In the latest episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I welcome Héloïse Rozès and Nikolai Fomm, co-founders of Corma. They dive into their journey as first-time founders and share invaluable insights into leadership, team dynamics, and startup challenges. Below are key takeaways from this enlightening conversation:
Key Learnings:
- Adaptive Communication: Both founders highlighted the importance of adjusting communication styles based on the audience, whether it’s co-founders, employees, investors, or clients.
- Human-Centric Leadership: Héloïse emphasizes that effective leadership involves empathy and setting an example, especially in handling unique challenges like managing diverse teams.
- The Power of Prioritization: Nikolai spoke on the art of saying “no” to certain ideas and initiatives to ensure the startup stays focused on its core objectives.
- Building a Value-Driven Culture: The team at Corma invests in cultivating a cohesive company culture, where principles are actively practiced through programs like the “Cormacolindor.”
- Networking as a Learning Tool: Héloïse and Nikolai encourage new founders to reach out to experienced leaders for guidance, noting that many seasoned professionals are eager to share insights.
References and Tools Mentioned:
- Radical Candor by Kim Scott: Héloïse and Nikolai have incorporated this framework to foster open and constructive feedback within their team.
- Station F: The founders mention the value of being in an environment like Station F, surrounded by other innovative startups and mentors.
Listen to the Full Episode
Tune in to learn more about the Corma journey, leadership insights, and practical advice for emerging leaders.
Here is the transcript of the episode
Le_Podcast_Corma_Mix
Alexis: [00:00:00] Welcome to the podcast on Emerging Leadership. I’m your host, Alexis Monville. Today, we have both Héloïse Rosas and Nikolai Faume on the show. They are both co founders of Corma, and they will explain a little bit what it is. Héloïse and Nikolai, it’s great to have you both on the show. Let’s start with some introductions.
How do you typically introduce yourself to someone you just met? It’s
Héloïse: a good question. When I meet someone. So if this is like in an informal setting, I’m going to say, hi, my name is Héloïse. I’m working in Paris as a, as a founder. And then I’ll just see if the person is in a startup ecosystem or not before knowing how to introduce myself better.
Alexis: Okay. Nikolai, how about you?
Nikolai: Yeah. So I would say that I’m also Nikolai, one of the founders of Corma and then yeah, maybe say a little [00:01:00] bit more about what I’m doing in life or at the company. And then usually it gets quite quickly to what we’re doing as a company. But yeah, I do it a bit like Héloïse, see a little bit, who do I have in front of me, so I don’t give like a minute monologue that the other person doesn’t really understand
Alexis: or wants to know.
Let’s say now I’m interested and I’m saying, okay, what is Corma about? What would you say? To keep it
Nikolai: short and spicy. I mean, usually people work with a lot of different software tools nowadays and it’s become so many, I mean, just think of all the new AI tools that are coming in. It’s becoming a mess for all the employees to understand, okay, where do I have access?
How do I get access to a new tool? But it’s It’s messy for the company who needs to make sure you don’t pay for seats. Nobody is using your people are not signing up to dangerous AI tools and load up their entire company secret data to some weird AI company in China. It’s also a mess for the it team.
And basically as Karma, we want to solve that by bringing everything together in one place, [00:02:00] providing a great employee experience. And at the same time, making the life easier for the company.
Alexis: Excellent. I love it. Héloïse, can you do it better? Just to check that, can you make it shorter just to put some competition between the two of you?
Héloïse: Good. I mean, I’m lucky I got a bit of time to think about the question. Corma is the co pilot of your IT for handling licenses. So that’s how I put it in a sentence. People are like, okay, but what does it really mean? I simply tell them you’re a head of IT of 1000 people. You have to manage computers, Wi Fi, VPNs, and the little mouse of the, of the computers too, but also the softwares and what’s happening in the cloud.
But when you look at the application park, that’s your software stack represents. It represents a budget of three million dollars. It’s a black box where you don’t know what the ROI is, and you have no clue of who has access to what at what hour and if it complains. So Corma solves that problem by being the cockpit of truth of your licenses.
