I've been building software for more than 15 years in startups & scale ups, including Back Market, Drivy and Getaround. I've been through the early phases many times, hired many engineers, designed organisation, managed through acquisitions, built strategies and more.
If you feel like:
- your project is slowing down or not moving fast enough
- your team organisation is not fitting your scale
- your managers are struggling with their new role
- you encounter conflicts withing your leadership team
- you lack visibility over what is going on in your engineering team
- you struggle with your role as leader
- you are not meeting objectives and deadlines
Then I can help you by:
- Coaching you or your team to create or scale a product. If you are struggling with a particular point in your software production, be it work organization, vision, focus or something more technical, it can slow down your delivery. I can help you get over some roadblocks and move faster.
- Audit and help you build your software engineering processes. Once you've built your MVP, it's important to you keep moving fast, deliver on time and don't introduce bugs. A strong engineering culture alongside simple yet effective processes can go a long way.
- Helping you recruit developers or find your CTO. I'll be able to give you an external and technical point of view on any candidate you might want to hire.
- Work with you on how reorganising or scaling your team. It's hard to figure out what is the best setup for a given team. You probably heard of squads, tribes, agile team, impact teams... I can help you gain more clarity over what would work in your organisation.
- Facilitate workshops or discussions. You want to brainstorm a new concept, raly your team behind an idea or maybe build a long term vision. I can help you by helping you setup a successful workshop with your team.
Reviews & Recommendations
As first-time founders, there was a "before" and an "after" Marc.
He helped us accelerate on different aspects of building a tech product: getting the right process in place not only on the technical side (deployment, tools, security…) but also from a management standpoint: 1:1s, hiring, managing teams, etc.”
Marc is a fantastic tech mentor who helped me understand and solve management, leadership or technical issues related to scaling a tech & product organisation.
His feedback, advice and lessons learned building some of the best tech products are real gold for anyone seeking to build a great product with an impact-driven and pragmatic mindset.”
I met Marc during our years at Drivy. He did a tremendous job managing the tech team with strong organizational skills, thinking about employee development and performance from a technical and human point of view.
It was obvious for me to reach out to him when we faced similar issues within AssoConnect. As CTO’s chief of staff, I suggested a few hours with Marc to have an external eye and gather relevant pieces of advice.
After his intervention, we made some changes with almost immediate results thanks to Marc!
Insight, experience and goodwill are the qualities that makes Marc a major asset when he worked with us on improve our organisation and software development processes. This allowed us to focus on the major challenges of our startup’s growth.
Marc has been an excellent technical mentor since the very beginning of Plato. It is thanks to him that our stack is coherent and robust today.
Highlighted Projects
Classes for HEC
I gave classes and lead different workshops for HEC students in the "master entrepreneur" class. The objective was to help non-technical founders to be more effective in a startup environment.
Director of Engineering for Back Market
During my 3 years as Director of Engineering I lead up to 60 people and helped the company handled its skyrocketing growth. It involved structuring teams, hiring people, setting up process, evolving the architecture and more.
Executive coaching for Livestorm
During the first years of the company I worked with the CTO and CEO to scale their tech and organisation.
Long term coaching for Plato
I worked with the founding team from the initial MVP to their acceptance into YCombinator.
VP Enginering for Drivy
I reported to the CEO and lead the entire Drivy engineering team, scaling it from a few engineers to ~40 people until it was acquired by Getaround for $300M.
Team coaching for Plezi
I helped Plezi's team regularly for a year while they were redesigning their main product and improving their ways of working. Together we revamped ways of working, added tests and more.
Online classes for Open Classrooms
I created multiple MOOCs that were online for multiple years and followed by tens of thousands of students.
VP Engineering Europe for Getaround
After Drivy's acquisition I remained as VP Engineering Europe and lead the team through the post-acquisition integration process, between San Francisco and Paris.
Audit for Ejara
I conducted an audit of the company's tech organisation and ways of working for their investment products in Africa.
Here's a quick overview of other organizations I worked with.
Working Together
The process might differ depending on the situation, but in most cases here is what a collaboration would look like:
- We have a first free initial call or we meet over coffee if you're in Paris. The goal will be for me to better understand your needs, and for you to get a sense of if I am be the right person for the job. At the end of this we decide to work together or not.
- We plan a few meetings (remotely or in person) to work on a given topic defined during the initial meeting. It can be anything from a few hours to a couple of days. I like to have dense meetings and time appart so that you can try out ideas, read materials or talk to your team.
- Based on the result of these initial meetings, we either keep going with a recurring coaching session, a longer form workshop, a meeting with other people from your company... or we decide to stop there for the time being.
I like to get into long term relationships with my clients, so it's not unusual to have coaching sessions for a few weeks, then nothing for a few months, and then get back in touch to work on a new topic that appeared. In a lot of cases we gain can just pick the conversation up where we left it.
My goal is always to solve your problem as fast as possible by giving you lots of ideas, references and advices so that you can move forward on your own. If at any point I feel I'm not relevant for your current problem I'll tell you so and we'll pause the coaching.
Contacting Me
To contact me, you can send me an email with your project at marcg.gauthier -at- gmail -dot- com or via Linkedin.
From there, we'll plan a first free call so that I better understand what I could help you with, and then we can decide to work together or not. Note I often work remotely, but if you prefer meeting in person, I'm localized in Paris... so that's where I'll be!