In this new episode of MuzzOsphère, Antoine Gigomas talks with Sébastien Boucraut, Partner and Chief Scaling Officer at Breega, about a decisive phase in a company's life: the first year after investment. Founders' priorities, strategic hiring, the risk of overheating, sales organisation, internal communication: a concrete overview of the decisions that shape a company's trajectory for the long term.
A hands-on episode about growth, discipline and the importance of preserving harmony to perform over the long run.
priorities for the first 12 months after a funding round
For Sébastien Boucraut, it all starts with the relationship. At Breega, support is pro bono: the first priority after a deal is to connect with the founders and make sure they want to work with the team. Next comes identifying the major workstreams ahead and the risks founders don't always see, driven by targeted questions rather than a plan applied from the outside.
The core of the work in the first months remains founder alignment. As Sébastien Boucraut explains in the episode, this alignment relies on a DISC questionnaire: the goal is not an exhaustive behavioural analysis, but to identify what dominates in each person, their triggers and their fears, to make communication within the founding team smoother. Several days are devoted to it, complemented by co-development sessions where real situations are worked through.
Last but not least among the foundations: the PVNV (Purpose, Vision, Mission, Values). Sébastien Boucraut insists that values shape everything else, starting with the quality of hires.
A company's values are fundamental. HR is quite often pushed into the background, and that's a huge mistake.
the hiring mistakes that cost the most
The first post-raise trap is hiring without stepping back. Hiring without an eighteen-month vision, handing out titles that are too senior and block the structure's future evolution, writing vague job descriptions with no KPIs or business case: all mistakes that are hard to undo. Sébastien Boucraut cites forty-person companies that still have no HR function, a situation he considers untenable.
The most costly mistake is more insidious. Hiring someone for their expertise alone, without checking their alignment with the values, can bring a toxic personality into the organisation. The risk is not only individual: that person's values end up becoming the company's, and the founder loses control of what they are building. The guest's rule echoes the matrix in “No Rules Rules”: keep only people who are both high performers and aligned with the values.
When you hire, you have to hire the best person for your organisation: top values, top performance.
An observation Antoine Gigomas ties directly to Muzzo's work: a large part of the job is helping employers pin down the profile they are looking for (skills, soft skills, values), with one simple rule: hire for what the person will need to achieve in the next eighteen months, not beyond.
preventing founder overheating and burnout
Overheating is an almost certain risk after a raise: passion, adrenaline, the pace of tech. Sébastien Boucraut, who went through burnout himself and then avoided a second one in 2018, draws a clear distinction between the two states. Overheating is pre-burnout; he warns against the habit of wrongly saying you are “burnt out”, because the subconscious ends up hearing it.
His framework comes down to three energy reservoirs: body, soul and mind. As Sébastien Boucraut explains in the episode, a drop in energy in one affects the other two, like connected batteries. Prevention takes discipline: power naps, short moments to refocus during the day, and above all aligning tasks with your own rhythms (keeping a demanding document for an energy peak rather than for right after lunch).
When your energy level drops on one of the three, it's going to affect the other two.
This is no side issue for Breega: according to Sébastien Boucraut, it now accounts for nearly 20% of the team's interventions, through the lens of energy and harmony.
weighing growth against solidity
Should you bet everything on growth when you raise from a venture capital fund? The guest's answer is nuanced: whatever the speed, some topics allow no compromise. Human resources come first, described as the lungs of the company: hiring well, building a coherent organisation and making sure teams move at the same pace. Sébastien Boucraut describes organisations split in two, one part at 300 km/h, the other at 50 km/h: a setup that has to be corrected, even if it means slowing down.
No matter how fast you go, there are things you can't compromise on.
This solidity does not rule out fast decision-making, quite the opposite. “When there's a doubt, there's no doubt”: better to decide quickly, even if it means making amends afterwards, than to delay out of hesitation. Sébastien Boucraut illustrates this with several high-leverage decisions: a fintech with an overpriced product, whose pricing grid was simplified and lowered (with a “core” version) to improve conversion before moving upmarket; hiring a supply chain manager at a hardware company, a role the founder had been covering alone; and parting ways with a toxic expert, which lifted the operational efficiency of the whole team.
His final advice comes down to one word: harmony. Scaling a company, he says, is like a musical score where everything has to be aligned and in tune. It ties in with an equation he likes to recall, performance equals capabilities minus interference: the leader's role is to reduce that interference to unlock the teams' potential.
the guest: Sébastien Boucraut
Sébastien Boucraut is Partner and Chief Scaling Officer at Breega, where he leads an eight-person team dedicated to supporting startups after investment. A former entrepreneur turned investor, he has organised this team into expertise verticals (talent and HR, growth and revenue, marketing and communication, finance, ESG), complemented by coaching for founders and C-level executives. Breega has invested in more than a hundred startups, around seventy-five of which are still active according to Sébastien Boucraut; the team has formalised its methods in the “Scale Room”, a library of pragmatic ten-page playbooks, templates and resources designed to be implemented directly by founders.
key takeaways
- The first 12 months are all about foundations: founder alignment, clear values, an eighteen-month hiring vision.
- A hiring mistake on values costs more than a gap in expertise: a toxic person imposes their values on the whole company.
- Overheating is prevented by monitoring three energy reservoirs: body, soul and mind.
- Speed is no excuse for any compromise on human resources or on the coherence of the organisation.
- Performance equals capabilities minus interference: the leader's job is to reduce interference.
