Eric Devaulx, VISCONTI Coach and Partner, today welcomes Maxime Cartan, co-founder and CEO of Citalid, a company dedicated to the financial quantification of cyber risk.

Maxime joined the operational center of ANSSI (National Agency for Security and Information Systems) in 2015 as a specialist in intelligence on cyber threats. He specializes in offensive computer security.

Before joining ANSSI he was a partner at Hypermind, a startup dedicated to predictive geopolitical analysis. Since the end of 2017, Maxime has been the co-founder and CEO of Citalid, which is developing an SAS solution for managing security and cyber insurance investments by quantifying risks.

Who is Maxime Cartan?

Very attached to his region, Marseille, Maxime is a married man and the happy father of a little girl. Passionate about diving, in love with the sea and a lover of mathematics.

What were Maxime's drivers? What gave him the desire to start an entrepreneur?

Maxime gets up every day for three reasons. First of all, the vision and mission of Citalid. This is important because when you believe in what you are doing, when you think the project is useful (we in this case it is for people to be confident with cyber risk) you do not have the impression of working.

The second reason is the team, Citalid is a human adventure. And finally, his attraction to risk is a driving force, he wants to change the situation.

Moreover, it is this last point, this character trait that gave him the desire to be an entrepreneur. It is this idea of carrying out a mission against the odds. Doubled by the fact of being attracted to any new project.

Why the financial quantification of cyber risk?

Alexandre and Maxime, the two co-founders, were both at ANSSI. They observed that at that time, among the managers of large French companies, there was still a denial or poor realization of risk exposure.

They really decided to act when they intervened in a major strategic French company compromised by attackers and when the manager refused to hear from the ANSSI who was offering him an IT remediation plan.

To make him realize the tangible reality of this risk, they were forced to show him his emails, which the attacker had access to.

He then realized the business risk for his company. This type of experience reinforced their belief that managers should be involved. That is financial quantification.

The aim is to study the probability of the occurrence of a risk and its financial impacts in order to express to managers in their language that there are actions to be taken that fall within their decision-making power.

How do Alexandre and Maxime work?

Maxime did not feel like going alone and thought he had found the person who would complete him. Several key success factors:

• They have different ways of thinking, different personalities, and cognitive biases that are extremely complementary.
• Trust: they trust each other
• Common values
• A faith in the project. There is certainly no guarantee of success but knowing that there are two of them and will always have the same vision is reassuring.

There is a subject that Maxime is passionate about: collective intelligence. How is it expressed at Citalid?

Collective intelligence is part of Maxime's career. His two passions in engineering school were hacking and decision sciences.

Leaving school he crosses paths with two people, Emile Servan-Schreiber and Maurice Balick, who opened his eyes to the fact that a crowd can have very stupid reflexes but can also give birth to very beautiful things, to do so, it is necessary to create the conditions for this intelligence.

How does that work at Citalid? Among the conditions of collective intelligence we find, first of all, the diversity of profiles. This is an important point for them, they have always paid attention to hiring complementary profiles.

The second condition is to provide everyone with access to all information and the freedom to give their opinion with full responsibility. At Citalid, they therefore try to trust the people recruited as much as possible and to share information as much as possible.

Is Citalid a family? A team? A collective?

Often in the start-up world we hear that it is a family, Maxime is not necessarily at ease with this discourse. It is important to separate: it is still a job.

Citalid is a team, of course, a collective, and almost a crew. A crew that goes in the same direction remains committed, and convinced that they will reach the destination, all together.

Some key steps in learning to be a manager

Maxime has always had this entrepreneurial spirit, like Alexandre. During his studies, he had already set up a web agency and Maxime had joined a collective intelligence startup at the end of his studies.

During 2017, they decided to resign. They start working in Alexandre's room.

They choose the name Citalid, which is, at its core, an acronym: center for transversal investigation and analysis in defensive computer warfare. Quickly, they were supported in the creation of the company.

They realize that things are taking longer than they imagined.

They then went through several stages: fundraising, Covid, hypergrowth... In this period of hypergrowth, the team grew and the manager was then forced to move away from the initial team.

Keeping in touch with the teams is then a real challenge. You also have to learn how to separate yourself from people and know how to find the right balance between being close to teams and taking on difficult decisions.

What has changed in Maxime since the creation of Citalid?

A lot of things. He went from being passionate about cybersecurity to someone who practices the profession of entrepreneur. He has also learned a lot humanly: he is more confident in himself, is more assertive, more resilient. He knows himself better. There are two reasons for this:

• The importance of being accompanied: Visconti coaching helps him a lot;
• The fact of succeeding in motivating people of great value, sometimes with more skills than you: it's exhilarating.

The ten-year-old dream for Maxime and Citalid?

For Citalid, the objective is for any cyber decision to be made through Citalid.

If they manage to inject rationality, probability, knowledge of the threat and the cyber universe into decision-making, then they will be able to reduce the fear market, unlock cyber insurance, make CISOs and risk managers more confident in their decisions and align the cyber ecosystem behind this objective.

For Maxime, at Citalid, he always hopes to give priority to the team. Today at Citalid he enjoys working with employees and he hopes that this will continue as long as possible.

What advice would Maxime give to be an excellent leader?

• Perseverance, resilience
• Recruiting people who are better than you
• Fall in love with the sale, with the customers and not with the product
• “Doing the right thing and not a lot of things right”, which means prioritizing and focusing on one and the same goal

What would be Maxime's greatest lesson as a manager?

Remain yourself because we live in a world where entrepreneurship is still a separate profession. You should not try to stick to the image that people project about what an entrepreneur should be. To succeed, you have to turn your strengths and weaknesses into drivers in order to be able to inspire confidence.

What is Maxime's leadership style?

If we combine being ourselves and involving the whole team with collective intelligence systems, we have a good summary of Maxime's leadership style. Succeeding in setting a course and motivating people with his ingredients is something he particularly enjoys.

The coach's advice

• Remain yourself;
• Collective intelligence as a model for collaboration;
• Recruit autonomous people, better than yourself to be successful.