Can you start by introducing yourself? What were you doing before Le Wagon?
I’m Kevin, a Commercial Engineer graduate and I was working at a strategy consulting firm, carrying out projects going from financial services to private equity.
I always had been interested by technology and while working as a consultant, I felt like this wasn’t the sector I wanted to pursue as a career. I wanted to be able to move to a tech company and I was very interested in joining a startup or a company having that entrepreneurial mindset.
So, at one point, I decided to take a 3 months break to attend Le Wagon and learn new skills to evolve professionally.
I had the opportunity to follow some programming introduction classes during my studies that I really enjoyed and I wanted to dive into this subject a bit more. Yet, before applying to Le Wagon, while I knew I wanted to change fields and move into tech, I didn’t know if I would actually completely change career to head towards a developer job or if learning how to code was more of a way for me to understand this tech side better.
What can you tell us about your Le Wagon experience?
I really enjoyed the hands-on experience Le Wagon offers. You get to spend your days coding and gain a lot of experience. At the end of the bootcamp, I knew how to build a web app from scratch, which is impressive. It is a challenging training but you definitely learn a lot. Now, I understand what coding means, the work it represents and also understand the underlying issues developers may encounter.
Le Wagon is also a big community with many networking opportunities so you can also learn many things from others and you get to exchange with people with different backgrounds and experiences, which helps when you are trying to figure out your own career path.
Thanks to this experience, it became clear that my current job wasn’t what I needed and that I should move onto my own entrepreneurial journey.
What happened after Le Wagon? Did you take a step towards entrepreneurship?
First, I kept working as a consultant for about a year but I had that idea of launching my own company in mind.
In fact, I kept developing the app built during the last weeks of the bootcamp for a few months. We had created a carpooling app for schools and we developed a prototype and tested it in a school. We actually had something like a 100 users during the test! But the business model was’t profitable and we didn’t see how we could actually make this app evolve over time so we stopped there. But it made me more and more interested in having my own company and to work on a project with a team. You get to see the impact your product or service has.
Getting that first entrepreneurial experience showed me that building and launching a product with your team was the career I wanted.
So, from there, I decided to give it a go and launch my own firm with 2 associates and in 2017, Keyrock was founded.
Can you tell us more about Keyrock?
Keyrock’s purpose is to provide easy access to liquidity in the digital asset space and thus facilitating growth, stability and financial freedom through supporting markets.
We deploy proprietary, scalable and self-adaptive algorithms for clients.
We managed to raise over €6M in funding over 3 rounds, the first one being at the MVP stage, the latest round being a few months ago from a Series A round.
Keyrock is a growing company and we can’t wait to see it evolve even more!
I work with developers everyday and I get to understand their perspective and I’m able to exchange with them about projects. Le Wagon gave me the tools to communicate better with tech teams and that just makes everything easier!
Usually, there are issues of understanding between business and tech as the language used is not the same, and it makes it harder to grasp the full potential of a project, why some tasks take longer than others or why some business idea can’t be turned into a project technically.
I don’t work as a developer myself, so I don’t get to use all the coding skills learned but Le Wagon training is still very valuable to me as I can better communicate with our developers and work more closely with them.
A word of advice for anyone wondering if applying to Le Wagon is the right move?
Don’t hesitate, just do it!
It’s 9 very intense weeks for sure but it is definitely worth it! It was so great to be learning something for myself and to discover a new world and learn more about technologies we use everyday. It taught me a lot and comforted me in my career move.
