Welcome to French Tech Updates! Your weekly source of startup, VC, and tech news and insights. I’m James, a startup-obsessed American living in Paris.

Wednesday morning I found myself surrounded by founders from around the world. As 165,000 attendees poured into Viva Tech, we gathered in front of two chairs in an exclusive corner of the conference.

Seated in those two chairs were the co-founders of two promising European startups: Gabriel Hubert from Dust and Jaime Castello from Shakers. These two leaders spent the next hour sharing the strategies and tactics they’ve used to grow their companies, and the mistakes made along the way.

During their talk, Gabriel and Jaime covered:

• 🚀 How to avoid growth traps and scaling too early

•  🔎 Interview questions and frameworks for identifying great hires

• ⚙️ Tips to keep your growing company aligned towards the same mission

In this special edition of French Tech Updates, I’m sharing all my notes I took during the talk. Whether you’re a founder entering the growth stage or wondering if working at a hyperscaling startup is right for you, I think you’ll find something interesting here.

Without further delay, let’s jump in!

👋 Meet the founders

Exploration vs. Exploitation: Knowing When You're Ready to Scale 🏎️

For most people, the idea of growth is highly enticing. I know I personally get a unique thrill from refreshing a dashboard and seeing the numbers going up and up. For startup leaders though this temptation to jump into scaling the moment you have a product can lead to disaster.

It was fitting that, in a talk about scaling, the conversation started with tips about how to tell if you’re ready for this next step.

The key, as Gabriel put it, is knowing when to shift from the exploratory phase to the exploitation phase—the time when your business foundation is solid enough that you can rapidly build on top of it.

The Exploration Phase

Exploration is where every early company and every founder begins their journey. This period is about figuring out who your customers are, what they need, and how you can solve their problems.

The tricky thing here is knowing when to end this phase phase and put the gas pedal to the floor. If you think of it like taking a road trip, the exploration phase is planning where you want to go and how you’ll get there. You can accelerate your vehicle at any time, but if you don’t have a direction you may end up going quickly to somewhere you don’t want to be.

Gabriel put it simply—until you can easily answer all three of these questions you’re still exploring:

1. Who buys what you’re making

2. Why do they buy it?

3. How will you find more of them?

Without these answers, scaling will be inefficient at best and disastrous at worst. Any team members you hire or money you spend will inevitably go towards trying to answer these questions instead of growing your business.

This step can be painful, and the temptation to leap ahead into growth is strong, but Jamie cautioned against this. If it feels hard it’s because it’s supposed to be hard. As a founder, you should be as close to your audience and their problems as possible, doing things that don’t scale, and gathering the deep insights that only come from this level of intensity.

You’re not just building your knowledge, you’re building your competitive advantage over others who jump ahead from this stage too quickly.

Once you have these essentials nailed down it’s time to move on to the exploitation phase where the real scaling begins.

Exploitation: Scaling Once You’ve Found PMF

The Exploitation phase is where the real scaling happens. After finding product-market fit (PMF), it’s time to grow, but growth here isn’t just about adding more—it’s about scaling intelligently.

1. Growth: Adding More to Accelerate Momentum
This is what most people think of when they hear "scaling." Growth at this stage is about expanding in key areas: acquiring more customers, hiring the right team members, and generating more revenue. It’s about pushing your business forward and increasing the capacity to serve your audience.

2. Efficiency: Leveraging What You’ve Built
But growth alone isn’t enough. Scaling also requires efficiency. It’s about getting better at what you do, so the resources you add (whether it’s people, time, or money) have a bigger impact. Efficiency allows you to stretch your resources further and ensure that the time and energy you invest actually accelerates your growth.

Principles Over Process: Scaling with Alignment

As your company grows, the number of processes and rules tend to grow along with it.

This creates a new danger, where you risk burying your founding principles and company culture under a mountain of procedures and bureaucracy. This mistake leads to stifled creativity, and slows down your pace—taking away two of the few crucial advantages startups have over incumbents. To help you maintain your speed, even as you expand, both founders shared some helpful tips.

Focus Principles Over Processes

Jaime and Gabriel emphasized that one of the most crucial aspects in avoiding the process trap is to focus on principles over process. And by principles they mean clear, shared values that guide every decision, no matter the size of the company.

Gabriel explained “Processes are an interestingly scary word for founders. They may sometimes hide the inability to do the right thing. Dust hires people who operate on principles vs processes and invests time in making sure the principles are understood.”

It’s a trait he learned to prioritize during his time at Stripe, during which the company went from 100 to 3,500 employees. This advice reminded me of another quote: “its better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.”

