20VC: The Framework to Scale A Team From 20 to 190 in 24 Months, How To Structure The Perfect Investor Updates & How To Create A Culture of Distributed Ownership with Radical Transparency with Jean-Charles Samulian, Co-Founder & CEO @ Alan

Jean-Charles Samulian is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Alan, the startup revolutionising health insurance with a service centred on people, simplicity and comfort. To date, Jean-Charles has raised over $85M in funding with Alan from some of the best in the business including Jan Hammer @ Index, Shakil Khan, Tom Stafford @ DST, Xavier Niel and Brent Hoberman to name a few. Prior to changing the healthcare insurance system, Jean-Charles founded Expliseat, revolutionising airline seating for economy class, now used by some of the world's leading airlines. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Jean-Charles made his way from re-inventing the airline seating industry to re-inventing the way consumers experience healthcare insurance? How did re-inventing the airline seat prepare and impact Jean-Charles' mindset going into the highly regulated healthcare market with Alan? 2.) How does JC structure his investor updates? What framework does JC believe these investor updates should take? Does he include thank you's at the end? Does he include requests for help? How does he involve the team in the writing of these updates? How does JC insert core strategic thinking into his updates? How much time does JC allocate to writing updates? How does JC think about transparency when coming investor updates? 3.) How has JC created a culture of distributed ownership combined with radical transparency? What are the key elements to achieve this? Where do so many go wrong with culture maintenance and creation? What have been the biggest challenges in scaling from 20 to 190 people in just 2 years? What has worked? What has not worked? 4.) How does JC structure the hiring process at Alan? Why does JC believe in the importance of "shadowing" for people to be excellent at hiring? How does JC define "excellence" in a potential candidate? What questions does JC most like to ask candidates? How does JC think about the right way to optimise new employee onboarding? Where do many go wrong with onboarding? What have been their core lessons at Alan as to what it takes to make it great? 5.) How does JC think about extreme self-organization today? How does JC structure his day and his time? How would JC summarise his relationship to his phone? What does he actively do to reduce his dependence on his phone? What has worked and what has not worked with regards to increasing productivity? How does JC advise others looking to make their first steps in increasing their productivity? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Jean-Charles’s Fave Book: The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Jean-Charles and on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Carta simplifies how startups and investors manage equity, track cap tables, and get valuations. Go to carta.com/20vc to get 10% off. More than 800,000 employees and shareholders use Carta to manage hundreds of billions of dollars in equity and Carta now offers Fund Administration so you can see real-time data in the Carta platform and work with Carta’s team of experienced fund accountants. Go to carta.com/20vc to get 10% off.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Welcome back. You are listening to the 20 Minute VC and Founder's Friday with me, Harry Stebbings. And you can see all things behind the scenes from me on Instagram at H Stebbings 1996 with two Bs. But to our episode today, and I've wanted to do this episode for a long time, having heard just the most incredible things about this founder from everyone I spoke to about him, and especially on his leadership. And so with that, I'm thrilled to welcome Jean Charles Samulian, co-founder and CEO at Elan, the startup revolutionizing health insurance with a service centered on people, simplicity and comfort. To date, Jean Charles has raised over $85 million in funding with Elan, from some of the best in the business, including Jan Hammer at Index, Shakil Khan, Tom Stafford at DST, Xavier Niell and Brent Hoberman, to name a few. Prior to changing the healthcare insurance system, Jean Charles founded Expliciad,

• 0:44Harry Stebbings?

  revolutionizing airline seating for economy class, now used by some of the world's leading airlines. I do also want to say a huge thank you. This schedule was really a team effort. Huge thanks to Antoine Martin at Zenly, Shakil Khan, Jan at Index and Pierre Vallad at Jumbo for some fantastic question suggestions today. I really do so appreciate that. But before we move into the show today, I'm sure you've heard about it, but my word, this is a product I love, Carter. Carter simplifies how startups and investors manage equity, track cap tables and get valuations. Go to carta.com/20VC to get 10% off. More than 800,000 employees and shareholders use Carter to manage hundreds of billions of dollars in equity. And Carter now offers fund administration, so you can see real-time data in the Carter platform

• 1:27Harry Stebbings?

  and work with Carter's team of experienced fund accountants. Simply go to carta.com/20VC to get 10% off. And speaking of managing the admin of those employee equity packages, well, do you already have a job? On Wanted, you can set the salary for which you would consider another job. Wanted is free and there are only two steps required. One, you set your salary. Two, you submit your LinkedIn profile or resume and that's it. Wanted will then reach out when there is an opportunity at this salary or more that matches your skills and experience. And Wanted already has over 50,000 talented individuals on the platform and is used by the fastest growing and coolest startups in the US. So don't waste time and energy on a recruitment process that takes months and yields a salary beneath your expectations. Get a raise on getwanted.com.

