The following interview is a conversation we had with Virgile Raingeard, CEO of Figures, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: €8.5 Million Raised to Build the Future of Compensation Intelligence.
Virgile Raingeard
Yeah, it’s actually Virgile Raingeard, but it’s a pretty tough name for English speaking persons to pronounce. No blame there, really.
Brett
And you were saying you have an English version of your name as well, right? It’s Roger.
Virgile Raingeard
Roger, yeah, indeed. So I lived two years and a half in Australia, right? And I kept repeating my name when I was on the phone because obviously it’s a tough one to pronounce. I was like, so people are like, hey, mate, what’s your name? It’s like Virgile Raingeard. Like, sorry, what? And I kept spelling my name all over and all over again. And one day I had this guy on the phone, it’s like, what’s your name? I said, Virgil. It’s like, Roger. And I was like, yes, Roger. And I went away with it. And so it was very early on in my time in Australia and a lot of people knew me back then as Roger. So you can go with Roger, you can go with Virgil. You go with the one you want.
Brett
Sounds good. Nice. I’m super excited to chat with you. And before we dive in and talk about all the epic work you’re doing there, vigors. We like to begin with just a couple of questions to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder and as an entrepreneur. So, first question, is there a specific CEO and Founder that you admire and look up to? And if so, who is it and what do you admire about them?
Virgile Raingeard
It’s a pretty good one, but I’m going to disappoint you in the fact that I always feel left out of those questions that there’s not like a single CEO that I really admire. And I’m going to tell you, I’ve read all about him or all about her. I don’t have that. I really don’t have personal admiration for someone in particular. So there’s lots of stuff that I pick up for some of those vendors, like quotes, essays, posts and stuff like that or learnings. But I don’t have someone specifically that I look after.
Brett
Are there any French companies that come to mind, french tech companies that you look at and say, wow, they seem to be doing a good job they’re getting it right. When it comes to company building, any French startups that come to mind, there’s plenty of those.
Virgile Raingeard
Right. So I think Konto, as you might heard, like the banking fintech raised 300 million or something earlier this year, I think is a model of efficiency, company building and so on. People will look up to right. Zenley that, you know, they acquired by Snapshot and then suddenly you got shut down by snapshot. I think they’re onto something else. And the ways they’ve been Zenley was truly impressive. And the tech, the design, some of the stuff behind it was, I think, best in class worldwide. So I think those two are good example of really cool French startup and scale ups.
Brett
Nice. And in the French tech ecosystem. What’s going on? I was reading about some drama a few weeks ago. This was probably like three months ago, wasn’t there? Some big drama between some VCs and a startup?
Virgile Raingeard
You know what I mean? You’ve seen that one out. Yeah, that was fun drama going on. Like medium post after medium post. That was some of the best stuff that was better than Insync has been released on by Netflix on the last one or two years. Right. So, yeah, basically a Founder accusing a VC of pushing them out silly goodies. A VC saying they didn’t do it. And it was always like one medium post. Then you have this LinkedIn and Medium post by the VC one week later, like, oh d***. Then the VC seemed to be right. Then you have the contour media and post by the Founder one week later and so on. Ultimately, I don’t know who’s rights were wrong, but that’s sure good entertaining stuff.
Brett
Yeah, I live for that stuff. Watching that unfold on LinkedIn, that was like yeah, like you said, our version of Netflix, I think, for anyone.
Virgile Raingeard
Exactly.
Brett
Awesome. And another question for you. Is there a specific book that’s had a big impact on you as a Founder and really as a person? So this can be one of the classic business books or just a book that influenced how you view and think about the world as a whole.
