Emmanuel Straschnov is Co-CEO and Founder of Bubble, a visual programming software that makes programming as easy as pointing and clicking. Bubble counts more than 400,000 users; people have used it to start companies without technical resources and have either been accepted into YCombinator & 500 Startups or raised multi-million dollar rounds.
Born in Paris, Emmanuel studied computer science and mathematics at École Polytechnique and received his MBA from Harvard Business School. Before starting Bubble, he was a management consultant in China. He’s now based in New York.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Emmanuel Straschnov’s background, why Bubble was founded, and the company’s ideal customers
- What made Bubble appealing to Emmanuel and his thoughts on coding academies and bootcamps
- Emmanuel’s experience transitioning from student to Co-Founder for a tech start-up
- Why Emmanuel and his Co-Founder decided to bootstrap their business before fundraising
- How the Co-Founders hired their first employees and core team
- How Bubble attracts quality talent and Emmanuel’s take on the use of referrals and recruitment specialist partners
- Emmanuel’s advice on onboarding new hires for a tech startup and building and structuring teams
- The benefits of a company sharing its company culture with its users and followers
- The challenges Emmanuel faced when growing and scaling his team and the lessons learned
- Where to learn more about Emmanuel Straschnov and Bubble
In this episode…
Communicating with the users and followers of a company’s online content is a powerful method of creating awareness about the company’s mission, goals, and objectives. It also provides a good avenue for people to learn more about a company’s culture and work environment, and helps convert users to candidates for future job openings.
For a tech startup like Bubble, engaging with their users and followers has helped the Co-Founders attract and hire quality talent. This method helps candidates learn more about the company before joining, making the process of onboarding simpler and faster.
In this episode of Elevate Hire, Greg Toroosian is joined by Emmanuel Straschnov, Co-CEO and Founder of Bubble, to talk about how first-time founders attract top talent, why engaging with the users of a company’s products or services is powerful, and the lessons Emmanuel has learned from over eight years of building and running a tech startup.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
- Elevate Hire
- Bubble
- Contact email: contact@bubble.io
- Emmanuel Straschnov on LinkedIn
- Emmanuel Straschnov on Twitter
Sponsor for this episode…
This episode is brought to you by Elevate Hire, a talent acquisition firm which provides leadership and senior level recruiting services for early-stage companies. Elevate Hire also offers advisory and consultancy services for select clients.
Elevate Hire was founded by Greg Toroosian after more than a decade in the Talent Acquisition space, working with startups, globally recognized brands and recruiting agencies, because I found that too many early-stage companies were struggling to recruit and retain top talent during crucial times of growth.
Because recruitment and talent retainment are keys to having a successful company in today’s fast-paced economy, Elevate Hire is committed to helping you recruit the right top tier talent, at the right time, can differentiate the most successful companies from the rest of their field.
If your company needs assistance with talent search, hiring process improvements, choosing and implementing recruiting tools, team training, or if you’re in need of an advisor, get in touch with us today to find out how we can make this work so that you can start building the company of your dreams.
Click this link to learn more about us and the services that we can provide for you and your company.
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:04
Welcome to the Elevate Hire podcast where CEOs, founders and executives of early stage companies talk through their experiences and building teams.
Greg Toroosian 0:16
Greg Toroosian here, founder of Elevate Hire and host of the Elevate Hire podcast where I talk with CEOs, founders and executives about the challenges and successes they’ve had while recruiting for their teams. In this episode, we’ll be discussing how first time founders attract top talent, how probably communicating the impact of your company or your product is so powerful in hiring, and lessons learned from over eight years of building and running a tech startup.
This episode is brought to you by Elevate Hire, a talent acquisition advisory consultancy and execution firm who recruit leadership and senior level team members for early stage and rapidly growing companies. We believe that recruiting and retaining talent is key to having a successful company in today’s fast moving and ever changing economy being able to recruit the right top tier talent at the right time. In the most successful companies from the rest of their field, if your company needs assistance recruiting key team members improving your hiring processes, choosing and implementing recruiting tools, structuring and training your team or if you need an advisor then we can help. For more details visit elevatehire.com.
My guest today is Emmanuel Straschnov, co-CEO and founder of Bubble, a visual programming language for web and mobile applications whose goal is to make code obsolete. Emmanuel has a unique background and path to becoming a tech startup founder. So I’m excited to dive in here and find out more about his journey and what he’s learned along the way. Welcome to the show, Emmanuel. Hello. Great to be here. Thanks for making the time. I know things are pretty hectic for you guys right now very busy, which is great to hear. So firstly, when we jump into the show, I like to hand it over to the guests to share more information about themselves and their background. And actually in your case, what actually made you start Bubble.
Emmanuel Straschnov 1:54
So I actually didn’t stock Bubble like a founder did and I joined him after a few months. It was nothing corporate at a time so we both call ourselves founders. Okay, what do you have at that point was a very early prototype and I joined him again before there was no name, no incorporation of the company, but the concept was already there. And so he started that just you know, witnessing first hand because he’s technically was and he still is technical, the shortage of engineers in New York train and all these people having domain experts having smart ideas that honestly deserve to exist to see whether that could actually work as a company, whether it’s like a scaling startup or a niche product that would just make someone’s job easier, or like the smaller community, a small group of people’s life easier. And it was just not happening because you don’t have enough engineers in the world. And if you’re not well connected to raise funding, you basically will not be able to get this idea to life. And so everybody was pinging him. He had the personal experience himself as a tech co-founder of one of these niche products that didn’t work out because it was not enough to sustain his own life, and so he felt pretty strongly that was wrong. And we should find a software way to solve that. It’s not a new idea. I mean, the idea of applying that to starting companies is fairly new. But the idea of making programming easy and visual is not new. I mean, people have tried to do that for the last 40 years of technology. If you think of it, you know, the jump from MS DOS to Windows in the 80s was exactly about that. And it was using code to use a computer and then Microsoft and approved Macintosh came and said, No, you’re going to be using a graphic up, you know, graphic user interface to use a computer, we’re doing the same thing for programming web apps. And so that’s why we started it. We were like, you know, everybody needs to be able to create Airbnb type platforms, Twitter type platforms, without being technical, but just learning how to use the tool. And so the total credit takes about, you know, five hours, 10 hours, and then you can build these tools as these platforms yourself.
Greg Toroosian 3:54
Very cool. Very cool. So I’ll jump back into the previous question in a second, but so Who do you find tends to be your customers? Is it people who have their own website or own company that are trying to develop something just for there? Or are you finding it big companies or people just messing around as a hobby.
Emmanuel Straschnov 4:14
It’s more like non technical founders. So people at the early stage of an idea were looking for developers, basically 10 times. Come on us. A lot of hobbyists, you always have hobbies, you know, because people talk about you on blogs, we have hobbies, by the way, like, they come back to you when they actually need you. In the great big companies. Actually, there is a real need there. And so we have people coming from big companies as individuals, because they looked at us, you know, during the weekend thinking, oh, maybe I could start a project or start a side hustle or something interesting. That said, we’re not structured to save to serve large companies yet something we’ll do the coming years. It’s just a very different way to serve customers. We’re very much doubling down today on people studying companies or studying products instead. And the existing organization does. That’s not a big enterprise. It’s usually more like small businesses and startups. Okay. Very cool. Very cool. So going back to your background, because it’s non traditional, if you’re I take a step back, and I look at tons of people’s profiles
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