Preserve start-up spirit at scale

MAËLLE GAVET: In France, we have a lot of holidays.

I would spend most of my holidays at my grandparents house. And every morning my grandfather, who was always waking up early, would come and knock on the door. And I would just get up, it was still pitch dark, that was the exciting times, like you didn’t know what was going to happen. 

We would have a piece of bread with a piece of cheese, to start the day. And then we would go to the garage, pick up our bikes, my grandfather would be leading the way, and we would bike across the countryside. And then by the time the baker would open, which is usually about 7-7:30, we would go there, pick up a fresh baguette, and then bike back home.

These bike rides were basically my childhood.

He would talk to me about his past, he was born in the south of France without a father. As a, what we call a “no-land farmer.” So someone who basically had only his two arms to work, and from the age of 12 started working to support his mother and, his siblings, and then World War II happened, and my grandfather decided, when he was 16 to, to go into the resistance and he, he lost part of his right hand when he was not even 18.

He went on, working three jobs to sustain a family, he had this incredible set of values that really resonated with me and that I carry to this day. 

He would talk to me about all the things that matter in life. He would be like, nothing worth doing is ever easy. He talked about why, saying you should always ask why. Because if you ask why five times, you’re going to get to the bottom of whatever it is that you’re looking for.

You need to understand why someone is asking you to do something or why you’re doing something. 

My grandfather used to say, thank you is the most important word. So ‘merci’ in French, and for him, this thank-you was more than saying ‘thank you’ because someone holds the door for you.

It was more like, ‘Thank you for the opportunity that I have to be alive.’ ‘Thank you for the fact that I have amazing grandchildren.’ ‘Thank you for the fact that there was fresh bread today.’ And so I feel like that gratitude, that way of looking at the world in a glass-half-full type of way, is so important to me as an entrepreneur, I see a lot of the decision-making that I follow, use this set of values that my grandfather drilled into my brain.

JEFF BERMAN: That’s Maëlle Gavet, CEO of the global start-up accelerator, Techstars. The wisdom Maëlle absorbed from her grandfather, Pierre, when she was a girl in the French countryside became the foundation for a remarkable career. She’s a founder, an entrepreneur, and a longtime C-suite executive. Maëlle was recently named to the list of Barron’s 100 most influential women in U.S. finance. She helped scale the Russian e-commerce giant OZON, raising the largest-ever venture round in Europe at the time, and she has held executive roles at massively scaled companies, including the real estate firm Compass and the Priceline Group. Maëlle became CEO of Techstars in 2021. Techstars is a pre-seed investor and accelerator program for early-stage entrepreneurs.

Maëlle embodies the spirit of entrepreneurship and is remarkably savvy when it comes to navigating large companies. It’s that mix that makes her story so rich to explore on Masters of Scale.

I’m Jeff Berman, your host. Our guest is Maëlle Gavet. I’ve heard Maëlle share her expertise with young entrepreneurs and with seasoned corporate leaders.

That made me eager to know her full story. From France, to Russia, and now the U.S., Maëlle has shown her ability to stick to steadfast principles — demonstrating gratitude and perseverance Amid great change and uncertainty. 

Copy LinkMaëlle Gavet on her time as CEO of the Russian e-commerce pioneer Ozon

I began by asking Maëlle how as a young woman from the south of France, she landed her first CEO role in Russia.

GAVET: I was working for the Boston Consulting Group. And I had just moved to Moscow because I was preparing to become a partner. And my very last project was for Ozon, which at the time was a small e-commerce company, probably one of a dozen e-commerce companies in Russia. 

And so I did that project, which was a very short project, probably six weeks, and I had this aha moment where I thought, “Oh, here I was working for that company as a consultant,” and I was like, “I wonder what it would be to work for such a company.” And the CEO at the time, approached me at the end of the project. And he was like, “We’re looking for a sales and marketing director. I think you’d be awesome. By the way, in about a year and a half, I’m going to leave Russia. And I’m looking for my successor and I want to be clear. There’s three other candidates internally. So I’m not telling you here’s the job. But if you’re interested, that’s something that you could try to get.” 

And there was a moment, where I was like, what do I have to lose? And so I basically went back to the office, and sat down with the senior partner at the time and was like, “I think I’m going to quit,” and I joined Ozon. I became the sales and marketing director, and then a year later, I was promoted to CEO, that’s how it happened.