• 2:12Harry Stebbings?

  And once you get that incredible talent through Wanted, they have to be properly equipped. And that's where Brex come in. Brex is the company which built the corporate card for startups and who's the fastest company to reach unicorn status in history. Brex founders Henrique and Pedro built a payments business in Brazil, but kept getting rejected for a corporate card in the States. So they built Brex with no personal liability, up to 20 times higher card limits, and huge rewards like 7X points on Uber and Lyft, 4X on Brex Travel, and 2X on SaaS software. If you're a VC-backed startup based in the US, see if you qualify for a Brex card today at brex.com and get card fees waived for life by entering the code HARRY during signup. But you've heard quite enough from me, so now I'm very excited to hand over to Jean Charles Samoulian, co-founder and CEO at Alain.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 3:06Harry Stebbings?

  My word, JC, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show today. I've heard so many great things from Jan at Index, from Shaq, from Antoine at Zenly. But thank you so much for joining me today, JC.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Thank you, Harry. I'm super happy to be there.

• 3:17Harry Stebbings?

  Well, listen, I'm stoked to have you. As I said, I've been a big fan for a long time. But I do want to start with a little bit on you. So tell me, how did you make your way into the world of startups first? And then what was that aha moment for you, really reinventing the insurance industry with Alain?

• 3:30Speaker 02

  I think I've always been a big fan of technology, like a lot of people on the show. I started building websites when I was 12. I sold the first one when I was 13. It was like a very small website, but it was kind of magic to know that you can build whatever you want from your room as a teenager in southeast of France. And being from a family of doctors, both my parents are doctors, I spent a lot of time wondering why the user experience was so poor for them, also so poor for the end user, that means us, the people. And like, it's really weird, the system where you have people that really want to make it work, but the experience at the end of the day has no technology, no user experience. It drove me crazy.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  So I knew all along that I would try at some point to create something meaningful for the healthcare system. And when I was in my engineering university. At twenty one, twenty two, I was working already on a few healthcare related projects, but bumping also the ideas with friends. And one of those ideas was that aircraft seats, so the chair in aircraft, were already stuck in the eighties in terms of technology. And very quickly, we managed to convince people from the industry, like the former CEO of Airbus, that it was a good idea to try to transform aircraft seating. And we got like one million of financing even before our graduation, even before knowing we were going to build a company and that.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  And so we just decided to go and we developed the latest aircraft chair for economic class, dividing by more than two the weight of a seat, which generates massive fuel savings and massive CO2 savings. And we did that through a few technological breakthroughs, composite titanium and a lot of ideas and distribution and manufacturing. And it was really a wonderful journey. But at some point, I think like the real hard moment, and it was kind of a sad moment for me, is one of my grandfather got sick and he got diagnosed with a cancer, a lung cancer. And I just knew that I wanted to transform the healthcare industry. Like it was in my guts every morning when I woke up. And so I decided to do a transition to high adoption for secondary.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  So I decided to sell my shares in my first company and to move forward with my teenager dream, which was to build a healthcare company. And then it was starting from a blank page again. It's like, I know that I wanted to build a healthcare system that was frictionless, fair, unfriendly for everyone, but I didn't know how. I went to one of my friends with no my co-founder, Charles, who did his career in San Francisco at Facebook and Twitter. And we knew that we wanted to build something and that the long term goal would be to be the only app that people use to access healthcare, which means accessing the best prevention, accessing the best information, the best care, all without friction. And wondering how to do that, we decided that health insurance

• 6:20Speaker 02

  was the best way to start building a health insurance company. Because in fact, with health insurance company, you are in contact with every stakeholders, the users, the doctors, the host. Hospitals, the pharmacist, you have a revenue model, a business model, which is kind of very rare in the healthcare system. And the more you add services, the more you differentiate towards your long-term vision, the more you differentiate as a health insurance company. So it seemed pretty obvious. And the last thing was that as an entrepreneur, I had to deal with health insurance for my employees in the past. And it was one of the worst user experience, really unclear, non-transparent. We felt that they were trying to screw us at every step. So like every stars were aligned and we decided to create a land for those events.

