I’m Jerome Lacoste, a software engineer turned entrepreneur, based in Norway.
Bio
Ten years freelancing, 2002 to 2011, mostly for startups and SMBs. Then twelve at DragonBox and, after the acquisition, Kahoot! — 3 people to 35, then 65 to 600. A sabbatical year in 2022. Since 2023 I’ve been turning the by bonita companies around into profitability, and building PILOT Made toward its first customer.
So: a handful of small companies at different stages of maturity. My focus is strategy, business viability, and process — and, inevitably, building the software to support it.
I’m French, and Norwegian too since I moved here in 1998. Between a French-Colombian family and four kids, I get through French, Spanish, English and Norwegian most days.
What I write about
Projects — small technical things I build because they’re interesting.
Engineering — the software behind the companies. The domains are retail, e-commerce, app development and SaaS, and the surface is everything running a business requires: building the core product and delivering value; supporting the customer experience, from before someone is a customer through to keeping them a happy one; and whatever else the organization needs to move forward, in particular the back office — CRM, payroll, financial reconciliation, KPIs, big data. A friend of mine used to call these the invisible things. To me they’re the foundation of running a business smoothly.
Entrepreneurship — what running those companies has taught me. Which KPIs survive contact with reality, how to structure information so decisions get easier, and what’s actually worth measuring.
Businesses
- PILOT Made — aviation. Ahead of the aircraft.
- by bonita — the cafe, the flower shop and the restaurant, under one roof
Open source
- u3d — Unity3D installation and management tooling, from my DragonBox days
- fastlane — mobile build and release automation