Focus: Arthur, telling Joko’s story as the first employee
From working on one of the founders’ couch, without any product, to almost a million users and a team of 30+, I wanted to tell you my story at Joko, as the very first employee.
In this post, you will travel across six locations that are quite important to me and that correspond to key periods of Joko’s story.
Starbucks or the best place to get interviewed
Back in summer 2018, after 1 year learning code at “école 42”, I was looking for an internship. Among the different offers I browsed through, one stood out. The company was barely created at the time, but they were using newfangled technologies and I wanted to know more about them. So I applied. Soon after, I met over coffee two of its co-founders, Xavier (CEO) and Alex (CTO), at Châtelet’s Starbucks, in Paris. Later I would find out that we met there because back then, Joko had no office. 🤫
During this first contact, they pitched me their really ambitious project, and yet interviewed me with great humility and curiosity. After this discussion, I was convinced that joining Joko would allow me to contribute to create a great product while learning tons of things along the road. Spoiler: I was right! 🤓
Although, joining such a small team — basically only the founders — was a tough decision and a big bet. Indeed, Joko had no funding and the product wasn’t even launched back then. The story could have ended even before the end of my internship. But I took the risk and joined the team!
A couch is better than an office chair
The first weeks of my internship took place at Xavier’s flat, improvised as an open space. Note how working from a founder’s place is a good ice-breaker to start an internship. 🧠 At the time, the app wasn’t even on the stores, so to gather feedback, a test version was shared with friends and family.
Meanwhile, I was building knowledge on the stack. My very first project was to work on the back-office tool, which is still used by all the employees today!
Soon after, we received a positive answer from a famous incubator that had already backed famous French unicorns, like Criteo, Alan, and Doctolib. There, we were about to meet other great teams, be coached and have our first offices, finally!
We opened a beer — champagne was for later — for our couch’s farewell drink and we moved out.
Agoranov and its cute courtyard
Not only was Agoranov a great place to work, but it’s also the place where we released the app on the stores. An exciting time to be live! This drink where we released the app and watched the metrics just like a world cup football game was one of my best drinks ever. ⚽️
At the time, to avoid any scalability issue, you had to go through a waitlist to be able to register to the app. During the day after the release, an alarm rang every 10 minutes in the open space, notifying Xavier to accept a batch of users into the app. Yes, among the numerous letters hidden behind the CEO acronym, you have ASG, for App Security Guard! 👮
Even if we were a tiny team with a brand new app released on the stores, we were really cautious about building the best processes, making the right decisions, and moving fast on our product. This is now deeply rooted in the company’s culture and is shared among all the employees.
Lafayette Plug and Play and its awesome staff
To be able to satisfy our users and have them earn many points, we had to sign as many partnerships as we could. But it could be tough since partners were looking closely at the number of users we had, i.e. not a lot. 🐓🥚
So, to grow our business, we applied to Lafayette Plug and Play’s program which allowed us to meet more qualified retailers. We were the smallest team of the batch, but won the first prize at the end of the program thanks to Xavier’s awesome pitch! 🥇
Time was flying and my internship was coming to an end. I hadn’t graduated from “école 42” yet but Joko offered me to take a full time position and continue the adventure with them. Even if I was learning a lot at school, I couldn’t imagine leaving Joko where I had learned so much during those few months and tasted the thrill of shipping my own features. So I decided to accept the offer, quit school, and hop back on the Joko train.
During the following months, a lot of things happened, and it was not close to calming down yet. We closed a first seed round and joined Facebook’s acceleration program at Station F.
That day, we swapped our bottles of beer for a bottle of champagne! 🍾
Facebook startup garage at Station F
Lafayette Plug and Play’s program was more focused on B2B acquisition whereas Facebook’s program was more focused on the product side. We met cool startups there (Wilov, Avostart, The Bradery, …) and ate tons of tasty pizzas at La Felicita, Station F’s restaurant! 🍕
Thanks to our first funding round, we were able to hire new talents to help us build our product. It was also the perfect time to organise our first offsite and our first parties! 🎉
After a few months spent at Station F, the team was growing up, we had to find our very first cocoon…
First Joko’s office
I can remember the day we all moved into the new office after months of teasing. What a satisfaction to see Joko’s sign in front of the building after years of backpacking between different incubators!
The pandemic, and its many lockdowns, sadly kept us away from our brand new nest, but also gave us the opportunity to push further our ideas on remote work. We reworked all our processes — today, we have many members at Joko working in full remote from different places in France or abroad.
Of course, remote work doesn’t stand for “never see your colleagues again”, and thanks to our brilliant People team, we now organize twice as many cool events to gather the team!
A lot was built during these 3 years by such a small team. Yet there are still so many things left to achieve, and thanks to exceptional talents joining us every month, I can’t imagine where we’ll be in 3 years!