Virgile Raingeard
Yeah, I think there’s two of those that are linked. Right. Thinking fast and Slow the Impact of inconscious Bias by Daniel Kenman and so on. I think it’s a pretty big book about the importance of unconscious bias that’s important as a Founder, as a person, as an HR and I so it led me to read a book that not many people seem to know. Super Forecasters. I’m not sure if you’ve read this one. They follow along this world group of people that play around. I have a habit of forecasting events. Right. And what’s interesting about this book is that it led me to an habit of I love forecasting, and then looking back at my forecast and knowing what did I predict? Right? What did I predict wrong and how can I learn from that? And I don’t know. This book led me to this habit of noting down a lot of regular forecasts I make about the world, about my life, about business, about stuff like that, and then looking back at those later on and being like, why did I go right?
Virgile Raingeard
Why did I go wrong? And I think it really helps me improve less as a person, as a Founder. But yeah, that’d be super forecasters.
Brett
Can you share an example with us of a forecast you made and got right and then a forecast you made and got wrong?
Virgile Raingeard
So about like a specific competitor I got, the one that maybe I should remember Bob as the one that I got wrong, but one that I got right was like about them. We’re going to talk about the space and the competition, but I’m going to be reentering a new space, creating a new category, and I’m going to like I think within the next six months they’re going to be a big round from a stealth startup that is going to be a new competitor from us and that’s going to be coming ahead. So we need to plan for that and this is how we need to plan for that. And I wrote it down and surely enough, like magically, within two or three months after writing that down, it did happen, right? And I think it helped me prepare for it because it’s one of the forecasts I made that were white.
Virgile Raingeard
What did I do that gone wrong? I don’t know. I’ve understand arrogant. I predicted that we ended the year with 700 clients. We ended the year with 1200 clients back last year. So maybe there’s a good to say that I missed out on this forecast now. There’s plenty of wrong ones that I could get back to, but none come to mind just right now.
Brett
Yeah, no worries. We can circle back to that later. Maybe it’ll come up in our conversation here as we shy. All right, let’s talk about the company now. Take us back to the early days. What’s the origin story behind the company? And what was really going on in your head that made you say, this is it, I’m going to pull the trigger on this one?
Virgile Raingeard
Yeah, it’s a pretty good question. So a bit of a background of a weird background in the sense that I have a computer science degree and I switched to a master’s degree in human resources afterwards for very weird reasons. Right. So didn’t make sense at the time, but I think it gives some insight to the rest of my career. I ended up doing HR for I did twelve years in HR in large companies, then smaller and smaller companies. Right. As a human resources professional. And then in my last two years as an HR professional, I was like HR director for Series, a startup small scale startup. And when I tried to design my compensation policy, I had this massive pain point of I have no reliable market data to base my compensation policy upon, right, in France. And there was an ongoing pain point. And then at some point I was like, okay, I’m going to switch to I’m going to take one day off a week from my day to day job.
Virgile Raingeard
And my Founder accepted. I’m going to try to do on the side project to work on the first compensation benchmark for startups in France, right? And this was 2020, October 2020. It took off immediately. I had 15 companies willing to go along with it, sharing compensation market data with me. And I created the first version of Figures was just a Google Sheet. And I went out to company and says, you give me your own data, you pay, and I give you a one year subscription to this Google Sheet and I will update it monthly, basically. And that was how Figure was born, was just creating the first compensation benchmark for startup in France, October 2020. And I grew up to like 50 client companies just sending a spreadsheet. And then, wow, we made out of like my Co-Founder, which is an amazing the best developer I’ve ever seen, agreed to join me when he had like ten offers to join those startups and so on.
Virgile Raingeard
He agreed to join me, made a product out of it. And then this is two years ago, nearly to this day, is the first version of our product. And this is where it all started.
Brett
Wow. What were you charging for the spreadsheet? What was the cost for Express?