Alexis: Excellent. I love it. So [00:03:00] your boss, co founders, if I understood well, there’s a third one who is not in the room.
Nikolai: Yeah, it’s CTO. You know, they don’t like to talk to people too much. No, but he’s, it’s, it’s, no, that’s not true. It’s he’s called Samuel. He’s also very nice and sociable, but actually right now he’s on his well deserved honeymoon.
So we try to leave him as much alone as possible. That’s why it’s only the two of us.
Héloïse: And
Nikolai: I
Alexis: love that you’re taking care of that and you’re, you’re paying attention to that. And that’s, that’s very cool. Okay. Your first time founders, how do you experience leadership? Nikolai, could you share your perspective?
For me, it
Nikolai: was interesting because before I worked for two and a half years. in another startup and saw like some good growth there. And I always look at the founder, like whenever I didn’t know something, you obviously ask the founder and expect it’s like a bit of a wizard who knows the answer to everything and know that I I’m in this position myself.
I know this is not necessarily true. So I see it as a challenge that you need to figure stuff [00:04:00] out that nobody did before you. Obviously you have advisors, but in the end, You are the founder or you are free founders. You can ask each other. This already, this already helps at the start. And it still is a big challenge that a lot of people rely on you.
And obviously yourself, you might have some doubts. Of course you have your vision, but you might doubt it at some times. It’s a process as well to become a founder. Then you never did it before in your life.
Alexis: Okay. And Héloïse, I’d love to hear your thoughts as well.
Héloïse: So to be a leader in a, as, as a young founder in a startup, I think is absolutely thrilling.
I’ve always looked at leaders by leading by example, and I hope I share a good example with what I’m doing in my day and, and how I act in my life. But I think the biggest challenge for me is communication because we have so much information in our heads. We have to communicate it in one way to our co founders.
We have to not communicate some things as well because we don’t want to disturb them at some times of the day where we’re focused on deep work, but then you have to [00:05:00] communicate at different times. You start to communicate differently to employees, to interns and to freelancers, but also to investors, clients, prospects, and people you just meet at a random cocktail for networking events.
Communication for me is very, very important, and it’s a challenge that I’m not ready to have completely tackled yet, for sure. I think it gets even tougher when you go.
Nikolai: To jump in immediately and you have the extra challenge that you are the CEO, so you’re also by role in charge of the communication with the external world.
I mean, you mentioned investors, but like people will always look to you first. So it’s. Internal different types of communications and then the whole external world. And obviously the employees see what you say outside your investors have some insights into the company as well. So I think it’s already also interesting to balance those different types of requirements of communication where you are in the spotlight.
Alexis: What I observed so far, you are doing really [00:06:00] great. So I would say, don’t be too worried about that. Maybe that you are doing great, but I’m glad you’re taking care of that. And you’re, you’re finding that very important. So That’s very cool. There’s always challenges in early stage startups. Can you tell me what are the typical leadership challenges you face?
Héloïse, do
Héloïse: you want to take that first? Yes. The first challenge is people. Okay. And I think it’s the most important challenge of all, because a company is laughing about its team. The main challenge, for example, that one of us, we had to face was our first maternity leave. It was happened during, uh, the life of a startup.
It was a surprise for everyone, the person included. And we’re all very happy that it’s, it’s happening. It’s going well. However, it’s of course like, no one tells you as a young founder, how to react when your employee tells you that we’re going to go on maternity leave in the next six months. And you have to react to the right words in a culture setting that’s very international and with [00:07:00] an age gap that’s quite present.
So yeah, there’s a lot of key elements to put into context for your first reaction to this type of news, which for me was quite naturally because I think Life is a Miracle was very warm. But at the end of the day, it’s also a challenge for the whole team to make sure that everything goes well for everyone professionally.
