Freelance consultant
Consulting work for various customers.

Sofinnova Partners (venture capital investment firm)

• Did three technical due-diligences of companies prior to the closing of investment deals. These are short assignments that give the investor a perspective on the technical aspects of the company (tech team profile, quality of the products and technology, adequacy of the technical choices, work methodology) before submitting the project to the investment board. The 3 companies I audited over time where in different sectors of activity : application software development tools, ASP providing E-mail marketing services, and SCM software solutions.

Vistaprint (self-service website for designing and ordering printed marketing materials)
In charge of several software development projects, all the way from the project design to development, testing, and delivery of the final code:

• Reduced SQL Server load - Analysed the current load on the RDBMS and the available solutions to reduce that load - Designed and developed a proprietary caching system reducing the number of hits on the DB server and thus improving performance.
• Reduced the online payment processing costs. Designed and developed a new unified and extensible payment processing platform. Market study of available credit card processing solutions. Integrated the selected solution on the new platform. Designed and developed a storing & forwarding mechanism to continue accepting payments even if payment servers or providers are unavailable.
• Designed and developed support for new payment services : German direct debit and paper checks.
• Eliminated the dependency, within the site's source code, on Microsoft Site Server Commerce Edition in order to eliminate non-justified licence costs.
• Designed / developed / maintained set of applications to feed all website sales related data into the company's financial system (Sage MAS500, SAP). Objective: fully automated accounting taking into account all website transactional data. This is a multi-year project.

E-Mail Vision (ASP providing E-mail marketing services)

• Analysed the current hosting environment of EMV production servers. Reported the critical points and the risks taken. Defined the requirements for a new hosting solution, and managing the search for an adequate provider.
• Did a technical due-diligence of a company to be acquired, specialized in hosting large marketing databases and providing ASP based datamining services.

Team Co Development (Transition management consulting)

• Quick analysis of their current hosting and software development partner. Reported the critical points and the risks taken. Defined the requirements for a new hosting solution, and managing the search for their new provider.
• Assistance in defining technical framework around a new business unit.

Vistaprint - Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer
Within 12 months built and launched an e-business site that became the leader in the do-it-yourself online document printing business, handling thousands of orders per day.

• Analyzed the company's business and online objectives, to build a project development plan, and select the best technical architecture. In this instance we decided to go for a Microsoft based solution (IIS, ASP, COM, MS Site Server, SQL Server).
• Recruited a software engineer and a website developer to building a first prototype of the site's front-end.
• Developed all the business tier and data tier : modeling and implementing the data model, providing access classes to developers. Developing all the shopping cart, billing and electronic payment system. Technologies used here where VB and VB Script ASP, COM, MTS, MS SQL Server 7, MS Site Server Commerce Edition.
• Once the prototype was built, we moved the company from Paris(France) to Boston(USA) and intensified our recruiting effort. Over the next 6 months the technical team grew from 3 to 15, including a senior CIO to take over the management part and leave me into my technical architecture and design expert role.
• Our achieved goal was to provide a fully automated backend from the user creating and paying for his design online, to printing and shipping the final printed product. It is this fully automated chain with high order volumes which brings our production cost to be very low and thus be very competitive.
• Within 2 months we were ready for the first release. Focussed on building the web site production center so that it was as reliable and redundant as possible. Selected our hosting center (Exodus), our network storage provider (Storage Networks), our PC hardware supplier (approx. 10 Compaq Servers), payment service provider (CyberSource), our network equipment providers (Cisco) and our load balancing equipment (F5). Setup all the systems with the help of our systems and network engineers.
• Did some load testing benchmarks and analyzed the results to predict our system capacity, detect weak points, and plan future upgrades.
• For the next release, worked on converting the application into separate components, going towards a web service approach. XML is used to encode all user documents and for data exchanges between components.
• Final project was to return to France, in Sophia Antipolis, and prepare our internationalization effort and plan for the technical deployment of Vistaprint in France, UK, and Germany.

MultiMania - Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer
In 1999, the MultiMania portal was hosting over 100 000 websites and was ranked 3rd most visited site in France. Today MultiMania has 1 million members.

Assumed multiple roles throughout the growth of the company.

Software and Web site Developer

• In 1996, was a Java pioneer and developed one of the very first applications that was then used by Sun for technology demonstrations on shows, and deployed for public access through a leading cable Internet provider.
• Developed multiple tools and libraries (in C++ and Java) to simplify our multiple web site development efforts by providing our developers with simplified HTML template-based tools, database access libraries, site management tools, and more.
• Designed all data models and managed their implementation on MS SQL Server, Sybase, or MySQL.
• As the team grew, participated mostly in the specification and design phases of all projects (20 or so projects over the span of 3 years) , and then managed the development among the other software engineers.
• The MultiMania portal was originally built on the following technologies : FreeBSD, Apache, PHP, MySQL. I was very attentive in building a highly modular and scalable system that can now handle millions of visits per week.

Operations manager

• Purchasing of all network and computer hardware for hosting our own sites as well as our customer's sites.
• Configuration and installation of all PC hardware, operating systems (Windows NT, FreeBSD, Solaris), web servers (IIS, Apache), and database servers (MS SQL Server, Sybase, MySql).
• Responsible for managing the uptime of all the websites.
• Developed and purchased appropriate technology for tracking website usage (internal + WebTrends), and managing website advertising (DoubleClick, Open Ad Stream).

Team Manager

• In charge of all technical recruiting and team management. Grew the team up to a dozen engineers.
• Managed the merging of two teams and different technologies after the acquisition of another company in 1998.
• Put in place procedures to better manage groupwork : reporting, bug tracking system, source code versioning, code reviews.

Company officer

• Assisted our CEO and the other 3 cofounders in running the company.
• Guided the company through its growth phases (single website publisher, then web services company, before finally building a major web site portal)
• The company went through three venture capital funding rounds, before its IPO in march 2000.