Virgile Raingeard
So it was ridiculous. One of the biggest mistake I’ve made was I don’t know if it was not a forecasting mistake, but in a way it was pricing mistakes. So I started charging €400 per year for the smaller scale startups to €2500 or something like that. And it was a ridiculous price. And one of the biggest thing when we turned out, when we made it out of a product, we even lowered the price. I was like, you know what? Because we’re mostly a mix between a database business and a product SaaS products, right? But for the data set to become valuable, we need more company, right? Submit the data, co op, give and get approach, right? And I would like to meet to make the barrier of entry as low as possible. So we lower the price to be like, this is going to fuel more customers, which is one of the biggest issue.
Virgile Raingeard
Then afterwards I started reading some pricing strategies, advices, right? And I realized it was a huge mistake. I devalued the value of our product and I increased pricing by three X June 2021. And it didn’t impact at all our win rate at the time. So big pricing mistake because I was charging way too little to begin with.
Brett
Wow. So you three Xed and did you have any trouble retaining those previous customers?
Virgile Raingeard
It’s pretty cool, right? Because I hired my first salesperson when were still post trapped, and she’s the one who had to deal with Renewing client, being like, I’m sorry, you got to move from €400 to like 2500 because not only our pricing changed, but your headcount grew. And that was a nightmare. That was a blood pass. That was the first hundred or so customers, and those ones have been a nightmare to renew. But luckily, if I didn’t have to manage that, she did.
Brett
Nice. I love it. Delegating to the team, right? Yeah, exactly. And what about today? So can you talk to us about how the products evolved and what the product looks like? And if I were a customer, what’s that experience look like?
Virgile Raingeard
Yeah, so it’s pretty simple, right? So the first thing is that we want to do real time composition benchmarking. So we’re connecting to the HR systems of our customers, whether it’s a Bamboo, HR Workday, hyperb and the like, right. To gather data from them, we aggregate this data. The first part of the product is just basically data visualization for companies. Right. How much does a senior product manager in Paris earns? How much does an intermediate or a junior data analyst in Berlin earns? How much should the CFO in a poster SB startup in a SaaS startup earned in London? It’s basically how much, like, data visualization of compensation, market data with filtering options that enable you to be super precise about what you’re looking at. Right. That’s the first part of the product. The second part of the product as of today is analyzing our client data and basically doing a gap analysis with the market data and telling them, you know what, maybe you know, maybe you don’t.
Virgile Raingeard
But your overall your tech team is paid as a six years percentile of the market, but your sales team seems to be paid between the first year and the fourth years. And like doing running analysis for them on how they compare to the market running also gender pay gap analysis for them, seeing areas in their organization where they might have unfairness and stuff like that. And yeah, that’s like the big analysis part, saving them hours and hours in analysis that they would have done by themselves, that I did by myself at the time. Right. In a way, I created a product that I would have loved to have as an HR person in the past. Right. But that’s the two part of the product. We have data visualization for composition, market data, and analyzing our clients data to help them out with decision making when it comes to composition.
Brett
And how does compensation change from country to country? If we’re just going across Europe, does it vary a lot? I’m guessing it has to vary a lot, right.
Virgile Raingeard
In terms of like, market rates number one or maturity terms. Market. Yeah, market rates. Yeah, it does vary. UK is the number one type of country in terms of market rate. Then you have Germany being a bit ahead of France. New Zealand is in between Germany and France. Closer to France. Then you go down to lower and lower countries in terms of cost of labor, like Spain, Italy or Portugal, even though it’s changing fast, right? Like Portugal, for example, like Linsbon have made it super easy for people to move there and companies to move there. So there’s some pockets of tech and customer support. Salaries in Lisbon and Portugal are exploding a bit similar in Spain. Like the explosion of remote work is changing labor market dynamics quite fast. But overall, that’s a good overview.
Brett
Got it. That makes a lot of sense. Now, you mentioned something there earlier in the interview that we have to dive deeper into, and that is category creation. So my favorite topic in the world. So let’s talk about it. So are you guys creating a new category here?
Virgile Raingeard
Yeah, we are.
Brett
Likewise.