• 7:04Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, I absolutely love that. It's kind of a founding inspiration story. I do have to ask, because bluntly, J C, it's the first time I've ever had someone who's innovated in the airline seat industry. And I spoke to Antoine and Zendy and Shaq before the show, and they asked the question, what were your takeaways from that business? And I guess, how did it impact your operating mindset with Alan today?

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think one of the link between aerospace, healthcare, insurance, is that they are all very heavily regulated. And one of the learning is that regulation is not a curse. For me, it's an opportunity to innovate. Markets with high barrier to entry, they are likely to be places where you can make a huge difference. Because innovation is so hard because of regulation that people don't even try. What you need to do, it was one of my biggest learning, is that you need to see regulation as part of your project, part of your core knowledge. It's really an opportunity to approach things with the jobs to be done framework, and not just as a legal constraint on, yeah, there is regulation, we are blocked. No, it should be an opportunity to be innovative. And in order to do that, you need to go really, really deep.

• 8:06Speaker 02

  You should not give regulation to lawyers. Yourself, you know, you need to go as deep as possible. In our case, I spent a couple of months at the beginning of Alan, reading the full insurance code, and it's a lot of pages, you can trust me. And I did like a summary of it, which was like this big Google sheet document where you could fill document link article with each other. And it helped us build the knowledge. A second thing that I learnt, and I think that was really key, is the importance of culture. I love this quote from Red Asting, that you should have been thinking about culture. Yesterday and I think in my first company, we did not spend the time on culture. We were twenty two when we created the company.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  We didn't really have role models in terms of very successful startups in France. And we just didn't know how to do it and we were not super aligned with my co-founders. And as a result, I feel that we lacked something really meaningful on how we hire people, how we choose them, how we develop them. And how we operate and work together. And that's something we did with Charles for Alan and we went very, very deep on what we wanted to build in terms of culture. From day one, even before we incorporated the company.

• 9:16Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, in terms of that culture, I'm so glad you said about that culture because while we're on it, I do have to ask, when it comes to your culture at Alan today. You have this kind of combination of distributed ownership with combined kind of radical transparency. Can I ask, what are the key elements to achieving this kind of perfect combination and how have you done it?

• 9:33Speaker 02

  I think first what you need to start with is what do you want to achieve as a company? And us, for example, we knew that we had a very big ambition, the playing field is huge and healthcare system are broken all over the world. In order to reach that ambition, we knew that we need to attract the smartest people on earth. And if you want to do that, you want to give them the power to make decisions. So it's where distributed ownership comes. It was just natural, like you want everyone in your organization to be capable of making the right choices. And for distributed ownership to work, we thought that you need a few principles. First, you need to define what means excellence in your company. For us, it's how you think rigorously, how you make decisions, how you really dig deep.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  Also, it's important for distributed ownership is to tell people they should not fear being contrarians and that they should try to be right. I think you discuss that a lot with Mark Howard on the show, but like building the right thing is non-consensual. And that's something you need to train and coach people. You need to push people for courage to make decisions. And I like to see a company not as a democracy, and I think we should not be a democracy. But the sum of a lot of small, very enlightened despots who make bold decisions after taking the point of view of their peers, but not. Playing with the point of view and the difference is that.

• 10:51Harry Stebbings?

  In terms of the bold decisions there, I love that. How do you ensure that they take bold decisions but also aren't fearful that if the bold decisions don't pay off, that they may lose their job or they may get in trouble or see some form of ramifications from it?

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's really good tension to find and it's really differentiating like what is luck and what is execution. And I think it's really important to push people to do bold thing and if they fail, try to understand if they fail because they took bold assumptions and those assumptions didn't work out. Or if it was because of poor execution and what is not acceptable is like repeated poor execution. It means you don't learn how to execute and what you should favor and what we push a lot is how you make assumptions and you try to test them. And as in every scientific process, you make assumptions, they can be successful, they can be wrong. It's fine as long as you learn from it. And I think it was Alex Karp, the CEO of Fanta, we said that there are two types of mistakes, productive and non-productive mistakes.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  And you just want productive mistakes, the one you learn from. And for us, it's just testing the right assumption. So it's how you welcome mistakes as an organization.

