SaaStock Prais - Scaling beyond €50M ARR internationally: how Upsun structured its leadership team to grow fully remote?

Inside Upsen — Fred Plais’s Leadership Lessons from SaaStock

“There’s no manual for being a CEO. You learn through mistakes, crises, and conversations.”

At SaaStock Paris, Fred Plais, CEO of Upsen (formerly Platform.sh), shared his unfiltered journey from founder to mature CEO.
Over ten years, he built a fully remote organization spanning 30 countries, now at $50M ARR, with 60% of revenue coming from North America.
Upsen is one of the rare European scale-ups to combine durable growth, distributed culture, and operational clarity.

Fred’s core message to fellow executives: scale without losing clarity, trust, or humanity.

1. Remote by Design, Not by Accident

Upsen embraced remote work back in 2015 — long before it became mainstream.
At the time, most investors saw it as a risk.

“Some VCs told me: Even if it works, no one will buy you.”

That contrarian decision became a strategic advantage.
Today, Upsen receives 10,000 unsolicited applications every year without outbound hiring.
Fred boils it down to three rules:

1. Write everything down.
In a distributed company, spoken words fade — written ones endure. Every decision, playbook, and learning is documented.

“Writing is our spine. Without it, remote is just polite chaos.”

2. Embrace asynchronous work.
Slack isn’t a chat room — it’s structured communication.
Upsen bans lazy messages like ‘Are you there?’ and insists on context and clarity.

“Instant messaging is the enemy of deep work. We ban it.”

3. Meet to last.
Remote doesn’t mean invisible. Each employee must meet colleagues in person at least once per quarter.
Fred learned this lesson the hard way:

“I cut the travel budget for a year. Morale crashed. Never again.”

The takeaway: remote work doesn’t save money — it redirects investment into human connection.

2. Rebuilding Executive Cohesion: A Team Therapy Moment

Post-Covid, Upsen hit an invisible wall — performance was there, but energy and alignment were gone.

“I didn’t recognize the company anymore. It was a sum of high-performing silos, not a team.”

Fred turned to a consultancy inspired by Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
For three days, the exec team went deep into vulnerability, trust, and communication breakdowns.

The turning point came with one principle:

“My first team isn’t my department — it’s the executive team.”

That mental shift broke silos, rebuilt trust, and restored shared accountability.

“Trust isn’t built in offsites. It’s built in the courage to say when things are wrong.”

Every quarter, each exec now states two personal commitments:

• At my best, I… (what I bring to the team)
• Please remind me when… (the behaviors that derail me)

Simple but powerful — a recurring ritual that keeps vulnerability part of Upsen’s operating system.

3. Managing by Rhythm, Not Reaction

Fred often compares the CEO’s role to that of a drummer: keeping the tempo steady while others play the melody.

“If you don’t beat the rhythm, the company loses the tempo.”

Upsen replaced ad-hoc meetings with two consistent cadences:

The Tactical (weekly)
Duration: 60 minutes
Format:

• Quick round of key updates
• Collective selection of 5–6 priority issues
• Clear decisions documented and cascaded down

“A good meeting ends with decisions — and with who’s going to communicate them.”

The Strategic (bi-weekly)
Duration: 2 hours
Focus: 3 deep-dive topics (market trends, churn, product bets, pricing).
External contributors often join for added perspective.

These cadences are reinforced by quarterly offsites and biannual leadership retreats.
Every major decision is shared in writing across the org — visible, searchable, and transparent.

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4. Growing (or Redirecting) Talent

Upsen formalized two parallel career paths:

• The Manager Track, focused on leadership, communication, and alignment.
• The Individual Contributor Track, focused on technical mastery and measurable impact.

“Not everyone wants — or should — manage people. And that’s perfectly fine.”

Both paths are valued equally. At Upsen, a senior engineer can earn as much and have as much strategic weight as a manager.
This structure prevents the classic trap of promoting great specialists into poor managers — a shift that breaks both the person and the team.

“We moved one of our top engineers out of management. He’s ten times more useful now — and far happier.”

But the most powerful insight Fred shared was about what he calls the ‘Hero Employee syndrome.’

These are the high performers who seem unstoppable — always volunteering, always saying yes, always saving the day.
At first, they look like every leader’s dream. In reality, they’re a ticking time bomb.

“Hero Employees are the most loyal, the most passionate, and the most at risk. They carry the company on their shoulders — until they collapse. Our job is to protect them, sometimes from themselves.”

Fred admits that in the early years, he didn’t see the warning signs.
These employees became the emotional glue of the company — trusted by everyone, involved in everything, and ultimately spread too thin.
When one of them burned out, it was a shock.

“When a Hero crashes, it’s not just one person who stops — it’s a piece of your culture that goes missing.”

Upsen now watches these patterns closely. The leadership team tracks signals such as:

• Always being tagged on every project.
• Working late hours across time zones.
• Taking on “rescue” tasks outside their scope.
• Never saying no.

When that profile appears, managers intervene proactively: they re-scope the role, lighten the load, and often redefine success metrics to encourage sustainable performance.

“We’ve learned to celebrate the people who set boundaries, not just the ones who over-deliver.”

This philosophy also reshaped Upsen’s feedback culture. In performance reviews, saying no to an extra project or calling out a red flag is now seen as a mark of maturity, not resistance.

“In fast-growth companies, saying yes to everything looks like commitment — but real commitment is knowing when to stop.”

By reframing the Hero Employee narrative, Upsen has built a more balanced culture — one that values endurance over heroics, and collective consistency over individual sacrifice.

5. The CEO Must Also Be Coached

“You can’t lift others up if you’re not lifting yourself.”

Fred is blunt about this: CEO coaching isn’t a luxury, it’s infrastructure.
He works monthly with an executive coach (a former CHRO at Danone) to challenge his blind spots and keep perspective during turbulence.

Upsen now invests roughly 1% of ARR in leadership development — personal coaching, management training, and peer-learning programs.

“It’s CAPEX on clarity.”

He also emphasizes peer support:

“Being a CEO is too lonely to do alone. Talking with other founders is the best therapy there is.”

Key Takeaways

• Remote only works with strong written discipline and recurring face-to-face rituals.
• An aligned leadership team is worth more than ten isolated stars.
• The CEO’s role is to set the tempo without breaking the human rhythm.
• Coaching isn’t weakness — it’s a long-term investment in clarity and resilience.