Virgile Raingeard
We’re part of a few companies. So the category is a bit more mature in the US. Where it was created, I think two, three, four years ago. But in Europe, there’s only two players. And we created a category basically two years ago. Like, we are one of the first comp tech, compensation tech, like a subdivision of HR Tech, trying to provide tooling and data for companies when it comes to compensation. We’re definitely creating it in Europe, right? And we’re market leaders in that space.
Brett
Do you call it compensation intelligence? That’s the term that I’ve heard in the US. Or is that something different?
Virgile Raingeard
No, we haven’t called it that. Coined it that because and that’s a good point of like we’re thinking of using that terms, it didn’t reoccurate too well when we used it in Europe. But it’s definitely what’s being called in the US. Right, as a trendy term, composition intelligence. Right. So comptech composition intelligence. But we are definitely in that category.
Brett
And who are the companies in the US. That are doing this just to have those comparables?
Virgile Raingeard
The problem is the market leader now is Pave. Pave raised 100 million round a bit more than a year ago, I think a year ago to this day, nearly 100 million round to create this all in one composition management category. And those are players, lots of emerging players. There’s a lot there’s like a new player on three months or two. It’s a booming category. Some of the other player on the space are like piquity, open, comp, assemble, complete, and some of the historical player purely on the benchmarking pathway. So that apart are like salary.com or pay scale, for example.
Brett
And for you as a Founder here, how do you manage your own psychology? As you see competitor after competitor, continue to launch, raise a lot of funding, how do you just manage your state to make sure that you don’t get a little bit overwhelmed with competition? Because it seems like there’s a lot of competition in this space.
Virgile Raingeard
So. Look us. Competition is a great thing, right? And it’s impacting us greatly because it’s showing that the space is there to stay, right? And none of those are coming to Europe, right? And it’s saying one of them can try to get to Europe. And it’s a complex as often in a lot of categories, quite hard to get into Europe because Europe is like a very fragmented geographical area. Sitting into Spain, entering Spain is no different than selling into France, entering to Germany, especially when it comes to compensation, because there’s a lot of data, privacy topics that comes into play, right, with GCPR and the like. And privacy is a super sensitive concern, especially in Germany and France to an extent. And so for a us. Player to come in and being like, hey, come on, get give us your compensation on pre compensation information and so on, is very tough.
Virgile Raingeard
So, so far, it’s a good thing is that US players, there’s two things like US. Players are showing there’s a need for the space, which helps us, are helping in educating the space, which helps us, and also, to be very frank and very direct, also helping us in some of the new stuff we’re working on in terms of new module and so on. So, like, two modules working on salary bands, helping company create and share salary bands, right? And composition reviews, like managing companywide composition reviews, they are leading the way and they’re showing, to be very honest, there’s some stuff that I think they are building some cool products, some cool product features that we can have a look at. Meanwhile, when we started Figures back then, two years ago, went and created a product, there was no benchmark, no competition benchmark, right? Some of the stuff we built, some of the dashboard that I talked about previously that we built, like the Gap analysis between the market and you as a company, like the company positioning dashboard we created on a whiteboard with my Co-Founder, a lot of the feature were like, okay, how do we go ahead and do this right?
Virgile Raingeard
And I think it led us to create some poorly design features. It led us to create some features that maybe were not the one that client requested. And now, when we are building this module, in terms of salary bands, one thing that we are doing, and we are very upfront about it, is we are looking at some of the three or four or five competitors in the US. Some of the we are looking at their product videos and being like, that seems a good idea, that seems like a good idea. And for me, as a CEO, I feel a lot more reassured that we can just in a way, have a look at some competition, some benchmark to design some of our new features instead of starting from scratch entirely, right, which is very more risky. So that helps us, it educates the market, it shows there’s a way and facilitates a lot in the current and future funding discussion and help us get some inspiration when it comes to product design.
