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GUILLAUME LEROUGE’S BLOG

WWW.GUILLAUMELEROUGE.COM


A COUPLE OBSERVATIONS ON MICROMOBILITY IN PARIS

3 months ago, I moved to a new part of Paris. Whereas I used to live atop a
northern station of line 4, one of the busiest underground lines in Paris, I now
live closer to the suburbs, a 10 minutes walk from the closest tube station on
line 10 - and much further away from my office.


To alleviate this, I initially considered buying a light motorbike... that is,
until I got to try an electric scooter.


Though I couldn’t have foreshadowed it, my move took place at a fortuitous time,
coinciding with the arrival in town of 2 providers of electric scooter: Bird and
Lime.


Observation 1: this s**t is real


I initially thought that using an electric scooter would feel like an amusement.
After riding Bird & Lime about 10 times, I have to admit: this stuff really
works. The learning curve is seemingly non-existent, riding feels natural and
safe (I’m used to biking in Paris - the same precautions apply).


Observation 2: once you get started, it’s hard to stop


This is true in 2 ways: once you get used to the service, it makes you want to
use it again (see also observation 5 below). Beyond this, once you’re on a
scooter or bike, you tend to want to stay there. Yesterday, an 8-minutes, 2km
ride meant to take me to the tube station turned into a 30-minutes, 8km ride to
my final destination. The weather was good, the experience pleasant... why
bother getting back into an underground station?


Since you pay by the minute, this has a direct positive impact on revenue for
the scooter companies.


Observation 3: electric scooter > bike


This morning, after missing my bus, I decided to take a scooter. Bad luck, none
was available in my area. I fell back on a Mobike. Though my ride was pretty
short (less than 15 minutes), that was enough to get sweaty. This was further
compounded by a 20-minutes ride in a crowded underground wagon.


Sweat is obviously not a concern with electric scooters. Electric bikes live in
a middle ground there, since they still require you to pedal in order to move
forward.


Observation 4: multi-modality FTW!


I end up switching a lot more between various modes of transportation: bus to
tube, scooter to tube, bike to tube... though, interestingly, rarely the other
way round.


Some services, such as CityMapper, are trying to seize the opportunity by
offering ride itineraries that include bike and scooter options. However, their
solution does not take hops such as scooter-to-tube-to-bike into account yet.
You still have to do some mental calculations to find out whether taking a
scooter to the tube could be faster than the standard bus-to-tube connection
offered by the app.


Observation 5: free billboards all over town


I’d wager that one of the key factor of the rapid success of micro-mobility
companies is their ability to keep customer acquisition and retention costs low
thanks to their almost permanent presence in the background. 


Several times, while intending to take the bus, I stumbled upon a bike/scooter
parked next to the stop. In the frequent cases where the bus was more than 5
minutes away, this prompted me to take a scooter.


—


Electric scooters are not quite there yet. I’m finishing this article while
waiting for a bus that is still 8 minutes away: unfortunately, the only scooter
close to me has no battery left...





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TEN YEARS

Ten years ago, on this very day (November 2, 2006), I sent the following email
to jobs@xwiki.com:


> Hi,
> 
> My name is Guillaume Lerouge, I am a french student on Erasmus year (3rd year
> exchange) in London. I am currently studying business and international
> marketing. I have a DUGEAD (ex DEUG) from Université Paris 9 - Dauphine. 
> 
> I've been interested in wikis for a while and started writing my own blog on
> the topic (http://wikibc.blogspot.com). I feel quite comfortable on the
> subject and have been thinking about offering consulting services about the
> potential use of wikis, but as a student this is not easy to start from scrap.
> I would be really interested in working with your company for it looks like
> the competences you need and the skills I have to offer match pretty closely. 
> 
> I am fluent in both french and english. I'll be back in Paris by june 2007,
> and until then I would be interested in remote working. I'll be in Paris from
> mid-december to mid-january if you'd like to meet me. 
> 
> Looking forward to get in contact,
> 
> Guillaume

The reply was prompt:

