Announcing Our 5th CTO Meetup

The #P9EUtour is coming to Paris

A quick reminder about the #P9EUTour

In addition to our now traditional P9 Founder Summits, which we’ve been organizing every year for the entrepreneurs of our portfolio companies, we kick-started a new initiative this year which we’ve called the #P9EUtour. Almost every month, we pick 1 city, 1 topic and we gather a cool crowd of entrepreneurs and startup execs from our portfolio and from the local ecosystem to discuss it.

We started in January and already organized three. A Talent Camp in Berlin, an Internationalisation Workshop in Kiev, a B2B marketplace event in Berlin last month. We have other ones lined up in London, Munich and… Malta for the second part of the year but the next one to come is… a CTO meetup in Paris.

Point Nine CTO Meetups

My colleague Rodrigo started organizing CTO Meetups in various cities in Europe in 2015. Why? Because, in his own words, “There’s one kind of superhero that chronically gets less attention from us: founder CTOs and VPs of Engineering (sorry!). While software is eating the world, increasing competition means that speed of iteration is key to becoming a successful business. Tech founders have a critical responsibility there: they drive product development; therefore, their speed of development is what makes them winners.” We’ve thus been organizing a bunch of CTO Meetups since then in various cities across Europe. The video below is a good recap of the last edition in Paris 2 years ago:

With SaaStr Europe starting on June 12th, the broader SaaS ecosystem will be in town so we chose June 11th to organize our 5th CTO Meetup in Paris (again!). And we’ll be hosted (again!) by our friends at TheFamily.

#P9EUTour4: a CTO Meetup in Paris

The format will be very similar to those of previous editions. This will be a full day event for about 100 CTOs/VP Engineering of the best tech startups in Paris and of our broader European portfolio.

4 keynotes

• Michael Pilawski, COO at Typeform, will speak about “Designing Agile and Scalable Product Engineering Organizations”
• Guillaume Montard and Cédric Fabianski, CEO and CTO of Bearer, will discuss “Best practices dealing with API integrations”
• Quang Hoang, who, as a CEO at Plato, spends his days helping engineers improve will talk about: “What’s keeping engineering leaders up at night”
• Sacha Morard, CTO at LeMonde will end the day with a talk called “Do CTOs have to code?”

2 panels

• Rodrigo will moderate a panel on “Scaling teams” with Renaud Visage, CTO at Eventbrite, Laurent Perrin, CTO of Front, and Michal Pilawski from Typeform.
• In the afternoon, Renaud who’s joined us this year as Board Partner (🙌) will moderate a panel on “Scaling tech” with Laurent Cerveau, CTO at Zenly, Sylvain Utard, VP of Engineering atAlgolia and Dmytro Voloshin, the CTO at Preply.

16 discussion groups

We have come up with a new format for this year. After organising multiple meet-ups, we’ve come to realise that the best way to derive meaningful learnings from such events was to connect people that have faced similar challenges. We’re therefore pumped to announce that we’ve partnered with our friends at Plato to organize 16 discussion groups led by some of the most experienced engineering leaders of our broader portfolio and Parisian network:

• Charles Gorintin, CTO at Alan: “Evaluating which projects and tasks are top priorities”
• Jean-Baptiste Aviat, CTO at Sqreen: “Securing your infrastructure”
• Alison Eastaway, Head of Talent at Sqreen: “Scaling your engineering team”
• Evelyne Notton, CTO at Splio: “Managing Tech Debt”
• Nicolas de Nayer, VP of Engineering at Doctolib: “Overcoming the cross-functional chasm”
• Sylvain Utard, VP of Engineering at Algolia: “Deciding what to build versus buy”
• Pierre-Baptiste Béchu, CTO at Aircall: the topic is coming
• Francis Nappez, CTO at Blablacar: the topic is coming :)

That’s all for the program!

We’re restricting the event to 100 people, but as we’re always keen to meet new like-minded people, we’re opening 5 seats for applicants. Fill out this Typeform to get a seat!

A big 🙌 to Renaud Visage and to our friends at Plato and TheFamily for helping us in the organization.