Brett
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And that’s such a helpful way, I think, for founders in Europe or the US. Just to think about what’s happening in other countries, to look at the startups that are doing something similar there and look at it as a way to get inspired, to learn to all work together to educate the market. That makes a lot of sense.
Brett
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Brett
Now, talk to me, or we talked about the drama in the France tech ecosystem, but let’s just talk about the ecosystem in general. So right now for you as a French Founder, do you feel that it’s hard to have access to larger amounts of capital, or do you feel that there’s enough venture capital now to really service the needs of France?
Virgile Raingeard
No, that has changed a lot in the past few years. In fact, most of the latest taste of European funding I’ve read is showing that French funding into French companies has kept on growing year over year, and maybe about to surpass Germany when it was like two, three, four or five years ago. Germany and Berlin and Munich versus used to be much more advanced as an ecosystem. There’s a lot of funding into France, whether it’s coming from local players, as you know, like the BPI is a French government fund. It’s like the biggest investor in Europe, I think, by a lot of amount of capital deployed because of French government that put a lot of money into it, but also a lot and more foreign VCs coming into France because it’s becoming, I think, a great ecosystem in terms of talents, because of municipal things.
Virgile Raingeard
Right. The usual dynamics of there’s more and more second time funders, more and second time funders, tend to have easier access to funding, tends to have more ambition and so on. So I think this ecosystem is maturing a lot and access to capital is not how that will influence at all now. Not at all.
Brett
And if you had to summarize what a typical French tech entrepreneur’s mindset is there like some standard for me, when I look at Berlin, I see a lot of people who are part of Rocket Internet or inspired by Rocket Internet. And I think about those types of entrepreneurs as often mercenaries. They’re there to make money and build a big business. And that’s their mindset. They don’t love the business necessarily or love the product. They are there to build a big company. And that’s their mission. Is there some type of standard persona in France, you think around what a normal tech Founder looks like or the average tech Founder looks like in their philosophy for business?
Virgile Raingeard
Yeah, I’ll give you one that I think, of course, we’re talking about cliches, right? And I think that doesn’t apply to everything. But one thing that I’ve heard and I’ve seen personally from French founders is being tech obsessed and obsessed by the product, right? And I think it goes back to the maturity of the ecosystem thing. I was discussing this saying about like first time founders obsessed about the product, second time founders obsessed about distribution, right? And I think there’s a lot of French founders that are product obsessed. And I think there’s lots of talent when it comes to tech and products. And I think it comes back to culturally sort of the French thing, right. France being seen as a bastion for art, cultural literature, which is a noble thing. And in a way, I think building a great product or product led company is seen as very noble.
Virgile Raingeard
Meanwhile, distribution and sales historically and even to this day, in a way, is not very seen as a very noble way to build a company. Like building a sales driven company, a distribution first company is not being seen in a noble way, I think in France, in a way. And when I compare that to the UK and how we are just putting there’s much more appreciation for companies that have been built on amazing sales processes. I think it’s quite different in France. So I’d say that any cliche that seems to be true. And I think what I hear from VCs or repeat funders or other people on the market about French like the issue with French funders is like they are too obsessed with product and less about distribution in a way.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. I guess if you have to be obsessed with one thing, at least it’s the product, right? Especially as we move into this product led growth era that’s probably going to pay off in the long term.
Virgile Raingeard
I hope so. I hope so because I think I fall into that category. I’m obsessed by product building and this is what drives me the most, right? So egoistically. I also hope that this is a white obsession to have, but I think in a way, it’s prevented some founders from achieving better outcomes by thinking more about building and designing, having a very artistic vision of designing a great product without caring too much of how you’re going to sell it first way.
Brett
Have you ever watched the documentary General Magic?
Virgile Raingeard
No.