BERMAN: In that moment, minutes away from becoming a partner at BCG, which is a dream career trajectory for many people. You’re presented with an opportunity where there really are no guarantees. Had you been a sales and marketing person before that?

GAVET: No, but I had been an entrepreneur, and when you’re an entrepreneur, you wear every single hat on the planet. And I think you develop this capacity to make things happen. 

BERMAN: At the age of 16, she started her first business organizing children’s birthday parties in France. She then aimed to get into an elite college. To differentiate herself, she learned Russian, not exactly the easiest path one could choose. As a teen, Maëlle visited Russia dozens of times to volunteer at an orphanage, and by 20, she’d founded an event planning business in Moscow. 

Maëlle had been through the entrepreneur’s zero-to-one phase, building something out of nothing. So when the opportunity to lead Ozon presented itself, she was excited because the zero-to-one part was done. But the company still had the energy, the attitude, and the unlimited potential of a start-up.

GAVET: I can work in an entrepreneurial company without having to go through the zero-to-one because I had been an entrepreneur three times before. And every time I was like, “Oh my God, the zero to one is so excruciating, and it feels so lonely, and you have to build so many things from scratch.”

And so I was like, “Look, the CEO, which I admire, which I think is very smart and very thoughtful, with a strong IQ and EQ, thinks that I have a shot at it. So yeah, sure, let’s go and do it.” But for me, the most important feeling, it was not even rational. It was like I felt fear and excitement at the same time. And that in my life has always been the signal that there is something I should be doing.

BERMAN: Not everyone leans into fear.

So what was that about for you?

GAVET: Not just fear, fear, and excitement. It’s the combination of the two because if I also, there are also times where I’m fearful, and I’m like, “Okay, let’s just step back and think about it.” But as a former entrepreneur, it was this moment where I was like, I am excited because I see something that could be really big.

I thought that this company had a real shot at becoming the largest e-commerce company in Russia and had all the basic infrastructure that, leveraged properly, would help them get there. And at the same time, there was a little bit of fear because it was like, It looks really hard.

It looks really complex. When I feel that combination of like there is something big, and maybe I’m not going to get it that I don’t know, maybe my inner competition is like, “yeah sure, let’s do it. Let’s just prove to the world that this can happen”.

BERMAN: Maëlle was willing to work hard, and that enabled her to savor the challenges.

She knew that by taking them on, she would learn and grow. But the work meant growing an e-commerce company in a country where half the population wasn’t online, where more than 80 percent of transactions were cash on delivery, where no one paid in advance, and where branded delivery trucks or uniforms could lead to armed robbery.

Maëlle says the country was eager to develop back then, in 2009.

GAVET: Russia at the time was a very different environment than what it is right now. 

I worked in Russia at a time where the country was very open to the outside world, foreign investors were coming and investing, you could feel the desire for the country to modernize. It was very cosmopolitan. There was a lot of big hope and big vision. 

I’m a relentless optimist. I believe that there is always a way to make things work. Thanks to my grandfather, I had a very strong compass in terms of what I am okay to do and not okay to do. When I was talking to him about why he decided to go into the resistance, we all know not all French people made that decision.

He was like, you gotta fight for what you believe in.

And so when the board of Ozon talked to me about joining them, we had a very open conversation about maybe you’ll be the next CEO. I had a very direct conversation with them just to be clear, this business has to be squeaky clean. There’s no other option.

I would not be running a business if I had to pay bribes.

That was a non-starter. And I would fight for what I believed in, and that included running a really, really clean business.

BERMAN: Maëlle stuck to her principles, and she succeeded. Whether you run a billion-dollar-a-year retailer or a small neighborhood shop, we all have difficult choices to make.

But they can be made with greater clarity if you’re guided by values and boundaries that you will not cross, no matter the pressure.

Under her leadership, Ozon raised a venture capital round of $100 million. At the time, in 2011, that was the largest of any company in all of Europe. 

By 2015, Ozon had reached a valuation of $1.5 billion. And perhaps more importantly, Maëlle had helped build Russia’s first nationwide retail delivery network.

