Boss and Left-Wing: No, I Didn't Walk Into the Wrong Meeting

There's a sentence I hear about once a month, usually at dinner, right after the cheese course: "Wait, you're a boss and left-wing?"

The tone is always the same. A mix of polite curiosity and the face you make when you discover a friend raises chickens in the middle of Paris. Nice, but clearly filed under "weird."

So let's say it right away. Yes. I run a company, I sign paychecks, I negotiate margins, I worry about cash on the 25th of the month like everyone else. And no, that doesn't stop me from thinking that sharing value, social justice and a bit of humanity at work are not dirty words.

The funny thing is that everyone seems convinced of the opposite. On the left, they sometimes look at me as if I had a wolf in sheep's clothing on my LinkedIn. On the right, they find me endearing, the kind of guy who'll finally understand "when he's really managed a crisis." I get zero medals from either side. Good thing I never asked for them.

The Initial Misunderstanding

We've been sold a simple equation. Boss equals right-wing. Left equals anti-business. It's convenient, it fits on a slogan, and it's about as true as "developers don't talk to humans."

In real life, a company is a collective. People who get up in the morning, who put their brains and their hours at the service of a common project, and who'd like it to serve something and someone. If that's not a deeply left-wing thing, I'll eat my keyboard.

The stereotypical right-wing boss, the one who compresses salaries to inflate EBITDA and calls it "managerial courage," exists. I've met him. But he doesn't have a monopoly on entrepreneurship. We just let people believe he was the default model, and we ended up believing it ourselves.

Left-Wing Isn't a Brake, It's a Strategy

Here's where I'll surprise you, or at least make you raise an eyebrow. I'm not left-wing despite being an entrepreneur. I think it's one of the best business decisions I've made.

Sharing value isn't charity, it's retention. The real cost of a company isn't the salary you pay, it's the departure you cause. A good engineer who leaves means six months of productivity, a client who trembles, a team that doubts. When people feel they're treated like adults and get their share of the pie, they stay. And when they stay, we deliver. It's that prosaic.

Transparency isn't some feel-good thing, it's performance. A team you hide the numbers from makes bad decisions, because they decide blind. A team that knows where we stand manages itself. It took me a while to understand, I kept the numbers to myself for a long time thinking I was "protecting" everyone. I was mostly protecting my own discomfort.

Justice, finally, is what attracts good people. And good people attract other good people. It's the only snowball effect I know that doesn't end in an avalanche.

Employment, the Issue We Abandoned to the Right

We ended up believing that caring about employment, the real, sustainable kind, was a union or ministerial thing. Meanwhile, entire sections of the "pro-employment" discourse boil down to "less charges, fewer constraints, less protection." As if the best way to create good jobs was to make them as precarious as possible.

I believe exactly the opposite, and not out of naivety. I believe we create solid employment by betting on people. By training them. By giving them prospects, mobility, reasons to project themselves forward. At our place, it takes concrete forms. We send people to live and work in Tokyo or Montréal without them having to advance a euro, because we think a talent who realizes a dream comes back better. We say "no" to contracts that would pay well but would grind our teams. We prefer to grow a bit slower and keep our people a bit longer.

Is that left-wing? Maybe. I call it building a company where people want to stay ten years. And incidentally, it works.

The Left, Best Friend of Business Creators

This one nobody ever brings up, and yet it's perhaps the most important. We managed to make people believe that sharing wealth was punishing entrepreneurs. It's exactly the opposite. The best soil for creating a company isn't a country where the rich are very rich. It's a country where you can fall without dying.

If I launched my company, it's because at the time, I knew that if I fell flat on my face, I had healthcare, a safety net, a society that wasn't going to leave me on the side of the road. The business creator isn't a cowboy who succeeds alone. It's someone who dares, and you dare much more easily when education, health and minimum protection are collectively funded. The countries that share wealth the most are also those that produce the most small companies. It's not a coincidence, it's mechanical.

And then there's the issue nobody talks about. An SME doesn't sell to three billionaires. It sells to normal people who have the means to consume. Concentrate all wealth at the top, and you kill the market for all the small entrepreneurs at the bottom. Sharing wealth isn't robbing bosses. It's manufacturing customers for them. The uncomfortable truth is that the left is the friend of the SME creator far more than the multinational that optimizes its tax to zero.

When It Gets Uncomfortable

I'm not going to sell you a fairy tale. Being a left-wing boss is mostly living permanently with a small pebble in your shoe.

You have to set a price, therefore a margin. You sometimes have to part with someone, and no speech about values makes that day pleasant. You have to arbitrate between what you'd like to offer and what cash flow actually allows. The weekends when I feel guilty about earning more than my teams alternate with nights when I'm scared I won't be able to pay them at all. Perfect consistency, zero. Sincere effort, every day.

Maybe that's the real difference, in the end. The left-wing boss isn't the one who resolved the contradiction. It's the one who refuses to pretend it doesn't exist, and who tries, case after case, to lean on the right side.

Why I'm Telling You All This

Because I know who's reading these lines. And depending on where you're sitting, this text doesn't quite say the same thing.

If you already work with us. You didn't land in a neutral, smooth, opinionless company. You work in a place run by someone who thinks the company is a formidable tool for advancing just causes, and who assumes to say it even when it makes people smile at dessert. Financial transparency, decisions that lean toward people, saying "no" to contracts that would pay well but grind teams: it's not HR marketing, it's the rule of the game here. You already know that. This text is just the written version of what you're living.

If you're hesitating to join us. We won't agree on everything, and that's fine, I don't recruit clones. But if the idea that you can make a living while doing things properly speaks to you, we probably have two or three things to talk about. You'll know exactly what you're getting into, which is already more honest than average.

If you're a client or prospect. You might be wondering if all this is very serious, or if I'm going to invoice my convictions as a supplement. Don't worry. A team that stays, that feels respected and knows the numbers, is a team that delivers better, longer, with less turnover on your projects. My "left-wing values," on the client side, are called stability and reliability. It's probably the best deal you can have with a tech provider.

And for those who still think boss and left-wing is a contradiction: come see us. Coffee's on us. Left-wing coffee, naturally.