Brett
You have to watch it. I’ll send you a link after the interview. But it’s the story of the company that invented the iPhone in 1994 and it’s like this beautiful story. It’s presented as the most important company in Silicon Valley that you’ve never heard of. And they were this hot company, raised a few hundred million dollars, had this epic product. They’re on stage talking about the iPhone many years before the iPhone ever came out and they were so obsessed with the product and these little things that didn’t really matter in the end that they missed their opportunity and they weren’t able to successfully deliver on the product and they completely failed in the end. It was just a fascinating story of what happens when you are too close to the product and not thinking enough about how to actually sell it. I’ll send you LinkedIn.
Brett
It’s a fascinating documentary.
Virgile Raingeard
Love it. We’d love it.
Brett
Now let’s talk about country expansion and what that looks like. So are you available now in all countries in Europe or how many countries are available in so we are available.
Virgile Raingeard
In fact everywhere in the world. Like any company in the world that’s interested into Figures, can access Figures. But where most of our data lies is into some of the core biggest European countries like France, Germany, UK, Spain, Netherlands and so on. So we have the best data set for fast growing tech companies in Europe in those locations. And even if you’re a US based company that wants to hire open an office or has an office in France and so on, you can go and get us. But yes, in terms of commercial activity, where most of our clients are located is now UK and France, neck to neck, then Germany, then Netherlands and Spain.
Brett
And I was watching a video of you getting off. I think it was a train wearing a billboard, as you were. What was it? Expanding to Amsterdam? Yeah. How important do you is humor in what you’re doing? Because I watched that video and I laughed and I really liked it. I think that’s the type of stuff that’s memorable, right? If you’re too corporate and too boring, then people don’t remember you. But you seem to take a funny approach to some of those messages and the marketing that you do. So how do you think about that? Do you view that as humor is very important to brand builder?
Virgile Raingeard
Indeed. So one of our value is like why so serious? And comes from my Co-Founder and I. One thing that we have in common that we just was both driven by well, building a great product, right? And the impact we can have. And it’s also a lot about the journey rather than the destination. And one thing. That we have in common is that we just like to have fun along the way, right? There’s lots of fun stuff that we have built into the product as well and so on. And we like to have fun internally. That’s something that’s really in common forever. So when in terms of putting culture one of our values, being around humor is an important part to us. And one thing that’s interesting, right, two things that around that one thing we are dealing with salary stuff, we’re dealing with compensation, which is cancelled.
Virgile Raingeard
And we’re dealing with important sensitive information from clients. One thing is one struggle we had historically is how much fun can we have and can we have externally where we are supposed to be super serious with our clients data, right? And hoping that clients won’t misread our humor as a sign of not being too serious and responsible about what we’re doing. So that was one of the struggles we had that at the beginning prevented us from being very open about our humor. And the second thing is just that I had this random idea. It’s like, okay, we’re going to do a corporate video for life at Figures. But instead of being boring, we’re just going to do something quite fun and eccentric. And we did that literally. We called the cameraman and we did it in 2 hours, a brainstorm and shooting included. And we released that video.
Virgile Raingeard
And at the beginning, are we really going to release it externally? Are we going to look dumb? And it really took off. And then we realized that we are not the only one that liked to have fun throughout the day. And we have fun on those videos. We have fun on LinkedIn because I’m tired and a lot of people are tired of living the same corporate Blend stuff that has no impact, no everlasting impact. So when we realized that some of the fun we had when we put it into a video, when we put it in LinkedIn post. So we had this April’s full joke last year that we added the filter and we actually implemented it in our product to see composition market data per zodiac sign and could see how much was the concert earning. I were like doing this post that and we actually took it live in the product so our clients could filter market data and see that concert product manager are making more than lion or Leo product manager.
Virgile Raingeard
Which was completely stupid, right? And when we released that type of stuff, it resonated with a lot of people. And a lot of people are like us. It’s just like tired of feeling tired of these two series and Blender and they had fun. So the tradition that you saw was like anytime we release a new country, I’m trying to release a funny video about it. So I distributed flyers in London and I went around with a billboard, a walking big board in Amsterdam. Yeah, we’re having fun.
