Why Transparency, Craftsmanship, and OKRs Beat Digital Playbooks all the time! 😵

Hey there, digital warriors! ⚔️

France 🇫🇷 just celebrated freedom. Yet in the software world, too many teams and organizations remain trapped. Caught in an era where building software has never been easier, but delivering value at scale has never been harder. While startups can spin up apps overnight and deploy to the cloud in minutes, many investors are pulling back. Why? Because they’re seeing the hidden cost curve: million-dollar AWS invoices, delivery pipelines that stall, and engineering teams that burn out before they scale up.

We’re hearing something loud and clear from the top tier of global capital: software isn’t keeping its promise. It’s no longer the lean, scalable growth engine it once claimed to be. In fact, it’s become one of the riskiest bets in their portfolio.

Over the past 18 months, we’ve interviewed 100+ top-tier investors, from PE firms, VCs, and operating partners managing billions. The people behind some of the biggest names in tech. Firms and Operators who backed companies like Uber, Airbnb, SpaceX, Shopify, Miro, and 50+ of the most promising Unicorns on the market. Organizations that scaled fast but paid a high price when software delivery went sideways. They’ve seen billion-dollar potential wiped out by software engineering failures. Today, many of them are asking:

Can software still deliver exponential value, or has the risk profile outgrown the return model?

And here’s what they told us:

• ❌ Software is one of the riskiest investments in their portfolio
• ❌ Due diligence often fails to measure software engineering capability
• ❌ Even funded SaaS companies are burning talent and money instead of scaling it
• ❌ Unicorns have a success ratio of roughly 2% and a death ratio of 50% in the first year
• ❌ Technical transformation success post-acquisition? Lower than 10%

The paradox?

Software is still the most potent growth lever in any modern business. Especially now with AI!

Which raises the fundamental question:

🤔 How do we reduce software risk, and design elite software + AI companies by default?

This week, we’re proud to launch a new format on Forge of Unicorns: CEO interviews from the battlefield. Not theory. Not panels. But raw conversations with the people who are actually building modern, scalable SaaS companies, and getting it right.

Our first episode features Adrien Salvat, CEO of Webinterpret. He didn’t raise more capital; he raised the bar for how teams are led, structured, and evolved.

The result? WebInterpret stands out as a robust, growth-oriented SaaS provider in the e-commerce enablement space. Its strong tech, recurring revenue, and global reach make it a standout investment. A model worth studying for anyone serious about building high-performance software organizations.

Talent Density Without a Billion-Dollar Brand

Adrien is not running Google, or Meta. He’s not hiring from Stanford. And yet, he’s scaling something that 90% of companies dream of: a sustainable engineering culture, built on purpose, trust, and mastery.

What makes Adrien’s story remarkable isn’t a big funding round. It’s how he:

• Rebuilt a company after founder trauma
• Retained talent through cultural transition
• Ignored GenAI hype to focus on real delivery systems

While most companies try to replicate big-tech blueprints, Adrien bet on something deeper: talent density over brand appeal. And it’s working.

“I believe a lot in the fact that top-performing people stay in an organization if they are pairing and working with other top-performing people.” — Adrien Salvat

So what does that formula for talent density actually look like?

The Talent Density Formula

Top-performing people stay when they work with other top performers. This isn’t just theory. It’s a pattern we’ve validated across 20 years of socio-technical research. Simple to say. Brutally hard to systematize.

Adrien’s edge? He’s architected an environment where:

• Hiring is thoughtful, value-aligned, and never rushed
• Technical leadership isn’t transactional; it’s embedded and enduring
• Learning happens continuously through structured, real-world practice

This didn’t happen by accident. It was designed and practiced day after day.

What Adrien built at WebInterpret reflects the same principles we’ve codified in the SW Craftsmanship Dojo®: A living system where pair programming, refactoring, and psychological safety aren’t optional ideals. They’re rituals. Operationalized. Repeatable. Embedded.

Not because someone read a book or heard a keynote. But because the team committed to mastering the craft. Every single day.

Because elite cultures aren’t born. They’re earned through daily practice. Which raises the real challenge:

As a CEO, how do you keep that evolution alive, without being consumed by day-to-day chaos?

From Culture to Delivery: Embedding OKRs

So how do you scale that cultural density without losing clarity? You embed it in the governance layer. That’s where OKRs come in. Adrien doesn’t use governance for performance theater to collect vanity metrics. He uses his own formula to:

• Align teams on behaviors that matter
• Tie delivery to long-term sustainability
• Anchor product and engineering excellence

But more than that, Adrien builds everything on a foundation of radical candor and transparency. From quarterly results to hard decisions, his approach is simple: tell the truth, early and often. This honesty, especially in bad times, creates a culture of trust that no financial incentive can replicate.

“If you’re transparent with your people, if you communicate well with them, and if you are genuine and honest, they give it back to you.” — Adrien Salvat

Adrien doesn’t lead with bravado or buzzwords. He leads with clarity. Whether it’s a celebration or a setback, he shares openly with the team. No spinning. No hiding. Just truth. That’s not just a leadership style. It’s a strategy for scaling alignment and commitment. To generate psychological loyalty.

Inside our research, this principle becomes tangible. Our OKR recipe isn’t about individual checkboxes or abstract KPIs. We define bold objectives as a team and design Key Results that reflect the behaviors we believe are necessary to achieve them. The result? A shared data-driven language that keeps intention, trust, and evolution visible, measurable, and social.

Because OKRs aren’t a dashboard. They’re the bridge between behavior, untapped human potential, and business results.

Final Reflection: What Kind of Company Are You Designing?

Most CEOs are chasing GenAI like it’s the answer to their delivery problem. Adrien isn’t.

He’s building talent density with clarity, humility, and trust.

Because evolution doesn’t start with frameworks. It starts with leaders willing to reinvent themselves:

• Adrien didn’t inherit a perfect culture; he rebuilt it.
• He didn’t panic under pressure; he leaned into it.

And when others chased AI trends or scaled recklessly, he asked better questions: Who do we want to be? How do we work together? What do we stand for?

That’s the playbook that doesn’t expire. It’s Slow. Intentional. Repeatable.

And it’s exactly what inspired us to build our next evolution: The Developer Studio.

Backed by 20+ years of research, we’ve built an elite force of software crafters. Engineers who master the full spectrum: from product discovery to delivery and beyond. People who eliminate cloud cost nightmares, join teams with zero disruption, and ignite excellence from within, without triggering transformation fatigue and riots.

They’re not just developers. They’re cultural fertilizer. Engineers who blend product thinking with delivery mastery, from day one. Passionate about building software that makes your customers fall in love, your culture gets stronger, and your delivery achieves a stable and sustainable pace.

This model is designed for forward-looking investors and CEOs, private equity operating partners, and transformation leads who can’t afford to wait years for evolution formula to naturally seed, germinate, and fruit. The Developer Studio is for those who need excellence to start now, and stay for good.

So here’s the real question:

Why keep gambling on hiring when you could embed excellence from day one?

If you’re tired of transformation frameworks that stall, of top talents ghosting your mission, of cloud invoices draining ROI while progress halts, then it’s time to stop improvising.

Because talent density isn’t a lucky accident. It’s a system. And we’ve built it.

The Developer Studio gives you immediate access to elite software crafters. Engineers who enter your org with zero disruption, inject clarity, build momentum, and model mastery that sticks. Not just lines of code. They shape your culture from the inside out.

If you’re serious about evolving your company without losing your people, this is your moment to act.

Let’s craft the team that your best talent will never want to leave.

📺 Enjoy the full interview

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