Startups are meant to make mistakes and learn from them, but this only works if your team is focused on the right things.

Some principles at Dust include:

• Always get feedback when you speak with a user.

• Share that feedback not with a general team but with the engineer who wrote the code for the feature.

There is still space for process in a fast-growing company, but these processes should only be put in place for the very few areas that need them—low “brain moat” activities that should eventually be automated.

Staying Aligned as You Scale

As your team grows, keeping everyone on the same page becomes increasingly challenging, but maintaining alignment is vital if you want to continue scaling efficiently. A boat with eight rowers pulling in different directions will be easily passed by two people pulling together.

While strong, shared principles are the essential starting point, alignment doesn’t just happen without a few additional ingredients. Gabriel used an analogy of birds flocking together to explain how teams should operate.

In nature, dozens or even hundreds of birds are able to coordinate their actions and move together without any process or training telling them what to do. To achieve this they need three things:

1. A common direction

2. The ability and desire to get closer when too far away

3. The ability not to bump into each other

These same ingredients apply to companies as well.

• A common direction: alignment on where the business is going, which is the employee’s job to know but the founders’ responsibility to show.

• The ability and desire to get closer when too far away: achieved through feedback whenever anyone strays too far from the direction of travel (the company vision and principles).

• The ability not to bump into each other: enough guidelines to avoid stepping on each other, duplicating efforts, or creating unnecessary conflict.

Alignment can be tough, but with the right principles and culture in place, your team can scale and accelerate without losing direction.

Hiring for Growth: Finding the Right Fit at the Right Time

Speaking of your team, building the right one is one of the most critical elements of success. Hiring the wrong people, or hiring too early or too late can seriously slow you down, or even kill the business. Understanding the right timing and the right people to bring on board is key and Gabriel and Jaime had plenty of advice to help you make these decisions.

Hire for Mindset and Passion

When it comes to hiring in the growth phase it’s often less about the technical skills and more about mindset and drive. A startup requires people who are not only smart but also passionate about the mission, eager to learn, and who can thrive in the chaos of early-stage growth.

If you’re wondering whether you’d be a good fit for this environment, Gabriel shared a potent quote about the experience you gain in a startup environment:

A growth stage startup delivers on the 5 years of experience in 2 years of time promise. If that sounds appealing to you, I believe both Dust and Shakers are hiring 😉.

As a founder, this the type of mindset you need in your team. You’re looking for people who are ready to move fast, learn quickly, and don’t shy away from the hard, uncomfortable moments that come with building something from the ground up.

How do you know if someone matches this profile? Jaime and Gabriel had some advice to share there too. Check out the questions below that Gabriel and Jaime suggest using to assess whether a candidate has the right mindset for a high-growth startup.

Sample Interview Questions for Identifying Mindset and Passion:

1. What is your proudest professional achievement and why? Most people will identify several, but you need to really push them for one example. A good sign is when their response is a “type 2 fun” moment—something that was challenging and painful at the time but highly rewarding in hindsight.

2. Tell me about something you’ve learned a lot about in the last 90 days. You will likely see a big variety in these answers. Some people will struggle to answer, while others have a ton to share. What they learned is less important than how and why. Remember, you’re looking for passion and curiosity.

3. Imagine we’re having coffee three years from now, you got the job and you’re telling me it’s been the best three years of your life. What reasons are you giving? Once again, you’ll get a diverse range of answers. Some people will tell a story about the company going public and the huge success its become. others will talk about personal achievements or what the team has done. Depending on the role, any of these can be good answers — but overall you want to filter for a combination of ambition and collaboration over pure intelligence.

Hiring Velocity: It Will Take Longer Than You Expect

One last note on hiring—an often overlooked aspect of scaling is understanding how long it takes to fill key roles. This pain point was something I heard reiterated later on in the day by the founders of Nabla and Sifflet, especially due to the long notice periods in France when employees leave their current jobs.

In fast-growing startups, hiring pace is critical to your scaling plans. As Jaime said, “in geographies like France because of the 3-month notice period it can take a full quarter just to fill a role. And in a startup, a quarter is a year.”

If you’re growing your head count be prepared for hiring to take longer than expected—not just when it comes to getting someone in the seat, but also in getting them up to speed. “If the best operators are teaching others how to operate they aren’t operating,” warned Jaime.

Prioritizing your principles, hiring for the right mindset, and hiring from geographies with shorter notice periods can speed up this process, but only so much. When it comes to hiring, the best you can do may be to plan realistically and anticipate filling open roles to take longer than you’d like it to.