• 11:59Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, I love that in terms of the productive and non-productive. Can I ask again, and going off schedule, you said about kind of the vigorous, deep thinking there, but also the execution being central. How do you think about the balance between vigorous, deep thinking, but also speed of decision making being optimal within startups and balancing quality with speed of decision making?

• 12:17Speaker 02

  It's a really tough one and you always need to fight for it. And the way we see it is we try to use that framework where we tell people you should make decisions with seventy percent of the data. So it's okay to make decisions when you don't know everything, you should move forward quickly. What we try to push people is to ask really the right questions. So you need to differentiate by making a quick decision just because it's quick or asking the right questions and just challenging what are the best things to be challenged? And what are the best things to be challenged? Very often, they are the things that people think are very common knowledge. So the industry is working like that, you should always do that. That's the kind of sentences where you know there is a.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  Problem because people have switched their brain off and I've just said it should work like that. That's especially where we push people to dig deeper because it's where you find contrarian thinking and where you find innovation. And where you are going to have significantly better returns.

• 13:16Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, absolutely. And no, I couldn't agree more. I mean, it was actually Jan at Index who told me about how you've mastered the challenging the perceived wisdom element. I do want to ask you because, you know, culture is always difficult to build and maintain, but it's super hard when you've scaled as fast as you have done. From twenty to a hundred and ninety people in just twenty four months. Can I ask, how's the culture really allowed you to scale so efficiently? And I guess what were some of the core challenges in that really fast changing organisation?

• 13:41Speaker 02

  I would not say it was one hundred percent painless, but it was a lot easier than I thought to scale at that pace. And I think it came with a very strong hiring process and always raising the bar, a very strong onboarding and a very crisp definition of culture. And I think the biggest challenge is when you think you have a strong culture, but the explanation of it is not very crisp or is not crisp enough. I love the last Ben Aruch's book, What You Do Is Who You Are, which explains that culture is not only about the values you have, but also the virtues, how those values translate into actions. What has been key for us to scale is that we documented a lot, how we make decisions, how we interact with each other,

• 14:23Speaker 02

  how we solve problems, how we react in those kind of situations. And that is really great for people onboarding. One other thing that we did is that we have a lot of written discussion and most of our decisions are taken not in meetings, but in written forums and GitHub issues. And that base of knowledge helps every newcomer to see all the decisions we have made and it's more than four thousand decisions we have made in the past in a very simple and accessible way. And that helped build the knowledge and what is the culture and how to scale it. But all that goes to trash if you don't build a hiring process and onboarding process, that is very true.

• 14:57Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, you're keying me up so well here, J C. But if we take those kind of one by one, in terms of the hiring process, how do you think about really retaining such a high quality of candidate with scale? And I guess what does truly hiring for excellence mean?

• 15:10Speaker 02

  Hiring for excellence needs again to define what is excellent for you. And you know with scaling, you say you should hire very, very fast. I think we had a contrarian approach at the beginning, at least at the beginning of the company, where we remain less than twenty for a very long time, just to consolidate the foundations. And I think what you need to do is define, so what is excellence? And how people would fit with who you are? How will you love working with them? Will they love working with us? And then you need to build a process to test that. That's the first thing. But before entering into the process, you need also to go where excellence is. And what is most likely is that the best candidates have already a job and they are already excellent at it. So most of our hiring comes through outbound and referrals.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  So it's our job to identify who are the best in the industry. Then you need to have a process that removes bias. So it's how you script your different interviews, what questions you ask. But also you need to coach people on how to analyze the answers to questions to remove bias. And it's really hard. And the best way we have seen to help people to become great interviewers, it's a principle that comes from lean manufacturing, which is shadowing. So if you want to become an interviewer at Alan, you need first to shadow people that interview. So you need to just sit there in the room, see them interview candidates and just take notes and see how it works. And then you will do interviews with a shadower that is going to help you and do feedback until you're said to be fit.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  The last thing that is really important for excellence is that the best way to see if people are going to be really performant and fit very well in your culture is to see them work in your culture. That's why the last step of our process is what we call the full day at the office, where people come for one day working with us on a project and they interact with several people from the team, they have a lunch with the team. And at the end of the day, we have like a chat on their project, on what they did. And it's really helped us to see how people behave in the company, or what is a great outcome for people, how they react to challenge on the work they have done. And that's pretty powerful.

• 17:16Harry Stebbings?

  I love that first day and I totally think that's the best way to kind of get a freemium version. If we take that one step further to the onboarding element, onboarding, I mean, it's a really hard thing, especially for first time founders to get a grasp of what good onboarding is. How do you think about structuring your onboarding and what have you found works best in terms of onboarding optimally?

• 17:34Speaker 02

  It's a super iterative process and for us, I think it's a combination of making the onboarding really warm. So you want people to feel really welcome in the company and you need to really think about, like, it's a very strange feeling when you have someone joining a group of people that is already big and that already knows each other. So how you make that the welcome really great. So it's a welcome breakfast, it's a lot of coffee and one on one. Then we have very structured onboarding in terms of documentation. So for every day in your first like three weeks, you have what you need to read, you have like training sessions that are live and then you have three people that are follow you very closely. You have what we call the role buddy. So it's someone that is going to help you understand what your job is at Alan and how you interact with

• 18:19Speaker 02

  others. You have what we call a cultural buddy. So it's someone that is going to help you understand our culture and how to interact with others. And you have like daily or every two days check with. And then you have a coach that you see bi-weekly and that is helping you to grow personally and to help you solve the challenges you have. So we really focus on building very strong written knowledge that you can go and dig really deep in the documentation, trainings and people that are there to support you.

• 18:47Harry Stebbings?

  I love that in terms of the coach and I haven't heard it used so widely spread. Normally it's just for the exec team. So that's awesome to hear it's for the wider team as well. I guess the person coordinating all of this in a lot of cases is the chief people officer. And I know that you've spent a considerable amount of time looking for a chief people officer. How do you know when's the right time to hire one? And how was the process for you in terms of the hiring?

• 19:08Speaker 02

  I think the answer is that it should be sooner than later. I think for us, we have been pretty lucky to do our first people or talent hire when we were only 14 or 15 and it had been really instrumental for us. And then later in the journey, we just know hire the chief people officer. But like hiring for people very early The journey is really important. Again, I think the way to process it and to think about it for a company is to go back to the problems you are trying to solve. And that's the framework I use all the time. What is the problem we are trying to solve? And is a problem like you are not sure of the culture of your company, you are not sure of the onboarding, you are not sure on your hiring process, you are not sure on I need to provide a career path to my team. So what are the problems you are trying to solve?

• 19:50Speaker 02

  And when you have defined those problems, do you feel that your current team is capable of solving them all? And for us, we felt that with the founders and some people that have been there for a very long time, we have been pretty good at building the culture, building a great hiring process, documenting a lot of things, building a salary and equity grid that is public and transparent. But we felt that we needed at one point to have someone that was a lot better than us in scaling people organization. And for us, what was really challenging is that we didn't want someone that was pure people that have done just HR in the past. We wanted someone that truly understands very well business. Because for us, people is about out organization and we don't want a centralized HR function

• 20:34Speaker 02

  when every HR problem or topic is handled by the HR function that is becoming bigger and bigger. We really believe in distributed ownership and we think the role of the chief people officer is to empower everybody in the company to make people decisions. And so we have tried to look at what was the best profile and it was a profile who had worked in tech companies, but also in more classical companies that have seen teams from very small to very big and that love to empower people around them. And then the process to hire the people is like you ask your investors, your peers, who are the best people they know in the industry? You interview them, you try to find what are the things you really like, the things you don't like,

• 21:16Speaker 02

  and you try to define what is your ideal profile and you try to find people that match that profile.

• 21:22Harry Stebbings?

  Totally agree in terms of leveraging the investor base there. And I love that structure in terms of how you went about the hiring. With this structure though, it comes a lot of organisation. And we've tried it before about extreme self-organisation. So I have to ask, how do you think about extreme self-organisation today? And what do you do that works?

