Time for a new adventure, my start at WeMaintain

This week, I joined WeMaintain, where I was entrusted with the VP of Engineering role. I am now in Paris, on an onboarding spree. But wait, how did we get there?

3500 days ago, I joined an agency of 25 employees, consulting & contracting in Enterprise-Java. Ten years later, MATHEMA has over 120 employees and has diversified its activity to other stacks & offerings of the software engineering lifecycle. Thanks to the trust of MATHEMA’s CEO and CTO, I took part in shaping this transformation. I entered the company as an engineer/consultant and a team lead. I later worked as a coach & mentor. Finally, I led the NewWork charge as the Head of Agile (consulting), CLO (Chief Learning Officer), and unofficial-troublemaker-in-chief. MATHEMA is where I embraced servant-leadership, learned what it means to be a leader, and started coaching leaders. And it is where the Software Developer's Journey podcast was born.

But working as a consultant/contractor/coach also meant little work on products I believed in. It meant working with client structures I often couldn’t influence. It meant accepting the status quo more than one would like to. For many years, the pros overweighted the cons, especially when I was able to focus on the inner life and culture of the agency. But right before the COVID hit, I realized that it was not enough anymore. I took my time to find the right place, and in the end, that place found me!

WeMaintain is a “PropTech” Startup, i.e., a startup working toward applying information technology and platform economics to real estate markets. The culture here is precisely “my kind of crazy”: servant-leadership, team-ownership of the business problems (think teal-organization à-la “Reinventing Organisations” from F. Laloux), constant feedback, mindful communication, etc. and with core-values “Care, Grit & Uniqueness” which align perfectly with mine. I am amazed by what they have achieved so far, the software and IoT products they created, as well as their organisation. The energy of the team is contagious ; and I already started dreaming about what what we will do in the future.

So here we are. After two weeks of refreshing vacation where I managed to introduce my son and his grandmother to D&D, I made my way back to Paris to start this next adventure.

I want to thank Andy Hanke and Thomas Haug, for their support, as well as all the MATHEMA colleagues for the fun years together. I wish you all the best!

I want to thank the co-founders of WeMaintain Benoit Dupont, Jade Francine, and Tristan Foureur for their trust. And I already want to thank all the new colleagues who took me in with open arms and are constantly taking me under their wings to get me up to speed!

With those words, I’m off to discover more about the PropTech-, regulated maintenance- and lifts-world; and trying to meet with as many new colleagues as possible before heading back to Nuremberg and working remotely from there!