Alexis: I have to admit that the first time it happened to me, I believe my face showed something completely different from what I wanted to say. And I saw the person, the face of the person in front of me. And I realized that my face was telling off what we will do now. And what I wanted to say is, of course, congratulations, because that’s what you want to say.
But I was already starting to compute what, what we will do. That’s an important person. And when I saw the face of the person in front of me. [00:08:00] I
Nikolai: think this can summarize many things quite up. You have like really happy moments and still lots of concerns at the same time. So you obviously, we are very happy for her, but still, we still feel the responsibility as a founder, because this person also has a leadership role, you think, okay, who will cover that?
Okay, we also have a CTO who goes on maternity leave on his honeymoon. At the same time, you have someone who has a visa needs to travel for it. So we always have A lot of things in the back of our head that we need to consider. And just because we consider, I don’t think that makes us less humane. I would say we try to be very empathetic, but still we also need to make sure that the company survives because in the end that’s the goal here.
So I think yeah, balancing those thoughts is quite important. And then maybe to add to your point, so I would agree people challenge at the top. For me, It is the challenge of challenges because [00:09:00] there’s always so much stuff happening at the same time and you need to prioritize stuff. And this means, which I find quite difficult is sometimes you have to say no.
Like we, by definition, a startup has very limited resources. So people will have ideas. That might be great, but still, sometimes you have to say, no, you need to prioritize because if you do everything at once, you do nothing. And that’s quite important to set like a clear guideline for yourself, for the founding team, but also for the employees.
Héloïse: I completely agree. Especially in a tech startup where people are like tech wizards, project geniuses, call it whatever you want, but people are very creative. They always have this cool idea to do this new research or that cool new feature. But at the end of the day, maybe it’s my stage hat, but I have me.
For me, if it doesn’t go on the front line and there’s no impact on the revenue, it’s not a good idea. It’s not good. If I cannot see where it’s going to bring more value to the market that we’re addressing.
Nikolai: And sometimes it’s a bit brutal. And like, because, you know, you don’t want to be [00:10:00] the no person. And I mean, we don’t say no most of the time, but it happens.
And it can be kind of like, because you know, you want people to have ideas because maybe the idea is actually something nobody thought about and it sparks something great. But I mean, the minimum we have to do is like really challenge it. And then, yeah, sometimes we have to be a bit tough and say, yeah, okay, cool.
But honestly, Maybe in two years, if everything goes well and that’s not always easy.
Héloïse: And actually the challenge to make sure that we, uh, not just challenge that, but channel that we channel the energy of the people that joined the team by creating this a new ambassador program. That’s called the Cormacolindor.
It’s literally, so, you know, the name Corma comes from the name, the ring, where the sass of sass, so one ring from the Lord of the Rings, basically. And, um, uh, Cormacolindor is literally an elfish. Yeah. The ring bearer, the person that bears the ring, because like Frodo, when you’re Corma, you’re a Cormacollindor in Elvish.
So we did this program quite [00:11:00] recently with the new hires to help them step by step collaborate with each other to reach the objective key results, make sure that they do things outside of work that build up the team, uh, team spirits and make sure that individually they shine because everyone is unique.
Everyone can not, no, They cannot be replaced, someone cannot, because you’re not here, I replace you. So it’s really a very interesting program to show that, to really leverage also and make them shine as people. Because it’s not just the challenge, it’s also the main channel of how Corma is going to do great.
Alexis: I love it. That’s very, very interesting. So you put people first as a challenge, and I can see that you are really taking care of I’ll People contribute to the company, but also how they develop themselves, how they grow into their role and grow with each other. So that’s very cool. Are there other challenges as managing people as young founders?
I mean,
Nikolai: for like an important thing, it’s people, but [00:12:00] you know, as a startup, you’re in survival mode all the time until you get I mean, technically every company is survival mode, but I would say in startups is the strongest because they are young, they didn’t prove themselves yet. They don’t have as much money as they want.
