes wrong within the team, it’s because we didn’t do our job right.
We try to be as transparent as possible to make sure everything is well enough exposed so that we don’t have too many things going wrong— through QA, weekly meetings, monthly financial meeting showing where the company’s finances stand, etc.
Your biggest challenge?
We want to be able to sell menus online directly, trough an e-commerce website. So that’s our big focus so far. Another challenge is to make sure the team has just enough pressure to be efficient — if you put too much pressure, efficiency goes down.
Our team if very heterogeneous, and developers have to work with PMs to define the product, so everybody needs to understand a bit of what the others do!
Any hiring tips?
We’re going to start open-sourcing a few things and write some articles about what we do. I think that’s a good way to put yourself out there, get the word out that what you do is cool.
We’ve hired recruiting firms to find some quality candidates. But when a candidate shows up, you want to be sure they ask the right questions: are they here to write some code or to crack the product you’re building ?
Once the intentions are aligned, we give a coding exercise. It’s a quite complicated one, so ends up being a personnality test as well. The end result of the exercise gives quite a lot of information on the candidate’s personality. I also usually send a little thing to do in a technology that the candidate has never touched before, just to see how they adapt.
And then I usually end the interview with a few questions about infrastructure. If you know your stuff on that part, that’s some serious bonus points.
What about the future?
Where will you be in 3 years?
Right now, we serve about 3000 orders a year. We’re expanding geographically, going to Lyon and Lille. In a few years, we’ll be all over Europe and will be able to work on the entire event with the organizers, not just the catering.
We’ll also be able to predict the needs of recurring events, to push the right menus at the right time.
Promo code for Monbanquet.fr !
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