The founders of Tiime and Medaviz, both non-tech backgrounds, explain how they recruited this profile which becomes essential when scaling up.
Hiring a CTO without technological knowledge is like asking a food critic to judge a Picasso painting: it doesn’t make much sense. However, many French tech founders from a business school or non-technical background sooner or later find themselves faced with this delicate stage of choosing their chief technology officer.
From a start-up at the other, this fateful moment does not occur at the same stage of development. “The subject of recruiting the CTO came to the table after our first fundraising, three years after our creation,” recalls Guillaume Lesdos, qualified accountant, former auditor and current CEO of the medical teleconsultation platform Medaviz. “We have existed since 2015 but the question of the CTO did not arise immediately. At the beginning, we relied on two lead developers. Then, as the team was structured, we had to recruit a CTO in 2021,” explains Amélie Schieber, a business school graduate and president of the fintech Tiime, an accounting platform intended for the self-employed.
Knowing when to hire a CTO is a first step. Finding the right candidate is another. The two founders also adopted different approaches. At Medaviz, the search for that rare gem first went through the network: “At the time, we had already met a lot of people from the start-up ecosystem. It was the former boss of my CTO who recommended it to me,” confides Guillaume Lesdos. At Tiime, it was a recruitment firm that made it possible to identify the right profile.
A leader above all
Then comes a crucial exercise, undoubtedly the most delicate: the evaluation of the future CTO. “When you don’t really master the subject, it’s difficult to know the right criteria to assess your competence. A sales director, for example, I find it easier because you can rely on numerical indicators,” estimates Guillaume Lesdos. So we might as well not persist in the evaluation of technical skills: “I started from the principle that the technical validation had already been done by his previous employer. His salary in his previous company was high and this also served as an indicator of competence. During the interview, I mainly focused on his human qualities. I also noted that, without being his strong point, he had a certain business vision and was very attached to the notion of scalability.”
As Amélie Schieber points out, a CTO must above all adopt the posture of a manager rather than that of a developer who works in his own corner: “We tried to recruit a first CTO whose technical skills were validated but his integration with the culture of the company proved complicated. A CTO is above all a leader who leads teams and has a global vision for the company”. Qualities that the president of Tiime was able to assess herself: “I mainly focused on her personality. On the other hand, I did not judge her CV because I was not legitimate on this aspect. Her technical skills were evaluated by the recruitment firm as well as by the internal tech teams who gave me feedback on her work.”
“I did not judge his CV because I was not legitimate”
Evaluating the human qualities of the candidate, in particular his managerial posture, while entrusting the analysis of technical skills to competent people, this is the summary of the words of our two interlocutors. Any last advice for the road? “You have to think about the size and type of volumes that you are ultimately aiming for. Some profiles are very good at launching a functional product, but are not suited to a company that scales. In 2020, with Covid, we had to scale up, and we found that what had been built made it possible to manage large volumes and a large number of meetings. Finally, I would advise other founders not to rely solely on the CV. Our CTO would probably never have passed the selection if we had stopped at this criterion”, concludes Guillaume Lesdos.
