Preserve start-up spirit at scale: Techstars’ Maëlle Gavet

The very best founders I know are brilliant at building systems. They connect teams, they remove bottlenecks, and they eliminate single points of failure. And yet When it comes to their own wealth. Most are running a disconnected stack. A tax accountant here and a state attorney there, a wealth manager who doesn't talk to either one of them.

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Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad, and more. Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great, We want you there with us too.

Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. In France we have a lot of holidays. I would spend most of my holidays at my grandparents' house.

And every morning my grandfather who was always waking up early would come and knock on the door. And I would just It was still not. Peach Dark. That was the the exciting time. It's like you didn't know what was going to happen.

We would have a piece of bread with a piece of cheese to start the day and then we would Go to the garage, pick up our bags. My grandfather would be leading the way. And we would bike across the countryside and then By the time the baker would open, which is usually about seven, seven thirty.

We would go there, pick up a fresh baguette. And then bike. Back home. This bad cries were basically my childhood. Talk to me about his past.

He was born in the south of France. without a father as a What we call a no land farmer. So сама у базилиха.

from the age of twelve started working to support his mother and his siblings and then World War Two. Happened. And my grandfather Decided when he was sixteen to

The resistance. And he lost Part of his right hand. When it was

Not even eighteen. He went on. working three job to sustain a family had This incredible Set of values that really resonated with me, and that I carry to this day.

You would talk to me about all the things that matter in life. We would be like Nothing worth doing is ever easy. He talked about why saying you should always ask why because if you ask why five times you're gonna get to the bottom. of whatever it is that you're looking for.

You need to understand why. someone is asking you to do something or why you're doing something. My grandfather used to say Thank you is the most important word, so merci in French. And for him This thank you was more than just saying thank you because someone holds the door for you. It was more like

Thank you for The opportunity that I have to be alive. Thank you for the fact that I have amazing grandchildren. Thank you for the fact that there was fresh bread today. And so I feel like that gratitude, that way of looking at the world. in um glass half full type of way.

It's so Important. to mi as an entrepreneur I s load the decision making that I follow. Use

This set of values that my grandfather drilled into my brain. That's my El Gave. CEO of the Global Startup Accelerator Tech Stars. The wisdom Mael absorbed from her grandfather Pierre when she was a girl in the French countryside became the foundation for a remarkable career. She's a founder.

An entrepreneur and a longtime C suite executive. Mail was recently named to the list of Baron's one hundred most influential women in US finance. She helped scale the Russian e commerce giant Ozin. raising the largest ever venture round in Europe at the time. And she's held executive roles at massively scaled companies, including the real estate firm Compass.

And the price line group. Mael became CO Techstars in twenty twenty one. Techstars is a pre-seed investor and accelerator program for early stage entrepreneurs. Mail embodies the spirit of entrepreneurship and is remarkably savvy when it comes to navigating large companies. It's that mix that makes her story so rich to explore.

On masters of scale. You gotta have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to this is totally gonna be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Working out of every bedroom parking. Ten years later I'm like, well that's just how you do it. We haven't made it just how you do it. This

is masters of scale. I'm Jeff Berman. Your host. Our guest is Mael Gave. I've heard Mail share her expertise with young entrepreneurs and with seasoned corporate leaders.

That made me eager to know her full story. From France to Russia. And now the US. Mail has shown her ability to stick to steadfast principles. Demonstrating gratitude and perseverance.

I made great change. And uncertainty. I began by asking Mael how as a young woman from the south of France she landed her first CEO role. In Russia. I was working for the Boston Consulting Group.

And I had just moved to Moscow because I was preparing to become a partner, and my very last project was for Ozone, which at the time was a small e commerce company. probably one of a dozen e-commerce companies in Russia. And so I did that project, which was a very short project, probably six weeks. And Агадіс ага момент. where I thought, oh

Here I was working for that company as a consultant, and I was like I wonder what it would be to work for such a company. And the CO at the time approach me at the end of the project and it was like We're looking for self and marketing director. I think you'd be awesome. By the way, in about a year and a half I'm gonna leave Russia.