GAVET: Part of the success of Ozon, by the way, came from the fact that we built the first nationwide private delivery infrastructure. And so we were able to deliver books, and toys, and mobile phones to places where, within whatever, less than a week, especially if you were to go all the way to Vladivostok, 

BERMAN: Vladivostok, more than 5,000 miles from Moscow, on the far eastern coast of Russia.

GAVET: You know, a place where sometimes, delivery was not even possible, or it would take like a month, two months, three months, five months. 

The key differentiator was that we were able to build that nationwide delivery system.

And I sometimes joked, but I don’t know if it was a joke. Like, I do think that Amazon did copy some of the things that we were doing because we invented pickup points. We had 2,000 plus pickup points across Russia because, at the time, in Russia it was all cash on delivery, and we had to figure out a way for people to get their goods and pay us at the same time. And so we created these pickup points, and then a couple of years later Amazon launches their own pickup points.

BERMAN: At the core, Maëlle and Ozon were simply responding to a logistics problem. Ozon didn’t become the largest retailer in Russia by simply deploying technology that was already available in other countries. Their solutions were specific to Russia’s population and its vast geography.

GAVET: I think technology is an amazing opportunity. But the challenge is to find the right balance. I think in Silicon Valley, there is this tendency to look at everything through the lens of technology and forget the human. And then, in other companies, there’s a tendency to look at everything through the eyes of the human and forget that technology is actually a great way to complement and enhance humans.

And so, it’s constantly finding this balance between. High-tech and high-touch, difficult. But when you hit that right balance, like that’s where magic happened. 

BERMAN: But larger forces came to bear on Maëlle’s success with Ozon. In 2014, Russia attacked its sovereign neighbor, Ukraine, and it annexed Crimea. The world responded with widespread sanctions, and the Russian government placed even more restrictions on online services. Maëlle decided that her time in Russia was over.

GAVET: I have not been back there since I left.

BERMAN: Was it hard to leave 

GAVET: Um, a little bit. 

BERMAN: What was hard about It?

GAVET: It felt that there was so much more that could have been done. And so, it was, it was just, it was just a little sad because I wanted to do even more, but I—

BERMAN: Well, you built so much, and if there was so much more to do, how hard, I mean, how incredibly difficult to then walk away.

GAVET: Yeah, a little bit. As my grandfather was saying, nothing worth doing is ever easy. You’ve got to fight for what you believe in, which means that if the right decision is option A, even if there’s a cost for option A, go with option A.

BERMAN: After the break, Maëlle embarks on her next chapter in the United States, where she continues to deploy her grandfather’s life lessons to extraordinary results.

[AD BREAK]

BERMAN: We’re back with Maëlle Gavet, CEO of Techstars, and longtime friend of Masters of Scale.

You can watch our full conversation and more on our YouTube channel.

Copy LinkJoining the Priceline/Booking Holdings ecosystem

Before the break, Maëlle was telling us about the difficult decision to leave her post as CEO of the largest online retailer in Russia. She had several options for her next move, and she wound up in the United States.

BERMAN: When you left, how did you decide what to go do next?

GAVET: I wanted to see a very big company, and I wanted to see a public company because I believed that at some point in my career, I would be taking a company, whether it would be my company, from the ground-up, or a company that would be hired to manage, to that unprecedented scale.

And I wanted to experience it from the inside, and I was approached by the Priceline group, which is now called Booking Holdings, which owns Booking.com, Priceline.com, obviously, thanks to William Shatner, everybody knows Priceline. OpenTable, Kayak, Rental Cars, Agoda, and I can’t remember,uh, a few others.

At the time, they were already, I think, a 70 billion market cap company. 

I had a ton of respect for the chairman of the board, Jeff Boyd. I’ve never seen someone run a public company board as efficiently as Jeff. He had this uncanny ability to have this great relationship with the CEO, but also with every board member. While at the same time being very, very directive in the way the board was supposed to function. And he seems to intuitively always understand that balance of, being friendly and being demanding, being open and being directive, encouraging people to participate into an open debate and yet close the debate when we’ve been around the block a few times. We’re good. Let’s move on. And so I think this, this incredible EQ around how to manage the dynamic of a board to make it really effective. And I saw Jeff Boyd do that, regularly and seamlessly, and to this day remains the benchmark for me in terms of what an outstanding chairman looks like. 