• 21:39Speaker 02

  I'm always surprised how much people don't consider the value of their time and how they accept to waste twenty minutes here, twenty minutes there. And at the end of the day, they feel unproductive. And for me, it was kind of a necessity to take control of my time, of my notifications as well, of my interaction with others. So for me, for example, it means no notifications on my cellphone, on my laptop. And I am the one who go check things when I need to check. But again, for self-organisation, extreme self-organisation, it goes back to what problem are you trying to solve for your job? And for me, if I try to solve what is my job as CEO, it's mission and vision, be sure the mission and vision is articulated, that people understand it and that it translates in our strategy.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  It's organisation and culture and it's make sure we execute on that vision, that people feel empowered to execute. So then my extreme organisation try to match what is key to my role. So for example, in my calendar, every day from eight AM to eleven AM, I have a no-meeting, long-thinking time where I go deep into topics. So one day it can be long-term strategy, I spend three hours on long-term strategy. One day it can be explaining better our culture, so three hours on that. One other day it can be what means delighting in our project and try to define it for the company. One other part of my role is to be sure that the team is growing and fully operational. So I have daily one-on-ones every day at eleven fifteen for forty-five minutes,

• 23:06Speaker 02

  where I coach people, so I see them every two weeks. I have ten people I interact with on a two-week basis. And it's just to help them in their personal development growth and help them on the problems they are struggling with. Then I have slots in my agenda during the week, some slots that are dedicating to hiring, some slots that are dedicated to contributing to topics that come from the team, some that are in my calendar to check notifications. Email Slack, some that are dedicated to planning for next week, some that challenging the objective and achievements of our business on a weekly basis. So it's very organized, but that organization is made to have long period of time where I can be unstructured.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  So it's structuring to be able to have unstructured thinking that is really productive. And that's a combination of both that I think makes a real difference.

• 23:55Harry Stebbings?

  I love that structuring to be able to be unstructured. I do have to ask though, J C, because when I listen to you, it all just seems so kind of innate and natural to you in terms of the scaling of CEO ship. But it's such a challenging thing that bluntly ninety nine percent of CEOs struggle with being the changing role with the changing organization that they've built. What elements have you struggled with in terms of scaling yourself with the organization?

• 24:17Speaker 02

  I think where I struggled a lot at some point, and I've been working a lot on it, is to give more praise than criticism. And I have a tendency to consider that when we do something, even if that thing is excellent, we take it for granted it's what was expected from us. And then we move forward. And I think it doesn't scale very well for an organization. Because you really need to spend time telling people when their job is amazing, because it creates a very good feedback loop. For me, as an entrepreneur, it has been something that has been tough and I've been working a lot on that. It makes a tremendous difference because you focus on what is positive, you focus on reinforcing the good behavior, reinforcing what is great.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  And it gives so many great examples to your team on what is achieving super well in your company, that is transform everything. So I think it was one of my biggest challenges at some point. It's not totally solved, but I made a lot of progress on that.

• 25:10Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask your advice on something? And it's something that I've spoken a lot about with our mutual friend Shaq. Shaq told me once, you know, you need to sometimes appreciate what you've built and appreciate what you have. And it's not that you're preventing ambition, but just have that moment of gratitude and appreciation and not always be looking for the next thing and the bigger thing. How do you think about that? What would you advise me? And do you ever sit back and appreciate, oh my God, we've built an incredible organization of a hundred and ninety amazing people? Or is it always the next thing, the next contract, the next hire? How do you balance?

• 25:40Speaker 02

  I think it should be both. It's not a really great answer, but every week I think we all try to celebrate what we have achieved and really spend time to thank the people who have done that. And also try to thank yourself. But human beings, we become very used to what we do. What is interesting that when you do something that seemed so huge one year ago. Once you have done it, you say, ah, it's kind of normal and you need to fight against that. Like you should still celebrate it. And it's really important because it makes the company move forward, but you should not forget ambition on the other. So the way we try to do it is to make this celebration as opportunity for ambition. So it's more really what we have done is amazing and thanks the team for doing that and connect it to the long term vision.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  And when you just do that connection, how it fits with what we are trying to do, it just connects the dots and I find it super powerful.

• 26:31Harry Stebbings?

  In terms of thanking people, I'm really interested. You said about the thanking people there. A lot of people, especially founders, have a slot at the end of investor updates, which thanks part of the cap table who've helped them during that last month or last quarter, however often they do that investor updates. And I spoke to many of your investors before and they said that your investor updates are the best they've ever seen. So what's the thinking here? How do you structure your investor updates and what do they include?