And I'm looking for my successor and I I wanna be clear, there's three other candidates internally, so I'm I'm not telling you here's the job. But if you're interested, that's something that you could try to get. And There was moment where I was like, what do I have to lose? And so I Basically went back to the office.

and sat down with the senior partner at the time and was like, I think I'm gonna quit. And I like Join Hold on. I became the sales and marketing director, and then a year later I was promoted to see. That's how

In that moment, minutes away from becoming a partner at BCG, which is uh a dream career trajectory for many people, you're presented with an opportunity where there really are no guarantees. Had Been a sales and marketing person before that? No. But I had been an entrepreneur and when you're an entrepreneur you wear every single hat on the planet.

And I think y you you develop this capacity to Make things happen. At the age of sixteen, she started her first business organizing children's birthday parties in France. She then aimed to get into an elite college. To differentiate herself, she learned Russian.

Not exactly the easiest path one could choose. As a teen, Mael visited Russia dozens of times to volunteer at an orphanage, and by twenty She'd founded an event planning business in Moscow. Mael had been through the entrepreneurs zero to one phase. Building something out of nothing.

So when the opportunity to lead Ozun presented itself, she was excited. Because the zero to one part was done. But the company still had the energy. The attitude and the unlimited potential. Of a startup.

I can work in an entrepreneurial company without having to go through the zero to one because I had been an entrepreneur three times before. And every time I was like, Oh my God, the zero two one is so excruciating and it feels so lonely, and you have to build so many things from scratch. And so I was like, Well, the CO, which I admire, which I think is very smart and very thoughtful, strong IQ and EQ. Thinks that I have a shot at it, so Yeah, sure, let's let's go and do it. But for me the most important

feeling. It was not even rational. It was like I felt fear and excitement at the same time, and that in my life has always been the signal that there is something I should be doing. Not everyone leans into fear. So what was that about for you? Not just fear, fear and excitement. It's the combination of the two because if I I also there are also time where I'm like fearful and I'm like, Okay, let's just step back and think about it. But as a former entrepreneur It was this moment where it's like I am

Excited because I see something that could be really big. I thought that this company had a real shot at becoming the largest E commerce company in Russia. and had all the basic infrastructure that leverage properly would help them get there.

And at the same time there was a little bit of fear because I was like Looks really hard. It looks really complex. When I feel that combination of like there's something big. And maybe I'm not gonna get it. That I don't know, maybe my inner Competitive double is like, Yeah, sure, let's do it. Let's just prove to the world that this can happen.

Mael was willing to work hard. And that enabled her to savor the challenges. She knew that by taking them on, she would learn and grow. But the work meant growing an e commerce company in a country where half the population wasn't online, where more than eighty percent of transactions were cash on delivery, where no one paid in advance, and where branded delivery trucks or uniforms could lead to armed robbery. Myel says the country was eager to develop back then in two thousand nine.

Russia at the time was a very different environment than what it is right now. I worked in Russia at a time where the country was Very open to the outside world. Foreign investors were

coming and investing, you could feel The desire for the country to modernize. It was very cosmopolitan. There was a lot of big hope and big vision.

I'm a relentless optimist. Uh believe that. There is always A way to make things work. Thanks to my grandfather I had a very strong

Compass. In terms of what I'm okay to do and not okay to do. When I was talking to him about why he decided to go into the resistance because We all know not all French people made that decision. He was like you gotta fight for what you believe in. So when the board of Ozal talked to me about

joining them we had a very open conversation about Maybe you'll be the next CEO. I had a very direct conversation with them, just to be clear. This business has to be squeaky clean. There's no other option. I would not be running a business if I had to pay bribes. That was a non starter.

And I would fight for what I believed in and that included running of really Really clean business. Mael stuck to her principles and she succeeded. Whether you run a billion dollar a year retailer or a small neighborhood shop, we all have difficult choices to make.

But they can be made with greater clarity if you're guided by values and boundaries that you will not cross no matter the pressure. Under her leadership, Ozan raised a venture capital round of a hundred million dollars. at the time in two thousand eleven, that was the largest of any company in all of Europe. By two thousand fifteen, Ozan had reached a valuation of one point five billion dollars. And perhaps more importantly, Mael had helped build Russia's first nationwide retail delivery network.