BERMAN: Knowing when to continue debate and when to stop and make a decision. That’s a critical skill for anyone in business. Maëlle rightly admired the chairman, Jeff Boyd, for his balanced leadership. She also admired the Priceline Group’s nimble culture, allowing the brands it acquired to maintain their unique pre-acquisition qualities.

GAVET: They were big and yet they had kept this entrepreneurial spirit.

Most of the brand was still being run by the founder, slash the original team. So Steve Afner was still at Kayak and he was still going around and, and, you know, making his interesting jokes on stage and, and, but also running the business from the inside.

And the group had figured out a way to create commonality and a camaraderie spirit, and yet keep them independent. So the founder would still feel like that was their business and they were still running it.

It was still a company made of entrepreneurs who were figuring out new things every day, on both big and small scales.

BERMAN: Why aren’t more leadership teams at big companies who are doing the acquiring looking at the Priceline/Booking model and saying, that works, we should be doing a version of that? 

GAVET: I’ve seen countless times, big companies buying a small company and not using these words but basically having that attitude of, like, I own you, you’re mine.

And so when that happens, inevitably, things are shifting step by step. “Oh, you decided to spend how much? On what? Why? I would never have done it like that.” And it’s one thing when you’re just looking at it from the outside, but when you own that business, and they just announced to you that they’re going to spend a few million dollars on something that you personally believe is completely silly, it becomes really hard to be like, let me look the other way and let them go. And I think the strengths of what the Priceline Group/ Booking Holdings were doing at the time, and as far as I can tell, are still doing was: “It’s okay, yeah, I would have done it differently, but I trust the founder.”

Copy LinkWhat Maëlle discovered as COO of Compass

BERMAN: From the Priceline Group, Maëlle was hired to be the chief operating officer at Compass, the largest residential real estate company by volume in the U.S. Leading operations at an American real estate company may seem as far as can be from delivering books to Vladivostok, but Maëlle found parallels in accountability.

GAVET: They’re a public company

It’s a business where ultimately, you have to show people houses and apartments. It’s a people-first business. It’s a lot on the relationship, and so finding this balance between, “we want to have a platform, we want to leverage data, we want to be a tech company, and yet we also are a people-first business,” and they had to figure out this interesting, hybrid model where you both, a tech company, and Robert Refkin, the founder of Compass, was very adamant about these businesses for real estate agents.

“Everything I do is to help them be better and make more money. And they are my customers,” and I saw Robert making dozens of phone calls every day to the agents in the network to wish them a happy birthday, a happy anniversary. “Hey, I, I heard you, one of your kids is sick. Is everything okay?” And so that personal relationship was absolutely critical to the business, and a lot of agents just came for Robert.

And this is why the Compass experience, which itself came from the Ozon experience where I had to run an ecommerce business but also 2000 physical pickup points.

And so, that hybrid approach was always really critical. 

Copy LinkHow Maëlle Gavet has scaled Techstars

BERMAN: With leadership jobs at household name companies, Maëlle’s latest move was not, perhaps, an obvious one. In 2021, she became the CEO of Techstars. It’s an accelerator that puts early-stage founders through a course of mentoring and fundraising preparation.

Again, she considered her options before taking the role, but her motivation to say yes came from a very deep and very personal place.

GAVET: I come from a family where we never used the word entrepreneur at the dinner table. No one explained to me that venture capital exists. No one walked me through a P&L and a balance sheet. 

And so I didn’t have the connection. I didn’t know how to raise money. I didn’t know where to find my customers. And when I finally understood what Techstars was providing to entrepreneurs, because I did my homework after two calls with the founder, I was like, I wish I had that when I was an entrepreneur.

Like, I wish I had people who deeply cared about my business and had this unbelievable network, and would be a safe space for me to talk about all the crazy stuff that I have to deal with. Because let’s face it, being an entrepreneur is basically a marathon full of crazy stuff happening one after the other.

BERMAN: Maëlle’s first task was to ask a lot of questions. She wanted to know why Techstars did what it did.

GAVET: Techstars was, at the time, very focused on developing local communities. but the company didn’t really think of itself as an investment business, which was very interesting. 

So we had at the time 280 employees, and I talked to every single employee one-on-one with the same set of questions, including one, which was: “What is Techstars? What is our business?,” and no one told me Techstars is an investment business.

