Startup culture: Could you be a successful employee at Kombo?
I have written this for one reason: I have discovered that working at Kombo is not for everyone. It’s actually hard, probably harder than in most companies. So you will discover more about our culture here, and see if you can fit with it.
Our ambition and our challenge
Our ambition
Our goal is to make a platform to help people move in their country or around the world. There are good websites for trains, for buses, for flights OR for carpooling. But not for everything, not international, and not up to the last kilometer.
Our challenge
Kombo can only be a global platform. We are making a platform, and most of the time a platform really makes sense when it is global. Airbnb, LinkedIn or Blablacar could not exist if they were successful in just 1 country. But it goes further than that, because we are a mobility startup. We help people move around the world and we cannot say to some people that they need another platform to go to the next place.
To build this global platform, we have to execute fast. I wrote an article about execution in the sense of business, and I strongly recommend it if you want to understand better this term.
We are entrepreneurs
The word “entrepreneur” can mean a lot of things. Let me take the real life example of Clément Hugon, our CTO. He has built his house by himself, with his girlfriend. It has taken 2 years, by working only on week-ends and vacation. Did he know anything about construction before? No. Did he spend time reading tutorials on the Internet? Yes. Did he enjoy spending all those week-ends, without taking any vacation? Sure. Does he enjoy living in a house, that he designed by himself, with a lot of light and ecological tricks, and that he built with his hands? Definitely.
As entrepreneurs, we have 3 convictions:
Anything is possible
There is no barrier to success except ourselves.
Building a global platform like Airbnb, Spotify, Blablacar, Tinder or Netflix is possible. The proof? Some human beings did it. We don’t say it’s easy, nor we have all the skills to do the same. But that is feasible.
Most of the time, people are not aware of the difficulties for successful projects. For example, Blablacar searched a business model for, not 1 or 3, but 7 years, and Airbnb also struggled at launch. And did you know that Netflix was renting DVDs sent by the postal service before being a digital platform? Success always requires time.
Anything can be learned.
We live in an amazing period where nearly anything can be learned online. In other words, you “just” need to be good at using Google, reading and understanding what you find.
We can overtake the giants
And we can already overtake giants in some areas. Don’t be afraid to compete with giants. A good startup can adapt much faster than a large corporate, which needs several layers of decision-making so that many smart employees do not have decision power. Then, the CEOs may have more to lose by taking a new initiative than to win by changing the whole system. This explains why innovation comes more often from startups, while large corporates will keep the safest options because they have much more to lose. Last thing, never forget that large companies also have a much higher pressure of their owners/investors for short term results more than a long term vision.
Our qualities
That can sound pretentious and it may be, it’s fine.
At Kombo, all people share the same following qualities:
Problem-solving
We work on long term and scalable solutions. Each of us is here because there are difficult things to do. There are no repetitive tasks, or if there are, we need to find a scalable solution to make them disappear. For example, client service could seem boring. But determining what the most common issues are, and finding ways to solve the root causes of those issues can be very challenging. Think also about Google Maps. When the directors of this project started, they did not have data about all places in the world. The easy way would be to hire thousands of people to check manually all places. But this is not how they do.
Autonomous
You need to be a doer and achieve real things, not only Powerpoint slides or beautiful graphs. Each task you work on must have an impact on the business. So you need to enjoy working by yourself, and also with the team.
When you work on difficult things, there is no easy solution. There will be problems, and it’s part of the game. You can ask yourself the right questions, prioritize, search on the Internet, ask your peers, check if there are tools to do what you want to do and in 80% of the times you will find the solution on your own. That is much more gratifying than when one gives you the solution. You can also be stuck. Sometimes even your manager will not know better than you the solution. But he can always help, either by solving a part of the issue or by suggesting a new approach.
This culture of autonomy can be seen in the way we work: there is just 1 weekly meeting, during which everyone is presenting his slide(s). The managers will rarely ask you things, so that you have the chance and the duty to be the main character of your job.