> Hi/Salut Guillaume,
> 
> When do you want to start!
> 
> Ok we need to talk first... But we are very interested.
> 
> Merci pour l'anglais... On parle très bien français dans le bureau à Paris.
> 
> Ce qui me paraît tout à fait interessant c'est déjà de voir ce qu'on peut
> faire sur le marché londonien d'ici juin 2007.
> 
> Ensuite il y a des choses très interessantes à faire au niveau marketing chez
> XWiki à Paris pour developper la stratégie marketing.
> 
> Ludovic

Roughly translated, it said that French people speak French very well, merci,
but they'd be happy to chat with me. This was how I got my first job - a job I
ended up keeping for 10 years. 10 years is a long time, yet it feels like it was
only yesterday. I started as a 19-year-old intern, then an apprentice, then an
employee, then a manager. In that timeframe, I also became a husband and a
father (though not at the company!).

During the course of those 10 years, I learnt so many things that I'd be hardly
pressed to list them all. How to hire someone. How a great product is built. The
value of constructive disagreement. How to build a (very) simple web
application. Why it's so fucking important to fix your messes *right now* - debt
accrues fast, whether it's organizational, managerial or technical. How to sell
anything - an idea, a project, a solution, a mission. Most important of all, I
learnt the value of trust. Trusting that your colleagues will deliver under an
impossible deadline. Trusting that your clients will keep believing in you even
in tough times. Trusting that whatever happens, your boss will do the right
thing.

Some lessons I learnt the hard way. What it's like to lose a deal that seemed
set in stone. What happens when an irreplaceable employee decides it's time for
them to look elsewhere. The year-long consequences of a bad product management
decision. How it feels to let someone go - the burning in your stomach, the
thought that maybe there's still a chance, the days that pass in indecision
before finally making up your mind. 

Towards the end, a question kept popping up in my head: should I stay or should
I go? Am I still contributing enough? Am I doing my part? Am I living up to the
expectations the company has of me? Those of you who went through similar
motions know this: once you start going through these motions, it's probably too
late already.

Ending a 10-year-long work relationship isn't easy, but Ludovic understood. I've
done it in private, but I'd like to thank him one more time, publicly, for
everything he's done for me over the years. He got me started when I was but a
random Erasmus student getting in touch out of the blue. He trusted me with
increasingly important missions, all the way from intern at an 8-person startup
to the executive committee of a 45-people company. He was never afraid to point
out my mistakes (and oh boy! the mistakes I did) and remained supportive all the
way. I wish him and XWiki the best in their path forward!

Deciding what to do after such a long stint wasn't an easy thing. I was the man
of one company. As I told Vincent, XWiki's CTO, when he asked me what I hoped to
do next: "I spent ten years at one company, now I'd like to spend one year at
ten companies". I had dabbled with short consulting missions towards the end of
my time at XWiki, helping young startups define their go-to-market
strategy and assumed I could do this full-time.

However, one thing quickly became clear to me: helping startups as an outside
consultant is complicated. You have no skin in the game. Your fees are always
too high for their constrained resources. You need to be on the inside. How
could I reconcile this with my wish to work at 10 companies in one year?

In hindsight, the answer was simple: 2 weeks ago, I joined La Javaness, an
up-and-coming French startup factory. I couldn't have hoped for a better place
to pursue my career. Our worldview is simple:

 1. Several technological revolutions are currently sweeping the world
    (Blockchain, AI / Machine learning, Virtual Reality...).
 2. B2B tech startups are emerging in this space, but they have a hard time
    cutting through the noise and getting noticed by large corporate partners &
    potential recruits.
 3. Big companies are looking for innovative ways to embrace these revolutions.

Our mission is to bridge the gap between startups, corporate actors and tech
talent. We do this in the following ways:

 1. We built a team of world-class experts in the fields we identified as the
    most promising - machine learning in particular.
 2. We developed a strategic partnership with Eurogroup Consulting in order to
    get access to the largest companies in France and help them make their
    digital transformation projects successful.
 3. We incubate promising B2B startups, giving them access to tech talent they
    would be unable to benefit from otherwise as well as corporate partners they
    wouldn't otherwise be able to reach.

