Benjamin Saada is a deeptech entrepreneur. In 2011, while still a student, he co-founded Expliseat alongside Jean-Charles Samuelian and Vincent Tejedor, with the ambition of making aircraft lighter through ultra-lightweight seats. After spending more than a decade leading the company, he launched Fairmat to tackle another major industrial challenge: recycling carbon fiber composite materials. The bet paid off. In just four years, Fairmat raised more than €100 million to industrialize its process, backed by leading investors including Temasek, Bpifrance and Singular. A trajectory that earned Benjamin a place in the top 10 entrepreneurs of the year 2025 according to Les Echos.
In this episode of the Sonnar Podcast, he reflects on what these two industrial ventures taught him about a key challenge for founders: how to hire and structure teams as a company scales.
Hiring the first employees: betting on potential
In the early days of Expliseat, the team remained extremely lean — around five or six people for several years.
With limited cash and little employer brand awareness, the company mainly recruited young scientific profiles, often through engineering school networks, but also through the founders’ personal connections.
At this stage, hiring relies heavily on trust. It is easier to attract people who already know the founders or their ecosystem than completely external candidates.
The challenge is not to find immediately experienced profiles, but people capable of growing alongside the technology itself. In an environment where everything evolves constantly, what matters is not only a candidate’s current skill set, but also their entrepreneurial mindset and ability to adapt. Most of the learning then happens through mentorship and hands-on experience.
Key takeaways
- Early hires often come through personal networks: trust compensates for a lack of employer brand awareness.
- When a company is still relatively unknown, candidates are attracted less by the brand itself than by the intensity of the project and the learning curve it offers.
- Hiring junior profiles does not mean lowering the bar: scientific excellence remains critical in deeptech.
When the startup needs to start structuring itself
During its first years, Expliseat operated without support functions: no HR department, no in-house finance team. Everyone was expected to directly contribute to value creation.
This model worked extremely well up to around fifteen employees. But beyond that point, it started to reach its limits. As Benjamin explains, at Expliseat, “the entire culture was oral.” As long as the team remained small, this worked. But once the company reached 30 or 40 people, this mode of transmission became much more fragile: interpretations diverged, alignment weakened, and the company had to start documenting what had previously remained implicit.
This transition toward a more structured organization can also lead to partial team renewal. Some highly entrepreneurial profiles thrive in zero-to-one environments, but less so once processes and structure become formalized.
Key takeaways
- Up to around fifteen employees, culture can largely remain founder-led and informal.
- Around 30–40 employees, organizations often hit their first real complexity threshold. At that stage, what was previously transmitted informally — vision, expectations, ways of working — needs to be formalized and shared.
- Team turnover is often a normal consequence of this transition.
Hiring becomes a method
“A successful hire starts with the ability to define exactly what you expect from the person joining the company.”
Between Expliseat and Fairmat, Benjamin also evolved the way he approaches recruitment.
At Fairmat, the hiring process is now much more structured: an ATS to track candidates, a shared evaluation framework, and interview training for managers. Teams can, for example, shadow interviews before conducting them themselves. As Benjamin puts it: “You shouldn’t run interviews until you’ve observed interviews led by people who are already trained.”
For highly specialized scientific profiles, evaluation cannot rely on intuition alone. Fairmat involves a scientific committee — including researchers and professors — and uses job-relevant case studies to spend time with candidates and observe how they operate. “What matters isn’t the answer itself, but seeing how the person works.”
The objective is straightforward: compare candidates using clearer benchmarks and reduce bias in decision-making.
Benjamin also insists on a simple idea: context matters just as much as talent. In his view, many people can excel if placed in the right environment. “Everyone is good at something. You just have to find the right sport.”
Key takeaways
- Hiring becomes more reliable when candidates are assessed through comparable signals: structured questions, shared scorecards, and clear candidate tracking.
- For highly specialized profiles in industrial environments, evaluation cannot rely solely on internal managers: external domain experts can play a decisive role.
Onboarding: taking the time to become operational
“Candidate onboarding starts during the recruitment process itself, from the very first interviews.”
At Fairmat, onboarding is highly structured. Every new employee receives a company-wide introduction to understand both the project and how the organization operates. A “buddy” is also assigned to support the first few weeks.
For technical roles, responsibility is introduced progressively. New hires begin in an “explorer” phase: they observe, learn, and familiarize themselves with the systems before becoming fully operational. Depending on the complexity of the role, this phase can last several months — sometimes up to a year.
The goal is not to slow execution down, but to secure decision-making in environments where mistakes can be costly or even critical. This principle applies to everyone, including senior hires: nobody is immediately put in a decision-making position until the manager validates that they are ready. The transition to “collaborator” status marks the point where responsibility is formally transferred.
As Benjamin explains, this phase helps avoid “putting someone in a situation of failure or excessive stress” before they have the necessary context and reference points.
Key takeaways
- Onboarding should not stop at introducing the company: it must help employees concretely understand how the organization works.
- In technical or industrial environments, ownership and responsibility need to be introduced progressively.
- The learning phase is part of the role itself and helps secure capability-building. Even highly experienced profiles go through a learning phase before becoming fully autonomous.
- Managers play a critical role in supporting this progression and validating when responsibility can truly be transferred.
Hiring in the US
Expanding into the US requires rethinking hiring standards. The market operates very differently: candidates switch companies easily and expect fast recruitment processes. “From the moment you shake hands, things need to move very quickly.”
In this context, competing on attractiveness against large American companies is nearly impossible. As Benjamin explains, “We can’t compete with shiny American companies — it’s impossible.” Companies therefore need to return to fundamentals similar to the early days: hiring high-potential profiles, accepting a degree of uncertainty, and building capabilities progressively.
Finally, the first lever is often internal. Rather than immediately hiring a full local team, companies should prioritize sending existing employees abroad to launch the new market and act as carriers of the company culture.
Key takeaways
- Speed is critical in US hiring processes: strong candidates can be lost within days.
- Hiring is less binding: candidates test companies more easily and leave quickly if the fit is not right.
- Internationally, local employer branding often matters less than expected: companies need to rebuild attractiveness through other means.