In this new episode of MuzzOsphère, Antoine Gigomas welcomes Maroussia Houimli, Partner and Chief People Officer at OSS Ventures, a startup studio specialising in the digitalisation of manufacturing that does more than invest in startups: it builds them from scratch. In six years, 22 of the 30 companies it has launched are still active.
The focus is a role that is still rare in the venture capital world: Chief People Officer at a startup studio. After ten years in human resources and recruitment, notably at Microsoft and then with startups and scale-ups, Maroussia Houimli joined OSS Ventures five years ago to hold the people function to the same standards as finance, tech or product.
Beyond the usual talk about company culture, this conversation tackles very concrete issues: why org design must come before strategic hires, how to spot in a future founder the drive that shows neither on a CV nor in an interview, why a funding round accelerates people problems rather than solving them, and how to turn a company's values into observable, assessable behaviours.
a startup studio that builds companies from scratch
OSS Ventures combines two activities, a venture capital fund and a venture studio, both verticalised on the digitalisation of manufacturing. The model relies on a nine-month cohort process, iterated seven times: OSS teams identify a market by going into the field, onto factory floors, then recruit two founders, a sales-oriented CEO and a tech-oriented CTO. For nine months, the studio injects funding and provides a full operating team (cohort manager, product, tech, go-to-market, finance, people). At the end, the founders raise funds, hire and take off on their own.
The equity split was calibrated over several iterations: OSS takes 25% of the equity, and the two founders share the remaining 75%. Below that, the model didn't work for the studio; above it, follow-on investors would no longer come in. Another deliberate choice: the founders are not paid by OSS. Their fuel is drive and the ambition to make their project succeed.
The track record shows what the model delivers: 22 of the 30 companies created are still active. And when a project stops, it is most often a market problem, rarely a people problem. Because the studio recruits the founders itself, it can replace them within the first 12 weeks.
drive, a future founder's uncoachable prerequisite
The founders OSS recruits typically have eight to ten years of experience. The number one criterion, ahead of any skill, is drive, the “founder energy”: a mix of determination, ambition, ownership and obsession with a subject. It doesn't show on a CV, it can't be taught and it can't be coached.
Maroussia Houimli cites concrete signals: an entrepreneur who starts another company after failures, someone who leaves a comfortable permanent job to build a business with no guaranteed pay, a profile so obsessed with a subject that they turn it into a company. In interviews, she assesses soft skills through behavioural questions (their relationship to failure, to feedback, to difficult decisions), backed by a scorecard. But the real assessment happens in real conditions, during a 12-week probation period paced by gates and feedback: how they react to difficulties, their ability to challenge their cofounder, product vision, ability to sell to manufacturers, ability to ship with limited resources.
The lessons from more than sixty founder hires are clear-cut. The worst mistake: rushing the process for an impressive CV, then discovering after launch a founder who is impervious to feedback, which wipes out the entire value of the model. The best surprise: a founder with no sales experience but exceptional drive, who learned to sell and got the company off the ground.
An exceptional founder in the age of AI without drive: it won't work, that's for sure.
org design before hiring
Org design is the blueprint of your house. As a rule, you don't buy the furniture until you've bought the house.
Most founders hire first and structure later. Maroussia Houimli argues for the opposite: hiring is the last building block of org design, not the first. The exercise follows a sequence of questions: what is the strategy? what skills are needed to execute it? how do you assess performance? how, and how much, do you pay? and what company culture holds it all together?
The example she walks through in the episode speaks for itself: hiring a VP Sales used to the mid-market to go after an enterprise market means confusing two different jobs (volume and resilience on one side, long cycles and C-level counterparts on the other). A year later, that person has reshuffled the teams, given everyone a raise and sold nothing. You have to let them go, the segment hasn't moved, and the teams wonder how such a mistake could have been made.
When should you trigger an org design? At every point of organisational stress, anticipated or imposed: a funding round, a growth milestone (from 20 to 60 people), but also a pivot, a wave of departures, a cofounder leaving or the signing of an unexpected major client. The company moves, and the org design moves with it.
a funding round accelerates people problems
Even before a term sheet is signed, Maroussia Houimli makes sure every issue likely to blow up after the raise has been addressed: hiring plan, how roles will evolve, pay scales, culture, any C-level hires. Because the post-raise reflex is to hire fast. OSS's role is not to slow things down, but to make sure hiring happens fast and well.
Misalignment between cofounders is the issue that takes up most of her time, because it is multi-layered and can't be settled in a single meeting. The warning signs: a founder who comes to talk to OSS before speaking with their cofounder, a head of department asking for a one-to-one, a wave of consecutive departures. The points of friction concern shared vision and strategy, more rarely pay (often the symptom of a deeper problem), and above all the division of roles.
The division of roles isn't so much about who does what in the company, it's about who I'm willing to stop being.
The intervention is gradual, as in the case of a CEO and CTO who hadn't spoken to each other for six months: individual conversations, then a joint meeting with a memo, then mandatory coaching and the hiring of two C-levels once the company was at risk. At each stage, the founders keep room to take back control. For prevention, two tools: observing the duo during the 12 weeks, and a partnership questionnaire that forces the fundamental conversations early on (the sacrifices each is willing to make, the target company size, desired pay three years out, how to react to a client misaligned with the company's values).
The Way We Work: from values to observable behaviours
At OSS, an internal document called The Way We Work makes expected behaviours explicit, drawing a line between having values and acting on them. Rather than writing “we are transparent”, the studio writes: business plans, board meetings, decision-making and feedback are open by default. Or: a junior is expected to challenge a partner. It is not tolerated, it is expected.
The framework is used in two processes: hiring (you hire behaviours, not just CVs) and performance reviews, which it makes more objective by naming the gaps between expected and observed behaviours. It is shared with portfolio startups and evolves with each growth phase: at 10 people you lay the foundations, at 30 you identify what no longer works, at 60 you reinvent the rules.
the guest: Maroussia Houimli
Maroussia Houimli has worked in human resources and recruitment for ten years. She started out in professional services, moved into tech at Microsoft, then managed a team at an RPO firm that places recruiters inside startups and scale-ups. That is where she got to know founders and HR teams across the startup world, before joining OSS Ventures five years ago. Now Partner and Chief People Officer, she spends half her time supporting the portfolio, 30% recruiting founders and the rest structuring the studio internally. The two key skills for the role, in her view: switching contexts very quickly, and having the courage for difficult conversations.
key takeaways
- A verticalised startup studio can show 22 active companies out of 30 created when founder selection and support are treated as infrastructure, not as a support function.
- Drive (determination, ambition, ownership, obsession) is a prerequisite that can't be coached: it shows in real conditions, not in interviews.
- Org design comes before hiring: you define the strategy and the skills needed before recruiting, never the other way around.
- A funding round doesn't solve people problems, it accelerates them: the difficult conversations must happen before signing.
- Values are useless until they are translated into observable behaviours, built into hiring and performance reviews.