Scaling Smarts: The Importance of Governance and Rhythm

Scaling requires not only speed but also consistency, and that’s where rhythm and governance come in. While “all gas, no breaks” sounds good in a LinkedIn post, without a steady rhythm a startup can quickly burn out the team’s energy and the company’s momentum.

Scaling isn’t just about speeding up; it’s about finding a rhythm that maintains your speed without burning out

Creating a Startup Rhythm

At Shakers, Jamie and his team have established a quarterly and monthly rhythm of intensity that oscillates like a wave—providing for periods of intense focus along with pauses to recharge.

Each quarter follows a similar pattern: reflect, push, and sprint to the finish.

Each phase in this rhythm is then supported by rituals like monthly reflections and product showcases to ensure everyone stays engaged and aligned.

By creating this rhythm, Shakers is able to avoid burnout while ensuring that the team remains focused and making progress on high-priority tasks.

Strong Plans Held Loosely

While Gabriel and Jamie both believe that "plans are useless," they also stressed that planning is essential. This counterintuitive logic contains several truths:

• No matter what you plan, your plans will change.

• Once you have your plan in place recognize that pivots will happen and be prepared to adapt.

• The value of planning is in the process, which provides framework to guide decisions and reveal where you’re misaligned or need more information as a team

Your quarterly plans should allow for reflection, action, and adaptation. As the team grows, so does the need for flexibility in how goals are approached.

Setting and Adapting Targets

You’re running a startup not a small business—and change cuts both ways. Sticking rigidly to your goals can lead to missed opportunities, even when it looks like you’re winning. As Gabriel cautioned, “you can beat your KPIs and realize you still went too slowly.” 

At a time when AI is accelerating everything around us it’s more important than ever to be prepared to adapt your goals and plans to match the potential of the space you operate in.

When it comes to goal setting, set and track the minimum number of key performance indicators (KPIs) for your business and don’t get too attached to any one metric. Flexibility is key to adapting to changes and pushing harder when necessary.

Raising Funds: Knowing Which Game You’re Playing

While it’s tempting to raise as much as possible, you need to think strategically about the funds you take on, who they come from, and how you deploy them.

As soon as you take VC money you’re playing the VC game, which is one of perpetual growth and “lunging forward.” In the VC game, “walking means you’re falling backwards” and you need to spend your cash in a way that gets you to the next stage of growth quickly to raise again and repeat the cycle.

Gabriel also stressed the importance of maintaining strong relationships with investors, not just when you need money, but continually. Jaime's co-founders take a similar approach with one founder “always fundraising” and keeping their VC relationships warm.

How to Manage Your Cash

A quick way to go bankrupt is to view your cash as a lump sum. Companies that make this mistake are like large ships heading towards a dangerous reef, blindly unaware of their inability to quickly change course.

The reality is not all expenses are easy to turn off quickly. Adjusting your ad budget is orders of magnitude faster than cutting expenses on your office or your headcount. It’s not enough to just know how much cash you have, you also need to understand your flexibility to alter what you do with that cash.

The same is true for raising capital and what that means for your runway.

Gabriel put it this way, “It’s fine to have 5 months in the bank if you’re incredibly confident in your momentum and investors are pounding down your door. It’s really scary to have 18 months if no investors are coming to you.”

Know when to raise, how much to raise, and how to use that capital efficiently to fuel growth. Ultimately, it’s about raising enough to keep growing, but not overextending yourself with too much capital or too many investor expectations.

Podcast Recommendation 🫶

Venture Lab (With Luis) 🔬

Why you’ll like it: In a world where capital has become a commodity, the question emerges: How can investors provide value beyond funding and help founders build exceptional businesses?

The Venture Lab podcast explores this challenge through conversations with the most disruptive minds in entrepreneurship, venture capital, and media, capturing the fundamental shift occurring in today’s venture landscape. Click below to check out a recent episode with Seedcamp founder and prolific investor Saul Klein.

Additional Reading (and listening) 📚

• Jaime Castillo – Shakers, el talento 3.0 (Outliers Podcast)

• Dust grabs another $16M for its enterprise AI assistants connected to internal data (TechCrunch)

• Madrid's freelancer platform Shakers raises €14M Series A round (Vestbee)

• Dust’s Gabriel Hubert and Stanislas Polu: Getting the Most From AI With Multiple Custom Agents (Sequoia)

• FF Rising Stars: Gabriel Hubert, Dust (Founders Forum)