My job at La Javaness will be to help startups and corporates build innovative
projects together.

Effective today, I am also taking over the organization of Startup Grind events
in Paris. Looking forward to meet you there :-)

On to the next 10 years!

Comments 1
Upvote Upvoted 4




TO CHAT OR NOT TO CHAT, THAT IS THE QUESTION

Jason Fried has a great article about group chat software:


> What we’ve learned is that group chat used sparingly in a few very specific
> situations makes a lot of sense. What makes a lot less sense is chat as the
> primary, default method of communication inside an organization. A slice, yes.
> The whole pie, no. All sorts of eventual bad happens when a company begins
> thinking one-line-at-a-time most of the time.
> 
> We’ve also seen strong evidence that the method and manner in which you choose
> to communicate has a major influence on how people feel at work. Frazzled,
> exhausted, and anxious? Or calm, cool, and collected? These aren’t just states
> of mind, they are conditions caused by the kinds of tools we use, and the
> kinds of behaviors those tools encourage.
> 
> Based on these discoveries, I’ve put together a list of the positive and
> negative impacts of group chat on an organization. If you’ve gone chat-first,
> or you’re considering heading down that path, I encourage you to review and
> consider these impacts on your own organization.

An absolute must-read if your company is considering using Slack, HipChat or
Skype for business. We've been using Skype internally for as far as I can
remember at XWiki. I couldn't see us running a distributed company without it,
but the associated cognitive costs are real and should not be underestimated.

Comment
Upvote Upvoted 0




MICHAEL MORITZ ON WHY YESTERDAY IS IRRELEVANT

Continuing in the vein of yesterday's post, here's another great article from
The Macro. This time it's Michael Moritz from Sequoia, sharing advice on how to
build a company that achieves success over a long period of time (think 40+
years):

> Yesterday is irrelevant
> 
> How have we done it? It all sounds very, very mundane. You can read a book
> about the principles of high performance, or great leadership, and it’ll all
> sound very straightforward and rudimentary. The difficulty is doing it every
> day, doing it every week, month, quarter, year, and keeping that beat up.
> 
> That was one of the great things about Steve Jobs, it’s one of the great
> things about Larry Page, it’s one of the great things about Jeff Bezos, or
> Reed Hastings. These are leaders who are capable of doing it. How do they
> do it?
> 
> They want to make sure that their product is fresh, that it changes with the
> times; that they never rest on their laurels, or get complacent; that they
> always have an element of insecurity about feeling that they can always get
> eaten by a competitor, and that past successes don’t mean all that much.
> 
> Which is part of the reason we don’t have all sorts of lucite blocks
> commemorating this or that anniversary of some company hanging around the
> office at Sequoia: Because all of that is yesterday, and it’s irrelevant to
> the future.

Achieving success once isn't hard. Sustainable success at the highest level is. 

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BUILDING A NUCLEAR REACTOR PEOPLE WANT

Y Combinator is publishing a lot of great articles through their outlet, The
Macro. From an interview last week of Jacob DeWitte, founder and CEO at Oklo:

> So how did Oklo, formerly known as UPower, start?
> 
> Jacob : At MIT, I’d met my co-founder Caroline Cochran, who was also in
> nuclear engineering and had a background as a mechanical engineer. We started
> really digging into how would we do something advanced in nuclear with a
> startup. But we didn’t want to be technology pushers. We wanted to follow what
> people wanted, what people needed.
> 
> We had a series of conversations with friends and contacts who were working in
> power development for remote communities – for projects like mining and gas.
> They’d talk about how much a pain in the rear it was to get power to these
> remote places they were working on. The common thing to use is diesel, but
> it’s a big problem: There are often no roads to deliver the fuel, it’s quite
> unwieldy, the weather can be so severe that it will freeze, and so on.
> 
> These people would say, “Well, diesel is the most energy-dense fuel we know.”
> But nuclear is 2 million times as energy dense. We’d ask them, what if there
> was a small enough reactor that you could bring out on a job site? They all
> said, “Whoa, who makes that? We would buy that in a second. As many as you
> could make.”

And that's how you get started building the nuclear reactor of the future!

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