They don’t have like their product market fit yet. That’s generating profitable revenues every month. So, so it’s really. Tough also on the, on the commercial side to manage people and data founders are obviously heavily involved as well because we have investors, we have some funding, but we need to show to get revenue to prove obviously that our product, that our idea is needed, but at the same time it also pays our bills.
And I think balancing a little bit of this financial need to just push on the commercial expansion, but at the same time, not get lost. On it. And remember, you try to sell your product because you believe in it. And if you have more clients, you get more user [00:13:00] feedback. It’s a bit difficult to balance this sometimes the need for commercial expansion or with the internal need to understand what you actually want to bid.
If the client asks you, okay, can you do this? You say, obviously yes. And if, if it’s. Not there at all. You say it’s on the roadmap and if you know, it’s like humanly technically impossible to do it. You say, okay, we’re going to look into it for the next quarter. But obviously this has a limit. You cannot oversell all the time and you need to take a step back then and know how to balance this.
I would say this is also a challenge.
Alexis: Hmm. Very good point. So when the leadership team embodies the values and principles they want to see in the organization, then I believe the organization can scale, can grow and can become something very beautiful. Do you agree with that statement?
Héloïse: Yeah. Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
So like, it’s a very basic sentence to say, but really summarizes the whole feeling that we see, not [00:14:00] just at Corma as a company that has, is very strong in the values that it upheld, but also within Station F, we see the startups that are very united. Where the people are already, the cement of the whole building, of the, basically the cathedral that they’re going to build.
It beats any competition. It goes, it just shines quick pass.
Alexis: So what are you doing to create such a culture?
Nikolai: You mentioned it’s a lot of leadership by example. You need to lift the company values and I think it’s also something we learned. You need to actively nurture it. Like, okay, people. Probably have the tendency to copy behavior, but you need to encourage it.
And it was something that was not always super easy because sometimes people feel the founder has their unique role and they always share direction. But you know, it’s part of our DNA that we want people to lead the way as well. So there’s sometimes you need to actively encourage fine programs. Like, for example, what you said with this ambassador program, but it can be [00:15:00] small stuff to how you give praise, how you give feedback.
So for example, this radical Canada methodology, we follow it, tried to implement it and how we do feedback and how we do development and like personal career development. It’s an active process. It takes active management. Even if we try to. Live as the best example. I think it’s still, yeah, we still need to be active to do it.
Héloïse: Yeah. Some examples are typically by your life on time, if not on time, like this in advance, being on time is always being late. It being present for the others. Like if someone wants to talk about something, they can pick a lunch for you very easily as a founder is something that you do. I mean, sometimes it’s a career coaching.
Sometimes I, and we talk about other things than work, which is like, what is like next five years, you know, how, how can we, how can we get you there? It’s about creating an alumni, uh, alumni group. And the alumni also inspire the current people that are present at Cuomo. And so they are inspired together and it’s about giving them the voice to be heard so that they [00:16:00] embody this leadership position that Nikolai was just explaining now.
It’s part of not just the Ambassador program, which is. Basically setting a more formal setting to what was happening before it’s really just a mix of how you celebrate the little wins or you close the deal. That’s really, really good. Okay. How can I help you close your deal today? Collaboration on different topics and putting everyone in the same team, like there’s not a tech team and a safety mask on my team.
That’s just one. That’s just not possible to not talk to each other. Even if you don’t understand what JavaScript is, at some point, you’re going to have
Alexis: to. I love what you’re saying there. So you mentioned Radical Condor for the audience. The idea, if I summarize it, is if you care personally about people, then you can challenge them directly.
So that’s the important part of it. If people can feel that you care about them, then you can challenge them. basically give a feedback. If you don’t feel you care about them, it’s like if you were trying to put a big truck on a rope [00:17:00] bridge. It will not really work. Your feedback will not go through. So that’s basically useless.
Is it a good summary? I think
Nikolai: like the other thing is even more dangerous that because you care to, because I would say we all care deeply about the, the, the team, the humans, the people behind it, that you, because of that don’t challenge directly. I think in the concept it’s called ruinous empathy, and I think it’s a big risk that you’re trying to be too nice, too cushy.