• 26:54Speaker 02

  I think they are the best because they are not investor updates, they are team updates on which I put my investors. And we do a weekly update and we have done every week since even before we created the company. So I think it's two hundred and thirty weekly updates now. And we share the same thing to our whole team and to our investors and we do it on a weekly basis. Because first, as we said, you can achieve a lot in one week, whatever your size. And if you don't ship something in one week, I think you have a problem as an organization. So it forces us every week to say what we have achieved, what equity value have we created every week. Also, we tend to think that human beings are kind of really bad at planning their time and schedule at more than one week.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  So we feel that it's a good reason of time just to to do an update on the achievement and what we want to achieve next week. Last but not least, it's really an amazing way for people to get updated on what we do, on what you are up to, on what you are struggling with. It makes, for example, your board meeting a lot more productive because you don't spend time on updating on the business, they know how you think about it, you spend time on strategic topics. And then what is, I think, really important is how you structure your weekly updates. And for us, what we try to do is to have a few very important parts. The first thing is the strategic updates. So every week, I write a few lines, a few paragraphs that are connected to our strategy. For example, this week, it was what is going to be the impact of COVID-19 on our business,

• 28:22Speaker 02

  on our team, and on the community, how we can help the community. Then we always share a member story, so a story of one of our users, which can be very positive or from a detractor, just to connect the whole team to what our users are, and our investors to what our users are experiences. What we add after that is the value we have built this week. So what are the major things we've shipped, what we have learnt. We also share the lowlights of the week, what didn't go as expected, or what we are not proud of. And then we share the top three priorities of the company for the week to come. With a quick explanation, so everyone in the company, and every of our shareholders, they know what we are up to.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  I try also to share our key metrics, so some very important metrics we have. One aspect of our culture, so we discussed a lot of culture, so I try to give an example of what we have done this week that is very compatible with our culture. And then we have a longer part, which is a deep dive in a few topics, which are growth, product, international, brand on communication, people on finance. And for each of those topics, we have the same framework, which is key metrics, highlights, lowlights, top one problem to solve next week. And it gives you a ten-page document that gives a really great and simple overview of the company, that the whole team is reading every week, the whole team is commenting,

• 29:44Speaker 02

  and we also ask questions and help for our shareholders, and they answer on them.

• 29:49Harry Stebbings?

  That's an interesting one. I wanted to ask about this. A lot of updates that I get, what, ninety nine percent have a request for help from the investor base and then a thanks to the investor base and they say why they're thanking that person. Do you have that in yours?

• 30:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, what we do is that we do the request, so we ask questions and we try to thank, but the way we thank, we try also to do it in a more meaningful way. So having a call or like a really personal message to the people helping us on top of the weekly, we find it even more strong.

• 30:17Harry Stebbings?

  Totally get you. No, I think that's absolutely right. I love the structure there. And so thank you so much for unpacking that. I do wanna dive into my favorite element note of any episode, J C. As you know from hearing it, it's the quick fire round. So I say a short statement and you hit me with your immediate thoughts. Are you ready to dive in?

• 30:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's go.

• 30:32Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so I'm sure you've read countless books. What's the favorite book and why?

• 30:36Speaker 02

  I'm going to answer three. Literature, it's from Camus, Lexin and El Royaume. So it's in French, but it's a beautiful novel on humanism. I think science fiction is foundations from Asimov, which is really amazing on how to think about society and the different shapes than society can take. And in terms of business book, I would say The Everything Store from Brad Stone, which is about the history of Amazon, which I find just fascinating, how they dig deeper in everything.

• 31:06Harry Stebbings?

  I love the everything store. So completely aligned to you there. Very exciting. But Antoine Zeny told me about your son coming soon. How do you think children will impact your operating mentality and style? Give me a glimpse into the future here, J C.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, we are very excited with my wife. It's any day, so she can call me right now. But joke aside, I think it will teach us a lot of things on having a lot more empathy, being more patient, like being able to handle more complexity. I think it's also going to be a great test on my self-organization. I've been kind of extreme of how I allocate my time. So I think it's just going to be new challenges. But I find that especially in our industry where we are trying to solve healthcare for for everyone, being a parent is going to help us like build a lot more project, I think.

• 31:51Harry Stebbings?