Part of the success of Ozun, by the way. Came from the fact that we built The first nationwide private delivery infrastructure. And so we were able To deliver

Books. and toys and mobile phone to places where within whatever, less than a week, especially if you were to go all the way to Vladivostok. Vladivostok, more than five thousand miles from Moscow on the far eastern coast of Russia. In a place where sometimes delivery was not even possible.

Or it would take like a month, two months, three months, five months. The key differentiator was that we were able to build that nationwide delivery system. And I I sometime joked, but I don't know if it was a joke. Like I do think that Amazon did copy some of the thing that we were doing because we invented pickup points. We had two thousand plus peak up point across Russia, because at the time in Russia it was all cash on delivery and we had to figure out a way For people to get their goods and pay us at the same time. And so we created these pickup points and then couple of years later Amazon launches the own Pika Pun.

At the core, Mael and Ozen were simply responding to a logistics problem. Ozin didn't become the largest retailer in Russia by simply deploying technology that was already available in other countries. Their solutions were specific to Russia's population and its vast geography. I think technology is an amazing opportunity. We but the challenge is to find the right balance. I think in Silicon Valley there is this tendency to look at everything through the lens of technology and forget the human And then in other company there's a tendency to look at everything through the eyes of the human and forget that technology is actually a great way.

to complement and enhance human. And so it's constantly finding this balance between high tech and high touch. Difficult. But when you hit that right balance like That's where magic happened.

But larger forces came to bear on Maile's success with those and In twenty fourteen, Russia attacked its sovereign neighbor Ukraine. And it annexed Crimea. The world responded with widespread sanctions. And the Russian government placed even more restrictions on online services.

Mile decided that her time in Russia. Was over. I have not been back there since I left. Was it hard to leave? Um

A little bit. What was hard about it? It's um It felt that they were

So much more. been done. And so It was It was just It was just

A little sad because I wanted to do even more, but I Well, you built so much and if there was so much more to do, how hard I mean how incredibly difficult to then walk away. Yeah, a little bit. As my grandfather was saying, nothing worse doing is ever easy. you gotta fight for what you believe in, which means that if the right decision Is Option A, even if there's a cost for option A, go with option A.

After the break, Mael embarks on her next chapter. In the United States, where she continues to deploy her grandfather's life lessons to extraordinary results. When you've built substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position. The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious.

Creative planning works with business owners to build a strategy around concentrated equity. When to diversify, how to manage tax risk, and how to protect what you've spent years. Building. Creative planning where wealth works together. Learn more at creative planning dot com slash masters of scale.

Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's gonna be two types of companies. Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi. And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone.

Every week I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. and we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show. Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the rapid response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada.

It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. We're back with Mael Gave, CEO of Techstars and longtime friend of Masters of Scale. You can watch our full conversation and more on our YouTube channel. Before the break, Mael was telling us about the difficult decision to leave her post as CEO of the largest online retailer in Russia.

She had several options for her next move. And she wound up in the United States. When you left, um How did you decide what to go do next? Um

I wanted to see Um Very big company. And I wanted to see a public company. Because

I believed that at some point in my career I would be taking a company, whether it would be my company from the ground up or a company that I would be hire to manage. To that. unprecedented scale.

And I wanted to experience it from the inside. And I was approached by the Priceline Group, which is now called Booking Holding. Which owns. Booking.com, Priceline.com, obviously, thanks to William Schepner. Everybody knows Priceline. Open table, kayak, rental cars, agoda, and I can't remember uh a few others. At the time they were already, I think it was seventy. billion dollar market cap company. I had

A ton of respect for the chairman of the board, Jeff Boyd. I've never seen someone run a public company board as efficiently as Jeff. He had this uncanny ability To have this Great relationship with The seal but also with every board member

While at the same time being very very directive in the way the board was supposed to function. And he he seems to intuitively always understand that balance of being friendly and being demanding. Being Open and being directive, encouraging people to participate into an open debate and yet

Close the debate when We've been around the block a few times. We're good, let's move on. And so I think this incredible EQ around how to manage the dynamic of a board to make it Really effective. And I've I so

Jeff Boyd, do that. regularly and seamlessly and like to this day remains the benchmark for me in terms of what uh outstanding chairman looks like. Knowing when to continue debate. And when to stop and make a decision.

