I've been building software for more than 15 years in startups & scale ups, including Back Market or Drivy / Getaround. I've been through the early phases many times, hired many engineers, designed organisation, built strategies and more.
If you feel like your project is not moving fast enough, if you are encountering a new complex topic, if you're not sure what should be your next move regarding product or engineering, 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 or 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.
- Sharing insights on how to organise or scale 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.
- Bouncing ideas with you or your team. Experience has shown me that having a mostly unbiased third party to discuss tricky topic can help reach a decision quicker.
- Facilitate a workshop. 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.
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.
His training sessions have always been recommended by our community of entrepreneurs. The care Marc puts into the preparation of his classes is a testament to his involvement & discipline.
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.
Marc is THE person you need in your team if you want to be sure to build a strong, powerful and user-friendly product. His intransigence is a guarantee of reliability and quality.
Some Relevant Projects
Engineering Leadership: Drivy & Getaround
I lead the entire Drivy engineering team, scaling it from a few engineers to ~40 people until it was acquired by Getaround. There I also worked on most of the company's technical components such as the search algorithm, mobile API, fraud detection algorithms, pricing structure, internal workflow tools, driver/car matching algorithm, payment infrastructure...
In Person Classes: HEC
I gave classes and lead workshops for HEC (large French business school) students wanting to create their own startup. As far as I know, it was the first time people were writting JavaScript in this business school.
Engineering Leadership: Back Market
As a Director of Engineering I took the lead of the customer facing side of the engineering team. This meant multiple teams working on everything from onboarding (SEO, content, trust...) to search, recommendation and then actual purchase funnel on the apps and the web. I also lead the side of the product that handled recycling and purchasing of used devices. One of the many significant challenges was to scale the team and processes to fit the quick growth of the company (went from a dozen people in my team up to approximativaly sixty).
Mentoring & Coaching: Plato
Helped a young team of entrepreneurs with no development background get accepted into the Numa Accelerator , and then get accepted into YCombinator. As tech advisor I contributed to technical decisions and figuring out how to handle the software side of their company while undergoing multiple pivots.
Online MOOC: Open Classrooms
I created and presented, in collaboration with OpenClassrooms, two MOOCs about Ruby and Git. They were online for multiple years and followed by tens of thousands of students.
Workshops: WiFilles
I was in charge of the coding workshops during the first promotion of WiFilles, a never seen before program to introduce girls to computer sciences. It was a success and WiFilles is gaining more and more traction.
Entrepreneurship: Shadow Boxing App
I built a boxing training app from the ground up with the objective to give people a way to train from anywhere while keeping it engaging & fun. The app is used regularly by thousands of people and currently sits with a rating of 4.9/5 out of 5k+ reviews and was featured by Apple in 7+ countries.
Teaching, Talking, Mentoring
Here's a quick overview of the people and organizations I worked with or I'm currently working with on this matter.
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. 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. Finally, if you need to see me in person, I'm localized in Paris... so that's where I'll be!