Alan's amazing culture helps ex-founders and entrepreneurs to thrive by giving them ownership and fast pace

🤓 Are you a founder looking for your next challenge in the healthcare industry? We are starting a series of stories of ex-founders who decided to join Alan.

🎤 Today meet Vincent Lambert, an entrepreneur who joined Alan as a Senior Ops Manager

Vincent’s background

• After spending 5 years in McKinsey, Vincent founded Idomed, an e-health start-up providing a communication platform for healthcare organizations.

• With his co-founder, they launched this project from the ground up, with a lot of passion and commitment

• The project still exists, but Vincent decided to onboard in a new experience at Alan

Vincent told his story in this Q&A video. Check out the transcript below if you’d rather read about it!

Q: Hello Vincent, can you tell us about your career?

Vincent: Well, my career path is pretty standard. I'm an engineer by training, and I started with five years in strategy consulting. Then I left and joined the world of startups, where I spent two years in between. After that, I created a company called Idomed, which was called Idomed because the company no longer exists, but the product continues to exist, and which is a kind of WhatsApp for healthcare professionals. So I ran Idomed for six years.

Q: Why did you decide to join Alan after your experience as an entrepreneur?

Vincent: I simply wanted to experience something different. So I chose Alan for three reasons. Firstly, I wanted to continue working in healthcare because it was a sector I really liked and in which I had found meaning. Secondly, I wanted to experience a different corporate culture. I was really attracted by that dimension. When I set up my own company, I realized that, in fact, whether you like it or not, a corporate culture is created. And so I became interested in this subject as I went along, and I think it's the kind of subject that you have to live through, and that it's hard to understand what a different corporate culture really is in years of books, and that you really have to live it on a daily basis. And the third reason I joined Alan was that I wanted a company that was more developed, bigger than what I'd known as an entrepreneur. And so Alan already had a few hundred employees, so it also matched that criterion.

Q: Before joining Alan, what were your concerns or worries?

Vincent: My main concern was the culture of the written word. I tend to be a bit of an extrovert, enjoying working with people around paper, pencil and board. So I wondered what it would be like to spend most of my time behind my computer writing things down. In the end, it worked out very well. Firstly because I like it, having the time to write things down, and because in Alan culture, it's not a question of forbidding meetings, but simply of making them as effective as possible by preparing them well and planning their content.

Q: How's your experience with Alan so far?

Vincent: Well, my experience so far has been very good, it's going really well. It's been almost a year since I joined Alan. The first thing that really surprised me was the time the company takes to welcome newcomers. The onboarding phase is very well thought out and supervised, and there's no pressure to deliver things in the short term. We really give people time to get used to this new way of working. 

Q: Why is Alan the right place for former entrepreneurs to pursue their careers? 

Vincent: Because it's really a company that values a lot of the qualities that entrepreneurs have, which are ownership, Alan is a company where you really have the ability to take a subject and see it through from start to finish. That, I think, is something very natural for entrepreneurs. And the bias for action. I think that entrepreneurs have this ability to decide quickly, to get things done, because they've learned that it's all very well to think and discuss things, but that you have to get things done quickly. And that's something that's also at the heart of Alan every day.

Q: How does the Alan experience differ from your past experiences?

Vincent: Well, the company I knew best before Alan was McKinsey. I worked there for five years, and the main difference I see between McKinsey and Alan is McKinsey's pyramidal organization versus Alan's decentralized organization. And that's a really interesting dimension, and not an easy one to grasp for someone like me who's been trained in the McKinsey school. Basically, the McKinsey model means that young people arrive and are trained in the McKinsey methodology, and then the managers, or the people above them in fact, learn to shape the young people in general by telling them how to do things. At Alan, we have a rather different culture, where the idea is really to give everyone a sense of responsibility. That's not to say that everyone does what they want, but there's much less of a culture of "I'll show you what to do". And you, your role, your function, your mission as a more junior person, is to learn how to do things the way I know how. And that's really, I think, very rich in the medium and long term for an organization, but it's less easy to explain and to live and implement than a classic pyramidal organization. 

Q: Thanks Vincent!

Vincent: Thank you, and see you soon at Alan's!