That's a critical skill for anyone in business. Mael rightly admired the chairman, Jeff Boyd, for his balanced leadership. She also admired the priceline group's nimble culture. Allowing the brands that acquired to maintain their unique pre acquisition qualities. They were big and yet they had kept this entrepreneurial spirit. Most of the brand were still being run by

the founder slash the original team. So Steve Afner was still at Kayak. And he was still going around and and you know making his interesting jokes on stage and and but also running the business from the inside. And the the group had figure out a way to create commonality and

camaraderies period and yet Keep them. Independent. So the founder would still feel like that was their business and they were still running it. It was still a company made of entrepreneurs who were

figuring new stuff every day on big thing and small things. Why aren't more leadership teams at big companies who are doing the acquiring looking at the priceline booking model. And saying that works.

We we should be doing a version of that. I've seen countless time. big company, buying a small company and No using these words, but basically having that attitude of like I own you. You're mine. And so when that happened, like

Inevitably things are shifting st Step by step is like Oh, you decided to spend how much? On what? Why? I would never have done it like that. And it's one thing when you're just looking at it from the outside, but when you own that business and they just announce to you that they're gonna spend a few million dollars on something that you personally believe is completely silly, it becomes really hard to be like, let me look the other way and let them go. And I think the strength of what

the Priceline Group booking holding were doing at the time and as far as I can tell I still doing was It's okay. Yeah, I would've Done it differently. But I trust a founder From the Priceline Group, Mael was hired to be the chief operating officer at Campus.

the largest residential real estate company by volume in the US. Leading operations at an American real estate company may seem as far as can be from delivering books to Vladivostok. But Mael found parallels in accountability. They're a public company. It's a business where ultimately you have to show people Houses and apartments. It's a people first business. It's a lot on the relationship. And so finding this balance between we wanna have a platform, we wanna leverage data, we we wanna be a tech company, and yet

We also are a people first business. And they had to figure out this interesting hybrid model where you both A tech company and Robert Refkin, the founder of COPESS.

Adamant about This business is for real estate agents. Everything I do is to help them Be better and make more money.

and they are my customer and I saw Robert making dozens of phone calls every day. to the agents in the network to wish them a happy birthday, a happy anniversary. Hey I I heard you one of your kids is sick. Is everything okay? And so that personal relationship was absolutely critical to the business. And a lot of agents just came for Robert. And this is why the compass experience Which itself came from the old zone experience where I had to run an e commerce business, but also two thousand physical pick up point, and so that hybrid approach was always really critical.

With leadership jobs at household name companies, Mael's latest move was not perhaps an obvious one. In twenty twenty one, she became the CEO of TechStars. It's an accelerator that puts early stage founders through a course of mentoring and fundraising preparation. Again, she considered her options before taking the role. But her motivation to say yes came from a very deep and very personal place.

I come from a family work we never used the word entrepreneur at the dinner table. No one explained to me that venture capital exists. No one walked me through a PL and a balance sheet. And so I didn't have the connection, like I didn't know how to raise money. I didn't know where to find my customers. I I And when I finally understood what TechStores was providing to entrepreneurs, because I did my homework and after two calls with the founder, I was like I wish I had that when I was an entrepreneur. Like I wish I had

People who deeply cared about my business and had this unbelievable network and would be a safe space for me to talk about all the crazy stuff that I have to deal with because let's face it, being an entrepreneur is basically a marathon full of crazy stuff happening one after the other. Myel's first task was to ask a lot of questions. She wanted to know why Textstars did what it did. Text was at the time

Very focused on developing local communities, but the company didn't really think of itself as an investment business, which was very interesting. So we had at the time two hundred and eighty employees. And I s uh I talked to every single employee one on one With the same set of questions, including one which was What is Text art? What is our business?

And no One. Told me Text Charge is an investment business. And I heard everything. I heard we're a marketplace. I heard we're a SaaS business. Then I remember going back to some of the senior leader and be like, so We raise money and we deploy money into early stage startup like

We're basically a pre seat investor, right? Yeah. But that's not how How we see ourselves.

And so the biggest change internally and that informed a lot of the strategy decision that we took after I joined was to look at ourself as an investment business who is there to help founders be successful. Th the founder is still absolutely critical. Like we we leave and die for the founder. We take Common shares in the company, like we are with you in the trenches, no matter what. But what we're optimizing for is for you as a founder. To be

The most successful that you can be. And sometimes it's gonna be painful. But like remember, nothing worth doing is ever easy. Techstars expects the founders they work with to put in the effort. Especially during the initial three month program when they work with mentors, develop networks, and begin connecting with investors.

Over seventy percent of Techstars companies raise capital within three years after the accelerator program, more than any other global accelerator. Successful TextStars grads include Zipline. The drone delivery service. Also, Class Pass, which delivers access to the world's largest network of fitness courses. From Birmingham to Minneapolis, from Lagos to Tel Aviv.

Techstars operates more than forty programs around the world. And nearly all of the companies they work with. Are from outside of Silicon Valley. Talent and ideas are distributed evenly, but opportunities are not, then part of what we're trying to do is to bridge that gap. Not because it's the right thing to do, though it is absolutely the right thing to do, but because It's a good investment case. Like the best investors are the one

who go and invest in things that everybody else is misunderstanding. And so for us at Techstars, it's a lot about hey, there's this entire group of founders who are completely overlooked. By pretty much everyone else, we think that there is an opportunity there. One of Techstar's key components is mentorship. Miles own journey is full of mentors.

From John Boyd at Priceline to Robert Refkin at Compass to her grandfather Pierre. And anyone who's had a strong mentor, much less several of them. feels rightly compelled to pay it forward, imparting invaluable life lessons to others. When you think about the wisdom your grandfather imparted and what you've learned in your career

What are you tells and what are you doing when you're faced with decisions about when to speak up or when to take a position on something happening in the world? The conversation I usually have with founders is around okay, first of all What are your values? Not the values of the company, though when you're the founder, usually the value of the company and your value do tend to overlap almost like a perfect Venn diagram. But like what are the things, where do you draw the line? What are the things that you're okay to do and not okay to do? It's really interesting to see that most people actually have never m done the exercise of actually writing What are the values?

Uh that they follow in their life? What are the lines that they are not ready to cross? And also what are the things that They are very comfortable. ways, even though maybe the rest of the world is not. And so my conversation with our portfolio companies around this topic always starts with

Tell me what are your values. And write them down for personal values. Your personal values. Then the next conversation or the full-on to this question is tell me what are the values of the company. Usually again, if it's a founder, they tend to overlap, but not completely. And then I look at the I help them think about the decision they have to make through that lens. So

There are events in the world where your company in one way or another is going to be impacted, is going to be linked to. And in that case. you should use this value as a framework about what you want and don't want to say. But if it's a topic that has nothing to do with your business

I generally advise the the CO to not talk about it, which doesn't mean that they they can't they they're not allowed to have their own opinion, but I try to have them separate. The two because if they do talk about it, it is assumed they're also speaking on behalf of the company. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And so whatever they say, whatever they do, uh It's

basically is a reflection of the company. I think everybody at TechSarge, myself included deeply believes that entrepreneurship is a force of good. Sometimes. But generally a force of good. And when you empower and support entrepreneurs

you create a better civil society, you create a better economic environment, you create jobs, you create everything that makes the life of Everyone. Mm. Better.

My El Gave's journey demonstrates the importance of having a strong support system as an entrepreneur. Mm. Looking for opportunities in overlooked communities. And maintaining an unwavering set of principles.

By sticking to what we know to be right and true. We not only do better in business. If that isn't motivation. I don't know what is.

I'm Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening. Masters of Scale is a Waitwater. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. The production team includes Chris Gautier, Tucker Legerski, Masha Makutanina, and Brandon Klein.

Mixing and Mastering by Erin Vasconelli. Original music by Ryan Holland. Our head of podcasts is Likal Mulat. Visit mastersofscale.com to find the transcript for this episode and to subscribe to our email newsletter.

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