Brett
I love that. Yeah. Most of the stuff that I see on LinkedIn, I would summarize with that. It’s just very boring. It’s not entertaining, it doesn’t capture attention, and it seems to be changing. I think companies like you and founders like you are making it more interesting. So I’m seeing that on LinkedIn, which makes me feel better. There’s more memes now. I’m definitely seeing more corporate memes, which I think are pretty funny. So glad to see it.
Virgile Raingeard
And, you know, one thing about that was it’s interesting, is that, of course, I love the impact we’re having with our products, with our mission, how we’re helping out companies make fairer and more efficient decision. But recently, a company released a very sarcastic, like, funny video and they credited us by inspiring them for taking some risk. And I was like, that’s a Hanuk. I’m happy having that kind of impact on the market. Even if we fail as a company, if we encourage companies to be a bit bored, more bold into some of the stuff they release in terms of branding and so on, I’m happy with that impact.
Brett
I love that. Now, let’s talk about failure, which is obviously never a fun topic, but let’s say if the company were to not be successful, why do you think that would be? What would you not get right? Or what would be that big mistake? Or what would be the problem that you guys couldn’t solve if the company were to not work?
Virgile Raingeard
Okay, so it’s an interesting one because, of course, that’s an exercise that we go along and discuss from time to time. The first one, what we call the nuclear option, is like what we can’t have happening is, of course, security, right? And data leak and stuff like that, due to the nature of the data we hold. Right? Number one thing is that then, in terms of number two, beside that kind of data leak, I think the floor in terms of failure is fairly low, given what we build, the interest in what we build, and so on. But what will be the type of failure? It will be, I think, not being able to sell the product value of our product well enough, in a way, and building features that we struggle to sell because maybe market is not ready, or maybe I think the market is ready.
Virgile Raingeard
It’s like just struggling to properly educate our customers, important on some of the things we’re building, and then struggling to get traction because of that right. Being there. I think product marketing, education about our product, education about the ROI, of using a compensation management solution to make better decision and so on, could be one. But you know what? I think that’s even that’s a low floor, right? I think it will lead to not the great type of success and outcome. But I think besides the nuclear option, I discussed about, given the traction we have given, some of the data we have and some of the thing we are building and the success, once again, that we see in the similar category in the US. Given we are market leaders and we’re first mover advantage in Europe, I really have to mess this up personally to not make a success out of it.
Virgile Raingeard
Right. So it sounds very arrogant, but I struggle to see a very low floor in terms of catastrophic failure.
Brett
Makes sense. I like that you’ve explored that then you and your team have worked through that of what would failure look like and you’ve reflected on that and that is like the nuclear option for you.
Virgile Raingeard
Yeah. So the first thing, first of all, the nuclear option, of course, drives us like, you know, there was like a leak at Loom. Was it today? Loom leak or something like that? Today? Yesterday there was announcement this type of stuff. Every time I see it go live, I’m thinking of it could be us. Right. So I’m a bit obsessed with that. And we are working quite a lot on security. ISO 270 one, sock two and getting those certification, getting those processes up, which is frustrating, right? Because it’s decreasing product velocity. But we are doing that because we very much have the nuclear option in mind because we think the worst outcome besides that nuclear option is a very I kept saying low floor. It’s more we have a kind of a high floor in terms of worst outcome. Given the market creation, given where we’re in, given the traction we had, the only way that we will mess everything up would be that type of outcome is like that addicts.
Virgile Raingeard
I’m a bit obsessed by that. Negative. Maybe too obsessed as well. Right. Maybe there’s a case where we should be less conscious of that and more risk taking, especially early on when you’re building a company. I don’t know, but yeah, it’s something that does worry me. That’s pretty much the only thing that does worry me.
