Meet Cycle
Cycle is the AI-powered feedback management platform. Product teams can capture and centralize their customer feedback, process it into relevant features and opportunities, and allow them to close the loop automatically.
Cycle was founded by Mehdi Boudoukhane, and, together with their brilliant team, they joined eFounders to reinvent product management from the ground up. Today, the US-based company has a distributed team across France and Belgium.
Cycle
🏢 Industry - Product Management
💻 Location - United States, France, Belgium
👨👩👦👦 Team size - 10
💰 Funding stage - Seed
📅 Founded in - 2019
The Cost/Benefit Problem
Mehdi believed strongly in choice and personal investment as motivators to get the best out of employees. So when he integrated equity into his hiring practices, he provided new team members with three options: receive a small amount of equity in exchange for a high salary, a large amount of equity for a low salary, or median levels of each.
However, that setup also presented Mehdi with his first equity problem - it was far too complex to manage over time. So, the Cycle team transitioned to a flattened scale that standardized their equity picture going forward. Everything seemed to be on the right track.
But their problems were far from over.
Because they were facing a hard truth: equity was, for them, an expensive time monster. They couldn’t give stock options to their team without complying with local laws. That meant lawyers, follow ups, and constant management.
Truly, a second job nobody wanted. Expensive, time consuming, and mind-numbing.
Enter, Our Hero
But from struggle comes opportunity. And Cycle just so happened to have the right Head of Operations, Valentin Haarscher (we call him Val), to see through the fog. Because Val, who went on to become the founder of Easop, saw the need to fix this issue.
Lucky for Cycle, it drove him to search for ways to make equity compensation cheaper, faster, and more transparent to every stakeholder. Where he landed was this: there wasn’t a single solution on the market that came close to solving this problem. So he did it himself. Val created Easop to eliminate the headache of equity across borders forever.
To learn more about how Easop can solve your international equity headaches, just jump on a call with us. Get Started
Even after saying goodbye to Val as he went on to found Easop alongside Naël El Berkani and Thierry Colsenet, Cycle remained highly motivated to solve this problem. And since moving to Easop to manage their own equity, life has only gotten sweeter for Cycle.
Why Cycle Is So Excited About Easop
🗣️ Mehdi Boudoukhane, Founder @ Cycle
"Easop has taken the entire process of equity off our hands. All we need to do is decide who’s granted what, then grant it. No need to worry about what happens in between."
Prior to Easop, Cycle struggled to provide their employees with accurate information. Because the rules were different, one person often had to know everything about the laws and processes around equity for multiple countries.
It’s hard enough to be an expert in one country’s equity … multiple is exponentially harder. But with Easop, they’ve been able to provide their team with better, more accurate information at the click of a button.
Cycle doesn’t have to worry about equity grants on a country-by-country basis anymore. They can be sure that, across 70 countries throughout the world, Easop is available to provide up to date and easy to digest information about equity laws.
But beyond just the information - any peculiarities about a country’s equity landscape is implemented in the app. So Cycle can be sure that the documentation they produce through Easop is accurate every time.
Every equity grant is different, and before Easop, the differences from one team member’s grant to another’s was often confounding. It took too much time to sort through each one to understand things like how the post-termination exercise period, early exercise, cliffs, and vesting occurred on a person by person basis.
Since Easop, though, Cycle says the clouds have truly parted. Every employee’s individual situation is clear, and they can take better action more quickly than ever before.
Discover the future of stock option management with Easop. Your journey to seamless, compliant, and hassle-free stock option management begins here 📈
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