And I heard everything. I heard we’re a marketplace. I heard we’re a SaaS business. And I remember going back to some of the senior leaders, and being like, “So we raise money, and we deploy money into early-stage start-ups, like we’re basically a pre-seed investor, right?” 

It’s like, yeah, but that’s not how, how we see ourselves. And so the biggest change internally, and that informed a lot of the strategy decision that we took, after I joined, was to look at ourselves as an investment business who is there to help founders be successful.

The founder is still absolutely critical. We live and die for the founder. We take common shares in the company. Like we are with you in the trenches, no matter what. But what we’re optimizing for is for you as a founder to be the most successful that you can be. 

And sometimes it’s going to be painful. But, like, remember, nothing worth doing is ever easy. 

BERMAN: Techstars expects the founders they work with to put in the effort, especially during the initial three-month program when they work with mentors, develop networks, and begin connecting with investors. Over 70 percent of Techstars companies raise capital within 3 years after the Accelerator program, more than any other global accelerator.

Successful Techstars grads include Zipline. The drone delivery service. Also, ClassPass, which delivers access to the world’s largest network of fitness courses. From Birmingham to Minneapolis, from Lagos to Tel Aviv, Techstars operates more than 40 programs around the world, and nearly all of the companies they work with are from outside of Silicon Valley. 

GAVET: Talent and ideas are distributed evenly, but opportunities are not. And part of what we’re trying to do is to bridge that gap, not because it’s the right thing to do, though it is absolutely the right thing to do, but because it’s a good investment case.

Like the best investors are the ones who go and invest in things that everybody else is misunderstanding. And so for us at Techstars, it’s a lot about, “hey, there is this entire group of founders who are completely overlooked by pretty much everyone else, we think that there is an opportunity there.”

BERMAN: One of Techstars key components is mentorship. Maëlle’s own journey is full of mentors, from John Boyd at Priceline to Robert Refkin at Compass to her grandfather, Pierre. And anyone who’s had a strong mentor, much less several of them, feels rightly compelled to pay it forward, imparting invaluable life lessons to others. 

BERMAN: When you think about the wisdom your grandfather imparted and what you’ve learned in your career, what are you telling CEOs and what are you doing when you’re faced with decisions about when to speak up or when to take a position on something happening in the world?

GAVET: The conversation I usually have with founders is around, “Okay, first of all, what are your values?” Not the values of the company though, when you’re the founder, usually the value of the company and your value do tend to overlap almost like a perfect Venn diagram, but what are the things, where do you draw the line?

What are the things that you’re okay to do and not okay to do? And it’s interesting to see that most people actually have never done the exercise of actually writing what are the values that they follow in their life, what are the lines that they are not ready to cross, and also, what are the things they are very comfortable with, even though maybe the rest of the world is not.

And so my conversation with our portfolio companies around this topic always starts with: “Tell me what your values are, and write them down for me.” 

BERMAN: Your personal values?

GAVET: Your personal values. Then the next conversation or the full-on to this question is, “Tell me, what are the values of the company?” Usually, again, if it’s a founder, they tend to overlap, but not completely.

And then I help them think about the decision they have to make through that lens. So there are events in the world where your company, in one way or another, is going to be impacted, and is going to be linked to. And in that case, you should use this value as a framework about what you want and don’t want to say.

But if it’s a topic that has nothing to do with your business, I generally advise the CEO to not talk about it, which doesn’t mean that they can’t, they’re not allowed to have their own opinion, but I try to have them separate.

BERMAN: Because if they do talk about it, it is assumed they’re also speaking on behalf of the company?

GAVET: Exactly. Exactly. And so whatever they say, whatever they do, uh, it’s basically, is a reflection of the company. 

I think everybody at Techstars, myself included, deeply believes that entrepreneurship is a force of good, sometimes misused, but generally a force of good. And, when you empower and support entrepreneurs, you create a better civil society, you create a better economic environment, you create jobs, you create everything that makes the life of everyone better.

BERMAN: Maëlle Gavet’s journey demonstrates the importance of having a strong support system as an entrepreneur, looking for opportunities in overlooked communities, and maintaining an unwavering set of principles. By sticking to what we know to be right and true, we not only do better in business, we do better in life.

If that isn’t motivation, I don’t know what is.

I’m Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening.