Kirsten Roennau, partner and Partner VISCONTI, meets Aurore Malherbs, CEO and CTO of Padok.

Aurore Malherbès is a former developer who has become an entrepreneur. 3 years ago, at only 26 years old, she founded with her partner Clément David, Padok, a company specialized in cloud expertise, which covers all stages from the design, implementation and security to maintenance of IT infrastructures. Today, this dynamic company is doubling its workforce every year.

For Aurore Malherbès, trust, listening and strong common values are, among other things, the basis of solid entrepreneurship. Spotlight on this modern entrepreneur.

Padok's objective is to ensure that their customers' development teams are in good conditions to deploy on production environments. In Formula 1, the paddock is where the engineers are. These must be fast and accurate so that the pilot can leave as soon as possible and focus on driving.

This image can be applied to Padok, with the pilot representing the developer who uses an infrastructure and the Padok teams the engineers who take care of that infrastructure. Concretely, Padok cloud engineers design, improve and secure the infrastructures that will support a site, a platform or an application.

The two co-founders decided to launch Padok because they were facing a common problem. The infrastructures they worked on were rarely stable and prevented them from getting production up and running quickly. They could not find suitable partners to meet this challenge and that is how the idea was born.

Aurore and Clément succeeded in setting up Padok successfully thanks in particular to two key ingredients:

- They are highly complementary.

- They built Padok within Theodo's startup Studio, which allowed them to have a favorable context (contacts, coaching, financing...)

Padok took time to find out exactly why he was there. The company works with American giants such as Google, but how can you be sure that Europe remains the guarantor of its data? Padok wants to find an answer to this sovereignty challenge, while continuing to work with American giants. Their raison d'être is therefore to help European leaders to transition to the Cloud, to emerge, with sovereign solutions.

From her experience, Aurore draws several lessons:

- values are the key to team cohesion ;

- participatory leadership allows teams to progress more quickly;

- the active listening of its employees is important and reformulating what they say makes it possible to verify the correct understanding;

- preparing your one-to-one by being a coach allows you to really develop talents;

- for the company to be well, its manager must feel good.

To focus on its first apprenticeship, Padok plans to recruit between 40 and 50 people this year. There are therefore strong challenges in terms of cohesion, progress and retention.

The best way to do this is to have shared values. With her tactical team (Management Committee), Aurore worked on different types of values: Core Values, Implicit values and Aspirational Values. Implicit values are unstated values that represent Padok, for example: caring. Les Aspirational Values represent things that need to be improved, such as being on time for meetings.

Les Core Values are the established values of the company. For example, there are three of them at Padok:

- Team spirit

- The desire to progress

- Pragmatism