  For sure, I totally agree with you there. Antoine again told me about your very special wedding and the algorithm you created. Talk to me about the algorithm you created that decided the seating plan.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, we had tools for everything. We had a trailer board for everything and for the seating plan, we had four hundred guests, so it was kind of a lot. And so we built this Google sheet document where we put a lot of criteria on how people would fit with each other. And so we did the first mapping like that. And then the algorithm, in fact, was my wife, who woke up one night at three AM. She could not sleep and she took like this big blank paper and she drew the tables for four hundred people based on the algorithm we built and it was just amazing. So it's my wife who is the perfect algorithm. She's a genius.

• 32:35Harry Stebbings?

  That is an amazing woman. I do have to ask, who was the first check into Alain and how did that come about?

• 32:41Speaker 02

  We were pretty lucky to raise a seed round when we had only a four-page document. So it was really people we have built a relationship in the past and it was a few business angel like Brent Obermann, Guillaume Sarkozy, who was the former CEO of one of the largest health insurance in France, but also a VC, Partec in France, and Paul Demare, who is also a big owner of an insurance company in North America.

• 33:07Harry Stebbings?

  Tell me, who's the biggest mentor to you today and what have you taken from that relationship?

• 33:12Speaker 02

  I have so many people I should thank that I'm not sure I can list one and I think it would be unfair to the others. But I think what I tried to get from every people I interact with, which can be my investors, peers, other entrepreneurs, always try to understand how they think and how they come to conclusions. And I think the most fascinating thing is to see how people work. And I love shadowing people and trying to follow people in their daily work to see how they solve problems. And I think that has been the most meaningful way for me to grow on some topics.

• 33:46Harry Stebbings?

  How long do the investor updates take and do you involve other people in the writing of them?

• 33:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's like every part is written by someone from the team, so it's very distributed. And for me, I think it takes between one to two hours to put everything together, but it's not really writing it that takes time. It's the strategic thinking and the priorities for the companies and challenging the people of the company that takes time. So for us, it kind of replace the weekly meeting that executive teams have. So everything is done in a written and asynchronous way. So it's two hours that I really spend on strategy and discussing the problems we have and more than just writing the update that is just a side effect. So I would not see that as like we spend time writing the updates, the update is just a consequence of the work we do as a team.

• 34:32Harry Stebbings?

  Tell me, what's the hardest role to hire for today and why do you think?

• 34:36Speaker 02

  I think for us right now, one of the hardest role is B two B marketing because we are both on SMBs and larger companies. And there are not that many companies that have really scaled very quickly on B two B for SMBs, for HRs in Europe. And we want people that have experience Europe because the market is very different from the US. So it's where it's hard, but we are moving forward there.

• 35:00Harry Stebbings?

  And then final one, and probably the most important, what do the next five years hold for you and for Alan? Paint that picture for us.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  The two are really connected and for us, it comes back to our vision, which is to be the only app that everyone in Europe is using to access healthcare, meaning the best prevention, the best information, access to care and having health insurance as the foundation for it. So for me, it's linked to that. It's how we build the organisation to have that international growth, to keep differentiating our insurance offering and to add more and more healthcare services that help people live better, that help people have a more holistic healthcare. And if we manage to do that, we will be really, really happy.

• 35:42Harry Stebbings?

  J C, as I said before, I heard so many things from Yann and then it's Antoine from Shaq. I've been so looking forward to this one. So thank you so much for joining me today and I can't wait to see the next five years for you and for Alan.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  Thank you very much, Harry. I really enjoyed discussing with you. It's an honour.

• 35:57Harry Stebbings?

  And I have to say, I could not be more excited for the future with Alan. And if you'd like to see more from us behind the scenes, you can do so on Instagram at H Stabbings 1996 with two Bs. We always love to see you there. But before we leave you today, I'm sure you've heard about it, but my word, this is a product I love. Carter. Carter simplifies how startups and investors manage equity, track cap tables and get valuations. Go to carta.com/20vc to get 10% off. More than 800,000 employees and shareholders use Carter to manage hundreds of billions of dollars in equity. And Carter now offers fund administration. So you can see real time data in the Carter platform and work with Carter's team of experienced fund accountants. Simply go to carta.com/20vc to get 10% off.

• 36:40Harry Stebbings?

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• 37:23Harry Stebbings?

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