Polyvalent
This autonomy is a great asset, but being polyvalent is also a must-have. Imagine that on the same day, a marketing team member can design a new feature of the website, do recruitment interviews, talk to a train company abroad, write a newsletter, update Google Ads campaigns, close partnerships or manage requests of the client service. On the other end, we don’t ask marketers to be developers, or the opposite. But at our stage, we need to have people who can be multi-tasks. This is also the reason why most of our developers are full-stack or why we do not have a person dedicated to one precise marketing topic. (2023 edit : this has changed with our growth 😂)
Dedicated
We are a small team of highly-skilled people, with a strong dedication to our goal. That is the best way to be fast and innovative, as explained in the book « Insanely Simple ». I advise checking ideas #2 and #3 of this summary. :
Many businesses follow an instinctive but misguided principle : The more critical the project, the more people must be thrown at it. The operative theory is that more brains equals more ideas […] except only occasionally do more brains mean better ideas.
When you go to a restaurant with 2 friends, it is much easier than when you are 12: to choose the place, to choose between starter or desert, to order, to pay, etc. That applies also in the team of a startup, which has to go fast, not to the restaurant, but to an innovative product.
In order to be efficient, the team must be small and dedicated. This is why each of us loves what (s)he is doing, and is dedicated to his job.
Another explanation is given in The Great CEO Within, page 7.
Consequence: our written culture is strong…
This explains why we have the culture to write (and read!) things. We have a lot of (light) processes, so that most of the company knowledge can be found in a written document. Writing everything also helps being faster because instead of explaining something for the 4th time, you just send a link. It also forces everyone to be clear in a concise way, which is not the case when transmission is oral.
And we communicate a lot
However, and fortunately, there are also a lot of internal communication. A business is just a team of people working together. The human side of a company is the most important part of it. If people don’t enjoy working together, it won’t go very far. So we exchange a lot through the different tools we use, but also by phone/email and in real life as much as possible (pre and post-covid).
Our values
Liberty & Responsibility
Those 2 values go along together, and at Kombo, there are much stronger than in all the companies or startups I have personally worked in.
You can enjoy freedom, because you are responsible for your work and feel accountable for it. We are like a community of skilled people with the same objective. As managers, we hate supervising others, as if there were parents and kids. We are not anymore in the previous century when employees hated their job and managers had to control them. It’s impossible to fake work in a small team. Everyone can see the results of the work of anyone, and how fast you progress. One reason is that every document you are working on is shared with the team. So you will fight to make your part in the best way possible and if you have any issue, you will find a solution.
What is nice is that, once we know you are a good team member at Kombo, you will enjoy a lot of freedom. If you want to work from home, that’s fine. If you want to work from another country during weeks or months, amazing, live your experience and get inspiration. You can propose improvements on the product, our organization, even on marketing if you are a developer. Or a beer after work.
Creativity
We also like being creative. This is how we can solve complex issues, by finding new ideas, in the product or in the business. You can check for example how we made our website, with very low resources. While some companies spend 50k€/year on a designer, we spent 10 times less over several years. Another example: we were named SoBus and we needed a new name as we were planning to also sell train tickets, initially from SNCF. We could pay an agency for €20.000. But we purchased an excellent book to learn how to do it by ourselves. We found this amazing name, Kombo. It is simple to understand, to write, to remember, to say in any language, and it suggests what we do (combining tickets) without being too descriptive. It costed €10.
Inclusivity
The team has always been very international. Since 2018 we always had non-French speakers in the team. We encourage diversity, which is very valuable both for the team and all team members: Lots of languages, lots of points of views, lots of various experiences. And to make a global company, that makes sense! In 2020 we are 4 nationalities in a team of 9 people, over 2 continents.
We also love having diversity in genders. We need more women to be at 50–50 with men!
Life at Kombo
It starts with our office. We like having a nice working environment so our office is close to Paris center, with nice furniture, space, calm, and light.
We also like to go out together. On average we do 1 Kombo night per month, and lunch in nice places regularly. As we love adventure, we like to discover new and unusual places.
This is just the visible part, we don’t take pictures often when we work!
Perks
We try to provide perks to our employees so that they enjoy their work.
First, we try to provide stock-options to all permanent positions. This aligns the interests of employees with founders and investors. We have an article about stock-options in Medium.
There are also a lot of other perks, to help you come to the office, to enjoy the usage of Kombo with cheaper train tickets, free books, expense account, etc.
And employees are free to propose other perks as well!
To conclude, the balance between performance and pleasure is key. They’re inseparable and they’re also one of the pillars of Kombo’s success so far. Therefore, if you feel like this is the kind of project and spirit you want to embrace, that you recognize yourself in the description of our team members, and you feel even more motivated after reading this introduction, then you may be the next successful person to join us.
Apply at Kombo by sending your CV and a short email: jobs (at) kombo.co.
