Recently, we sat down with Lucie Le Naour, an active member of the Unicorns in Tech community. Lucie was a speaker at the Unicorns in Tech Summit 2022 where they shared their insight on how to build accessible and ethical tech. We wanted to hear more about Lucie’s first-hand experience of co-founding an organisation dedicated to social impact and share their expertise with you through this short interview.
Lucie, what’s your story as a Unicorn in the Tech industry?
I have done so many things in tech at this point! 😄 I originally entered the tech industry in 2014 as a Machine Translation Language Specialist. After 3 years I pivoted to technical writing which opened up many doors for me as I got to support a variety of teams across the product life cycle, such as backend and frontend engineers, designers, support teams, sales engineers, etc. These days I am working in UX as a freelance content designer with a focus on intersectional inclusion.
What’s the story behind Yourequal?
Yourequal was born in 2020, out of frustration with the lack of accountability in the tech industry. Long story short, one of my co-founders got passed over for promotion on her return from parental leave and when I reported it on Glassdoor, the review mysteriously disappeared after a month because it was suddenly “breaking the community guidelines”. My account also got shadow-banned so I couldn’t even use the website properly anymore. That’s when me and my two co-founders had the idea of creating an employer-rating platform by and for the community, a safe space for people to tell their experience without getting censored. We tell our story in a blog article on our website here if you want to know more! ☺️
Where do you see Yourequal in 5 years?
I feel like I can only tell you what I wish for at this point as 5 years is a very long time😅 I’d love it if in 5 years the Yourequal platform was out and we’d managed to enter the purpose economy. This is a long way out though!
What do you love most about your team?
I really love the way we support each other. It’s going to sound weird but Yourequal is the first company I’ve worked at where I’ve felt that people truly have my back and I don’t have to do it all on my own. Since then, I’ve only worked at one other company where I had this same feeling, so I feel like what we have at Yourequal is rare.
How are Yourequal’s values incorporated into the everyday life and culture of the company?
One of our core values is that we embed inclusivity in everything we do. In the everyday life and culture at Yourequal, this means that we let people guide us and tell us what they need, and we try to provide that so they can work in the way that best suits them. We also have a no deadline policy (except for things like grant applications for example 😅) so that everyone can work on their own timeline. We basically trust people by default to deliver what they say they’ll deliver and we try to make sure that people get something out of their experience with Yourequal (like new skills for example) since everybody works on a pro-bono basis at this point.
We’re seeing a lot of innovative start ups shift towards more socially and economically sustainable models, where have you noticed Yourequal push the industry forward?
Yes, I think people are getting tired of the current system and want to do business in a more sustainable way. At Yourequal we are openly anti-capitalistic and therefore entirely bootstrapped. We do not plan on taking any money that comes from VCs or banks to grow the project and want to pivot to a stewardship business model if the platform ends up being successful. This is the only way for us to ensure our mission remains social at its core and we certainly hope this way of working will contribute to some of the UN SDGs such as Decent work and economic growth (number 8) and Reduced inequalities (number 10).
A huge thank you to Lucie for sharing their story and for being such a fantastic example of social-actualisation. Now that you have had a sneak peek into what its like to co-found a company based on purpose and alturistic values, are there any ideas you would like to expand on? Maybe there’s a cause you have always wanted to address? Whatever it might be, we hope you keep up with folks like Lucie to stay inspired and hopefully soon enough you will be using Yourequal to review where you work.