You know, it’s like a bit of the example after lunch, you have some food stuck in your face. You don’t want to tell the person because you don’t want to embarrass them, but imagine then they go off and spend all their day with food in their face and they would have been so much more grateful to have this.
uncomfortable moment where you say, yes, sorry, maybe clean your mouth a little bit. There will be so much that you were created this little uncomfortable moment, but overall, because you care personally, you gave some, yeah, let’s say negative or in the sense, constructive criticism. This is better. Like, so for me, just being like toxic, not caring about [00:18:00] people giving meaning.
Feedback. Obviously there are toxic people. I don’t think we are at risk of it. So for me, it’s more the thing to avoid the ruinous empathy and to challenge directly because we have the best intention behind it.
Alexis: I love it. Thank you for the example. That will make it very clear to people. They will all try to look if they don’t have anything left.
So lastly, what advice would you like to share with our audience, especially those who are aspiring leaders or early stage founders?
Héloïse: That’s a good question.
Nikolai: I think there are a lot of answers to
Héloïse: it. Yeah, there’s so many. I mean, it depends on what context you’re in, but do you want to start or?
Nikolai: I mean, for me, there are some basic things.
You throw yourself into the cold water. I know some people that hesitated away from leadership positions because they are scared to manage others, be it because they’re still a bit young. They’re a bit shy. You have to do it to learn it. It’s not something you learn in the textbooks. So you. First, you have to bring yourself in the position to [00:19:00] lead.
And then the next thing is you will see, you don’t need to figure everything on your own. Find yourself some mentors, find yourself some friends. Ideally. I mean, we have us three co founders, I would say we are really, really tightly linked. Then you can like with people that have similar experiences or similar learnings.
Try to like, once you bring yourself out there, try to exchange with people that live in the same or lived in the past in the same situation and try to learn from there what worked for them, from what doesn’t. And for me, something that I usually do, like try to follow your intuition. If you feel something doesn’t feel right, maybe, yeah, reflect if it’s good.
And if you have a good feeling of something, you also need to have to act, like have the courage to act. Don’t be like too scared in moments, even if it might seem a bit scary. Like sometimes you have to push yourself a little. I think that’s the uncomfortable part of the leadership. Sometimes you need to do things that are not super pleasant, but you have to do it because nobody else will.
Héloïse: I mean, I can [00:20:00] only second what Nicolas just said. One thing in addition came into my mind. So when you’re young as a founder, there’s a lot of topics. But you’re going to realize that exists first in life, like managing new employees, like having a specific type of client to manage or stuff like that. It’s called like zones of hurtful ignorance that are very difficult to not difficult to observe because they’re quite come quite fast, but very difficult to, you know, on your own, if you really isolate yourself, it’s going to be a harsh on you, on your life, on your mental health.
To actually overcome and because you, you have like 15, uh, ignorance bits to, to master at the same time. Like, uh, it’s like, just life gets in the way. What I really would recommend to a young founder, how founder starting out is you just get your phone, build out a list of the top 50 people. And so maybe five in every category, or 10 in every category that you most admire in the world.
in your region, in your industry, and get [00:21:00] them on the phone, book a meeting with them. It might take you a year, but at the end of the day, you’re going to make it happen. Actually, I would disagree.
Nikolai: It won’t take you a year. Like one thing that surprised me, how happy many leaders are actually are to share their knowledge.
I mean, if you think of some people that we spoke, like we, I mean, yeah, it’s, We’re not out of school for that long and the amount of senior people we speak to just because we reach out because, okay, they maybe get spammed by sales people, but just people asking for like founder to founder advice. They are usually really happy to share.
So like really go out there and try to get some advice, some mentorship. I would say it’s easier than you think. I don’t think you need a year for it, but it’s super valuable to do that.
Alexis: I love that. That’s really beautiful. Thank you for being here. Join the podcast today. I’m sure it will be already uploaded.
Héloïse: Thank [00:22:00] you.
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