From engineering to leadership: Ludovic Fleury's journey

Ludovic Fleury shares nearly 20 years of experience in tech, from his early days through his roles as VP Engineering, CTO, and now CEO at Cloud IAM.

He looks back on his startup experiences, his mistakes (sometimes costly ones), and how they shaped his approach to management.

Early days: the luck of hypergrowth startups

Ludovic started his career in the 2000s and joined OpenClassrooms at the very beginning. He was their first dev, when there were still only four of them.

"It was a time when everything moved fast. Startups give you incredible opportunities. I was lucky to be there at the right moment."

He explains how that kind of environment sharply accelerates careers:

"I became a technical project lead in 2 months. Not because I was ready. Because someone had to be."

For him, that's the strength of startups: high stakes, incredible acceleration, but also the risk of growing too fast without being ready.

"You have to fight the Peter principle. The idea that you keep getting promoted to the next role until you reach the level where you're no longer competent. In a startup, you live this at warp speed. You take on roles you're not ready for, and you have to learn in production, sometimes painfully."

His first CTO role: the Plemy school

After those early experiences, Ludovic joined Plemy as CTO.

"It was a small company that needed to pivot to a crowdfunding model. We had a community-driven product that wasn't monetizing. We wanted to rebuild everything, and that's where I made a lot of mistakes."

He remembers wanting to go way too far:

"We wanted to build the Rolls-Royce of tech, when we hadn't even validated that we had a market."

A few concrete examples:

• Three months on OAuth 2, reading the spec and implementing it manually. When we didn't even have users.
• Choosing MongoDB when it had just come out. No community, no tooling. We had to build our own building blocks. Today it's standard, but at the time it was suicidal.
• Planning ultra-complex yield management for pricing and overbooking, when we had no traffic. We could have just handled it manually.

"We burned crazy amounts of time and energy building a beautiful factory… when we didn't even know if anyone wanted what it produced."

He took away one big lesson:

"You don't build to please yourself technically. You build to verify you're solving a problem and that it's worth investing in."

Golem.ai: structuring and managing a tech team in hypergrowth

After several adventures, Ludo joined Golem.ai, where he stayed 4 years, first as VP Engineering, then as CTO.

Why VP and not CTO right away?

"I refused to become CTO when I joined. I really wanted to do the VP role, focus on pure operations. Understand how you build a high-performing team, focus on management and technical execution."

When he joined:

"They had developed their own AI tech, but there wasn't a clear product yet. We had about ten prototypes to deliver in six months. We had to manage production and structure the team at the same time."

As VP Engineering, his role was to:

• Build and structure the teams.
• Oversee delivery of the prototypes.
• Put engineering management processes in place.
• Smooth out collaboration with product and business.

"I saw myself as the guardian of operations. The CTO role is more strategic: making the macro choices, contributing to the business. My job was to make sure things worked day-to-day."

Why become CTO afterwards?

"There was a leadership change. The CTO became CEO. And someone had to fill the seat. It started as an 'interim' role, but I accepted because someone needed to hold the shop together and manage the transition."

He likes the term "interim":

"It sets a clear, collective frame. Everyone knows it's temporary and that we're collectively responsible for the mistakes or adjustments. It's a way of saying: we're going through this transition together, we own the choices together."

As CTO, he discovered another level of responsibility:

"When you become CTO, you're no longer just responsible for the how. You have to make macro trade-offs. You're accountable for the contribution to the business."

And he insists on the human dimension:

"The team already knows you as their direct manager. Suddenly, you have to make tougher calls. You have to be clear about what's changing."

Why he left Golem

"I supported the strategic pivot. The team was ready for the next step. I think you have to know when to leave to make room for the right person at the right time. Otherwise you just become familiar. And the company needs new challenges."

Cloud IAM: stepping into the CEO role

Today, Ludo is CEO of Cloud IAM, a startup selling an Identity & Access Management solution to CIOs.

"It's a product for IT leaders. As an ex-CTO, I quickly understand the stakes. It's a mix of comfort on the technical side and discomfort on the overall structuring."

When he joined:

"It had been around for three years already, with good commercial traction. We needed to take it to the scale-up phase. Structure the business team, marketing, CSM, sales. On top of the technical leadership."

His first step:

"You can't change everything when you arrive. You have to observe. Understand the company, its numbers, its contracts. See how the teams work. Take the time before changing things."

A real challenge: the 100% remote culture.

"Structuring a 100% remote company is a real challenge."

"You don't have the coffee machine to sense what's blocking. Trust doesn't come from bumping into each other. You have to build it by working together on real topics."

"As CEO, I'm further from hiring and the day-to-day. The CTO is the one hiring, supporting people. Trust gets built differently and it takes longer."

Conclusion

Ludo says it himself: each step forced him out of his comfort zone. First by taking on roles without being fully ready, then by learning to make trade-offs, and now by leading a whole organization.

He has much more to share than this article, so for those who want to learn more I recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dib%5F9t-7Ht8