Start up: the Reality of Crises! – Thibault Renouf

Inspiration through Crisis: Understanding to Better Recover

Thibault began by explaining the genesis of his book: faced with the difficulties of the tech sector in 2022-2023, he observed a troubling discrepancy between journalistic coverage (focused on figures and layoffs) and the lack of sharing on crisis management methodologies. By listening to 100 hours of podcasts and reading all the books on the subject, he realized the importance of sharing real-time learnings.

This therapeutic approach led him to analyze Partoo’s past crises with hindsight: Covid, early 2022, market changes. As he explains with a wry smile: “it’s easier to deal with past crises than ongoing ones.” This approach allows one to learn to better anticipate future challenges, because “there will be others.”

Thibault’s honesty about his own mistakes is refreshing in an ecosystem often prone to showing only success stories.

Larry Greiner’s Growth Cycles: Every Solution Carries the Seeds of Crisis

Thibault introduces Larry Greiner’s model on the six types of organizational crises: leadership, autonomy, control, bureaucracy, growth, and collaboration. What fascinates Thibault about this framework is that “every solution to a crisis carries within it the seeds of the next crisis.”

Granting autonomy to solve a problem of power concentration will create silos and a lack of common strategy. Implementing a matrix organization to coordinate will slow down decision-making. This cyclical vision helps leaders anticipate the side effects of their solutions and prepare for future adaptations.

“The trap is believing that a problem has been definitively solved”, Thibault confides. “In fact, we are only creating the next problem. The art of management is to anticipate this evolution.”

Bootstrap vs. External Funding: Two Managerial Cultures

Partoo has experienced both growth models: bootstrap for 7 years (2014-2021), then external funding with hypergrowth. Thibault observes that these approaches create radically different managerial cultures. In bootstrap mode, proximity to teams is natural, and more stable growth allows for internal employee advancement.

With funded hypergrowth, everything accelerates: massive external recruitments, rapid structuring, more hiring mistakes. While hypergrowth generates excitement and allows for ambitious goals to be achieved (growth from 100 to 400 people in 2 years), it requires constant managerial agility to adapt to changes in pace and manage periods of contraction.

Thibault’s personal experience perfectly illustrates this duality: “In bootstrap mode, I knew the names of my employees’ children. In hypergrowth, I sometimes struggle to remember the names of new managers.”

In a nutshell…

Here are the three major lessons to take away from this Masterclass with Thibault Renouf:

• Learning from one’s crises: Analyzing past crises with hindsight allows for a better understanding of patterns and preparation for future challenges, which are inevitable in any growth.

• Anticipating Greiner’s cycles: Since each organizational solution creates new problems, transformations must be considered within their cyclical dynamic.

• Adapting management to the pace: Bootstrap and hypergrowth require different managerial approaches; the key is knowing how to navigate between proximity and structuring depending on the phases.

Don’t miss the next Masterclass!

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• Leadership is not taught, it is revealed at sea! – Amandine Deslandes
• From Special Forces to Private Sector: Leadership in Action – Alexis Bevillard