Brett
Yeah. I don’t know, it seems like from my perspective, you can’t really go wrong by obsessing over that problem. Right. I feel like there’s no way that two years from now you’d say, oh man, I had to spend way too much time making sure that everything was secure.
Virgile Raingeard
I think so. I hope so. Yeah.
Brett
I have to wonder when these companies get breached long term, how they can even go forward. Like LastPass getting breached. How do they continue to build a business after that? All trust is completely gone now, obviously, we’re using them switched off. So I have to wonder, once you get breached, what really happens? It makes sense, especially given the data that you have and how sensitive that is, how important security is.
Virgile Raingeard
I think it’s easier you just shut down immediately because lost of every customer want to retrieve that information. Lack of trust means you can get any customer and you instantly die at best. Maybe you can sell the technology to someone and retrieve some of it, but honestly, that’s really terrible outcome.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. Now, last couple of questions here. I know we’re getting close to being up on time. So what personally motivates you? What excites you when you get out of bed every day? What makes you want to just get out there and start working on this company and continue to build this company up?
Virgile Raingeard
So I mentioned that I’m seeing, I’m building a product I would have loved to use as a user. So I think that’s a key driver at the moment. I’m playing with our beta version of Salary bands and I’m like, I love it. In fact, I’m probably spending too much time playing around with it and being hands on as a CEO trying out all new features. But I mean, that’s what drives me and I’m like, I love this feature. It would have saved me so much time. It would have helped me so that much when I was an HR person. That drives me. I love those moments. And I remember early on when it was only my CoFounder and I, I love when he was like, hey, I’ve shipped something new into our test environment. Have a look. That excitement sometime I was in between, I was in sales call and stuff like that.
Virgile Raingeard
I was pretending to listen because I wanted to open the link and try out the new feature. That excitement of new features and imagining the impact it can have on our customers. It’s probably one of the biggest things. And the second thing we touched on, right? It’s more and more, it’s less about the destination, what we’re going to be, where we’re going to land and so on. It’s much more getting to work and having fun with a good group of people, enjoying people, enjoying the work I’m doing, and just often comes through the product, right? And the second part is very much enjoying who I’m doing it with, having some fun along the way. I don’t know, I’m pretty d*** happy.
Brett
But you seem happy. I like it. All right, last question here. Let’s do about three years, five years from today. What’s that big vision? What do you want this to really look like?
Virgile Raingeard
I like to think of our category in a way that once again is going to become obvious. I want it to become obvious five years from now, people are going to be like, how come? As an HR professional, I managed to run compensation without the tool like Figures. I want it to be so obvious that people will look back and wonder why? And wonder how could company work out compensation using on these spreadsheets, like billion spreadsheets like I did during twelve years, right? I want people to be using Figures and be like, really? People who are using spreadsheets instead of this. How come? Thinking about this, I think we’re the Stone age or Dark Age of composition and that five years from now, people are going to look back and it’s going to be a brand new yeah, it’s going to be a completely different type of norm when it comes to composition and how you manage it.
Brett
Right. Amazing. I love it. All right, well, we are up on time here, so I’d love to keep you on and ask another 20 or 30 questions, but we do have to wrap, unfortunately, before we wrap up. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where’s the best place for them to go?
Virgile Raingeard
Probably LinkedIn. I haven’t turned into a one man show or YouTube or whatever like that. So LinkedIn is probably the best way to go. So you get post informative post about compensation and compensation trends and the city videos of city post that goes along with it. So if you enjoy post composition insights and city jokes, yeah, just follow along on LinkedIn, I guess.
Brett
Amazing. Well, my friend Roger, thank you so much for her chat. I appreciate it. This has been a blast. I really enjoyed getting to know you, learning your story, and just really learning about everything that you’re building. This is such an awesome company and I wish you best of luck in executing on this vision.
Virgile Raingeard
Thanks so much for that, but thanks.
Brett
All right, keep in touch.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io. podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visioners on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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