Pierre-Yves co-founded Mindbaz alongside Coralie and Sébastien. Since then, his role as Technical Director (CTO) has taken on a new dimension as he has recruited new staff. Today, Mindbaz’s technical teams account for half of all employees.
Here’s a look back at Mindbaz’s major technical decisions and Pierre-Yves’s next challenges.
Open-source software: a discovery that shaped his career
An early career sparked by open-source software
August 13, 2001: Pierre-Yves discovers open-source softwares.
“It changed my life.”
“Before, I saw IT as a promising (for those not so young, it was the dot-com bubble era) and fun job, but by no means a job of passion. But then I was told that source code could be seen as knowledge.
To help society evolve, sharing this knowledge is essential. It was a real eye-opener, because this vision is fully in line with my values.”
Pierre-Yves Dubreucq, co-founder and CTO of Mindbaz
At the time, Pierre-Yves was on a work-study program to become a webmaster, before specializing in infrastructure management in a GNU/Linux-based environment. He continued his career in different structures such as industry, but also SSLLs (Société de Services en Logiciels Libres) like Audaxis, a subsidiary of the Rossel group, of which La Voix du Nord belongs.
“Working in a company that contributes to Open-Source Software made my job even more meaningful. I was a Systems Administrator, then I discovered management by becoming Manager of the web hosting department I was in.”
He then moved on to Alterway, another SSLL (now called ENL), before turning to OVH and joining Odiso, a Groupe Oxygem company, in 2013.
The professionalization of the Internet does not hold back Open-Source Software
2001 saw the end of the dot-com bubble. Some people began to understand the major impact of the Web. And yet, open-source was mostly confined to academics.
At the time, it was often said that open-source software couldn’t be a professional solution because it wasn’t backed by a company. If we take GNU/Linux as an example, we’ve gone from a hobby project to a dominant share of the server and corporate market.
The vast majority of cloud servers today run on GNU/Linux.
“Today, Microsoft has become one of the biggest contributors to open source, whereas at the time it was considered a kind of “nemesis”. It has even released its own distribution, Azure Linux, at the end of May 2023.”
“What I like is that for every problem, someone has already shared a solution or the first steps towards a solution, and if that’s not the case, it’s up to us. We’re involved and we’re helping society to evolve.“
Creating a new message-sharing experience with Mindbaz
When Pierre-Yves joined Odiso, he discovered the problems of hosting and sizing Mindbaz’s infrastructure, which was starting to grow vertically. His first steps were in the email routing industry.
After several years with Oxygem, then with the M6 group, managing Odiso, which hosts Mindbaz’s infrastructure among other things, he left to join Scaleway, the Cloud subsidiary of the Iliad group (Free).
A few years later, Coralie and Sébastien approached him to set up the takeover project.
To be read : Coralie Ladent, COO & co-founder of Mindbaz
To be read: Sébastien Lemire, co-founder and CEO of Mindbaz
At the time, Sébastien and Coralie were strengthening Mindbaz’s position as an email router specializing in deliverability.
“The 3 of us got on well together and kept in touch after I left M6. In 2021, we decided to team up to buy Mindbaz and boost the company’s development and internationalization. I’ll be in charge of the technical side, Coralie the product and customer service side and Sébastien the sales side.”
Mindbaz, which already provides routing services for companies wanting to send bulk emails, continues to develop its deliverability expertise.
In 2021, Mindbaz officially becomes independent, and the three co-founders build up the tools and services over the next two years:
- SMS router development 📱
- Creation of email training series🗣️
- Introduction of 3 types of audit for emailing managers
- Development of a multi-DB datavisualization tool
- Development of a feature for tracking database deliverability
These new features were made possible by the Mindbaz teams and new recruitments. This growth has been hailed by the Tech500 organization: Mindbaz has been selected as one of the 500 French Tech companies to join in 2023..
” We have other projects. Some are in development, others are still at the project stage. They’re all very promising.
We’ve recruited a devops team to help us speed things up. We’re recruiting in the other teams too. Léo, who joined us as a work-study student in 2022, will become a permanent employee in September 2023
We’re proud to see our teams growing in skills and numbers.”
Pierre-Yves Dubreucq
Find out about current recruitment opportunities to join Mindbaz
Mindbaz CTO: the challenges ahead
Controlling environmental impact
But innovations in marketing messages are not Mindbaz’s only technical challenges.
Pierre-Yves has a clear vision of his team’s objectives:
“We’re committed to keeping our digital footprint under control. We’re working to reduce it: which languages to use, how to improve our infrastructure, the impact of our service providers…
We want to provide quality services while consuming as little energy as possible.”
Joining impact projects
“The environmental image of emails is mostly negative, although in my opinion this is far from the truth. We’re aware of the climate emergency, and we’re working to improve our impact. For example, we’re very enthusiastic about the email expiry date project.”
In 2021, Pierre Yves and Jonathan Loriaux, founder of Badsender.com, co-wrote an article ( in french):
Digital cleanliness: towards empowering the email ecosystem?
The aim: to raise awareness of the impact of email and, above all, to provide a solution.
“Our observation is that companies will always send emails. But they should be deleted as soon as they become irrelevant. A promotional message is quickly useless, so what’s the point of keeping it around forever?
On the other hand, adding an expiry date to emails of limited interest is part of the solution.”
Jonathan Loriaux, his team and others with an interest in the subject launched the “Email Expiration Date” initiative to make this idea a reality.
“This project is great. The problem at the moment is that Mail Services Providers (MSPs) are not implementing it. By offering the feature, we hope other routers will follow. If all routers offer it, MSPs will probably be more active on the subject.
The day they do, our customers will be able to add this feature right away.”
Managing a tech team
“This is one of my challenges. I manage 3 teams, the Data team with Grégory as the manager, Software with Jessica and Devops with Aurélien.
I attach great importance to trust, autonomy and curiosity”.
Pierre-Yves’ Mindbaz adventure in 3 words
Team spirit • Expertise • Good spirits
Solidarity is spontaneously expressed by teams who trust each other. We pay close attention to this when hiring.
I like the fact that employees are sensitive to environmental and social issues.
It plays a part in the company’s decisions.
