Romain Kuzniak: from music to tech, then to entrepreneurship

Romain lives in Paris and is the father of two boys. After more than ten years in tech and a long run at OpenClassrooms, he's now starting a new chapter with Ignito, a SaaS platform to help teams gain efficiency.

But his path didn't start in tech. Before code, there was… music.

From music to code

A sound engineer and musician, Romain stacked gigs, concerts, and a day job at the Fnac.

"For ten years, I was below the poverty line. I was making €600 a month, plus a few gigs here and there. I loved music, but it was too hard to live on."

He hacked together a website for his band, and discovered code. When the Fnac started layoffs, a developer friend encouraged him to switch careers. He went for it, without really knowing what he was getting into.

Thanks to a continuing-education program at the Université Paris-Descartes, he went back to school at 28.

"Coming back to school with maturity was an incredible year. And above all, I clicked with development right away."

He landed his first job at a consultancy and discovered a world he'd never leave again.

The OpenClassrooms adventure

Romain joined the Site du Zéro, which would become OpenClassrooms. The company was still small, but already widely followed (2 million unique visitors per month).

He arrived at a pivotal moment: technical rebuild, fundraising, change of business model. Very quickly, he took over tech, then product and design as well.

Some key milestones from those years:

• moving from books and ads to subscriptions,
• structuring learning paths,
• launching the mentor program,
• RNCP accreditation,
• and above all online apprenticeships, which changed the game by making training accessible anywhere, anytime.

On the technical side, a risky bet:

"We implemented a clean architecture at a time when there was no documentation on it. We iterated, tested, and 12 years later, that architecture is still in place."

Scaling up

His team grew from 4 to nearly 180 people.

"When you're 4, information is easy to access. When you're 100, you have to delegate, set a frame, and keep a high-level view."

He drew inspiration in particular from Team Topologies and Conway's law: group together the people who communicate together, reduce cognitive load, organize teams so that the product reflects the user experience.

But he insists: the biggest mistakes don't come from technology.

• Hiring: "If there's a doubt, there usually isn't a doubt." Be uncompromising on probation periods.
• Culture: tolerating one deviation always ends up costing you.
• Fundraising pressure: "You're asked to hire fast. Sometimes too fast."

The slowdown and the layoffs

Like many scale-ups, OpenClassrooms went through a tougher period. A redundancy plan was launched.

"From a human standpoint, it's hard, because the process drags on for months. But paradoxically, it was a huge source of learning. We came out smaller, more aligned, and we gained in efficiency and quality."

He formalized a simple equation to guide his teams:

Value = Effectiveness × Efficiency × Quality × People.

Each factor counts as much as the others, and if any one drops to zero, the value produced drops to zero too.

• Effectiveness: working on the right things — the topics that really matter for the user and the business.
• Efficiency: how you execute, avoiding waste, friction, lost time.
• Quality: producing something reliable, robust, maintainable, that will hold up over time.
• People: the state of the team. Motivation, engagement, working conditions: without people, nothing holds.

"You can be fast and effective, but if you're working on the wrong problem, you create no value. You can work on the right topic with great quality, but if your team is exhausted, you don't move forward either."

Why he stayed for 12 years

He could have left earlier — there were offers. But three things kept him there:

• A strong mission, with concrete impact on thousands of students.
• A company that truly lived its values.
• Constant learning, at every stage.

"I didn't want to become the old grump who says, 'we already tried that.' When I felt my enthusiasm dropping, I knew it was time to hand it off."

Ignito: a fresh start

After leaving, Romain took the time to think. Travel, meet people, open up. Then it became obvious: launch his own company.

With Ignito, he wants to tackle a universal problem: inefficiency.

Not just productivity in tools, but everything that wastes time: useless meetings, poorly defined tasks, fragmented calendars.

"Ignito connects to your existing tools and helps you identify where you're losing time. The idea is to help product and tech teams become efficient again."

Becoming a maker again

After years of management, he found himself coding alone again.

Stack: Python + Next.js, with a big assist from AI.

"The hard part was retraining my brain. As a manager, you handle information in 5-minute sessions. Code is the opposite: focusing for a long time on a single task. I had to relearn that."

Another lesson: scale back the ambition.

"Before, even when we were lean, we had resources. Here, you have to simplify, aim smaller."

He's working with design partners and aiming for a first version in October.

The cofounder question

He's looked for a cofounder. It's hard.

"When you're starting out, you jump in with a friend. When you're more experienced, you become demanding: values, commitment, responsibilities. And you want someone equally experienced — and so equally demanding. The pool shrinks dramatically."

He also notes a cultural bias:

"In France, a CEO who comes from tech is still surprising. In the US, it's a non-issue."

For now, he's moving forward solo.

Current challenges

• Ship fast: get the first version out on time.
• Validate market fit: show the value before raising.
• Do everything yourself: code, sell, pitch, talk to customers, manage VCs.
• Absorb the highs and lows: stay the course through the rollercoaster.

But that's also what energizes him:

"In the end, my comfort zone had become scaling. Here, I'm at the very beginning, and that's a different kind of adrenaline."

What the career change gave him

• The habit of staying in constant learning mode.
• A sensitivity to harmony inherited from music, valuable in design.
• A sharp read of people, developed at the Fnac selling TVs to thousands of customers:
• "In 20 minutes, I was learning how to read people. Today, that helps me in management and in product."

His values today

• Integrity and fairness.
• Being simply good — at what you do and in your relationships with others.
• Get shit done.

His advice

• For a CTO: set a frame, stay aligned on your values, learn to delegate.
• For someone changing careers: be curious and stay in learning mode.

"Be curious and work hard — that's the best advice I can give."

In conclusion

Romain's path tells several things:

• A career change is possible, even with no initial background, as long as you keep your curiosity and your appetite for learning.
• The growth of a scale-up is never a straight line, and management mistakes weigh more heavily than technical choices.
• After leading a 180-person team, it's possible and even exciting to come back to writing code and learn a new craft: that of an entrepreneur.

A trajectory built on continuous learning, resilience, and integrity.

Ignito is just getting started, but one thing is certain: Romain isn't done learning, and isn't done surprising us.

Thanks to Romain for this rich, sincere, and inspiring conversation.