Scale Like a CEO

Nicolas Genest: Training Business-First Technologists for the AI Era | Scale Like a CEO

• Justin Reinert • Season 1 • Episode 45

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What if the real edge in tech isn’t code, but care? We sit down with Codebox founder and longtime CTO Nicholas Genest to unpack the “big reset” that AI triggered across engineering teams and hiring—and why the winners now pair sharp business instincts with humble, adaptive execution.

Nicholas traces his journey from leading teams at The RealReal and ModCloth to building Codebox, an academy and solutions company that trains business‑first technologists. He explains why so many organizations fell in love with low‑code: not to erase engineers, but to escape overbuilt systems and brittle attitudes. His answer is a talent model built on lived experience—nurses, teachers, baristas, drivers—taught modern full‑stack skills through intense simulations and coached to obsess over outcomes. The twist: students pay tuition only after they land a job, often via a share of first‑year salary, aligning incentives around real results.

We go deep on leadership, too. Nicholas shares how moving from founder‑CTO to CEO meant trading centralization for alignment, and why the hardest handoff was letting marketing adapt his voice without losing the core message. He promotes leaders from within to protect culture, turning seniors into coaches so values spread through practice, not posters. The conversation then looks forward: as AI levels coding, the technologist’s role splits into two critical strengths—mastering requirements and prompts to get the right output, and operationalizing systems in the cloud with security, scalability, and compliance baked in. That’s where seniority now shows up and where real business value gets delivered.

If you hire, manage, or grow engineering talent, this is a practical blueprint for the AI era: cultivate curiosity, teach people to care, and build teams that can both ask better questions and ship reliable systems. Subscribe, share with a colleague who’s rethinking their hiring playbook, and leave a review to tell us which skill you’re prioritizing this year.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Scale Like a CEO. In today's episode, we sit down with Nicholas Genest, founder of Codebox, to explore leadership development in the technology sector. Nicholas shares his mission to train technologists with essential soft skills for the AI era, transforming how we approach technical talent development.

Justin:

Nicholas, thank you so much for joining me on Scale like a CEO. Just to get us started, if you wouldn't mind, give us a 90-second intro to you and your business. With pleasure, thanks for having me.

Nicolas:

I'm Nicholas Genest. I'm a CTO. I've been in technology since 1999. Ever since I realized that you could make a career out of this. I've been working for Microsoft, Pfizer, Android Group. Then I landed in the startup world around 2007. I worked for the inventor of flash sales, VonPurvie.com in France. Then I got poached in Silicon Valley by the Real Real. I was the first CT of the Real Real. Then I contributed to the resurrection of Mott Cloth, which got acquired by Walmart. And I used these exits to create a company that became my calling. That's called Cold Box. And the Cold Box is an academy and a solutions company. And we train and deploy on the market technologists that are trained exactly the way I would have liked to hire them when I was a CTO and being ripped off by the industry during my years as a CTO. So essentially I'm on a mission to ride the wrongs and try to fix what I considered my industry to be broken with.

Justin:

That's great. You know, let's dig into that a little bit. So what problem does your company solve and why does that matter right now?

Nicolas:

Well, so my company is focusing on the behavior and the soft skills of technologists as opposed to focusing on the hard skills. And we we kind of tone down the need to be on top of the latest frameworks and the latest languages and all of this because two and a half years ago, as we all know, there was this huge line that was drawn by OpenAI and Chad GPT, and I call it the big reset. It it really levels the playing field, and coding is no longer a barrier to entry to good technology. And now what's more than ever, what's appreciated is technologists who are business first, who have grit, who have nimble and flexible mindsets, who are coachable and humble, who will care about the outcomes and the vision and the mission of the companies they work for, really care about the outcomes that they reach with their colleagues, whether they are stakeholders or colleagues and peers from the engineering world. So what we try to solve for is really double down on that soft skills component because we know that after a big reset AI brought to the world, that's what remains important.

Justin:

I really love that you're focusing in on that. I mean, even before that reset, as you call it, it was those kind of often called soft skills that were what differentiated a really talented technologist versus some that maybe they were a really great programmer, but they didn't work well in teams or they didn't actively work through problems effectively. So I love that that's the focus of your organization.

Nicolas:

We all have traumas of engineers telling you, trying to convince you that everything needs to be a nail because all they know is a hammer, all they have is a hammer, so everything needs to be a nail. And those are things that have really underserved our industry. And people were little by little calling us new lawyers, as with our tendency to resell our intellectual property multiple times, getting bad and bad press. And I saw this as a sign when the low-code, no code boom started with all of these low-code no-code platforms. And the first thing that companies wanted to do with this was get rid of engineers and say, Oh, we don't need engineers anymore. We have low-code, no code. We can put it all in the form of parameters now. And I really perceive this as a sign of this how fed up they are with technologists trying to make without us. So there must be reasons for it. And I drove into those reasons, and I try to find take excuses away from companies so that they can appreciate technologists again.

Justin:

Yeah, that's great. So and you've been growing Codebox for over seven years now, right? Yep. So our first program was launched in August 2018. Great. And so as you've as you've grown the company, what's one of the biggest shifts you've had to make personally? Kind of shifting from that founder to you know CEO of a of a company that you're building?

Nicolas:

Well, the shift was really around shaking off the can do it yourself, can do it all by yourself kind of mentality and reflex. When you're a CTO, you try to centralize and you try to to coach as many, as much as possible your your teams, and you try to give them guidance and you try you have a tendency to centralize the deployment of technology. And that's exactly the opposite that you need to do as a leader and a founder and a CTO CEO, is you need to get buy-in, you need to surround yourself with people with the right mindset, you need to spend a tremendous amount of time and energy on reaching alignment. You need to have the conviction that everybody is in it for the same reason as you are, and everybody understands why this particular destination is our North Star. Why doesn't matter the journey, but the the outcome is really what matters. And you need to you need to dedicate more time reaching alignment than than just falling back onto your own skill set and competencies and say, I'll table that, I'll do it later. Because you you'll never get to it anyway, and that'll that will drive your company to the ground. So you gotta surround yourself with people with the same mindset as you have, the same convictions, and and they need to be better than you at some of the things that you needed completion for. And Nicholas, how big is the team today? So the team is with the partnerships and all of this, we're close to being 45 collaborators.

unknown:

Yeah.

Justin:

That's great. That's great. And so looking back, what was the hardest role to let go of? So thinking about things that you had to delegate and kind of hand over to someone else, what was the most difficult?

Nicolas:

The most difficult one was because I'm really not talented at it and I have I feel I have no taste for such things, had to hand over my narrative, my purpose, and my communication lines to marketing. So that's what's been the hardest because when it's your idea, when it's your vision, when it's your ambition, you want to stay in control of the message, and you want everybody to understand what your purpose is, and you want to repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat. And it's not by repeating all the time the same thing that you actually achieve awareness. You need to create variety in your messaging, you need to adapt to audiences, you need to, and then this is the realm of a totally different skill set than I have. So letting go of my message and my purpose and have it being adapted by marketing and public relations people is really what has been complicated for me.

Justin:

Yeah, thank you for sharing that. And so, as you've grown, how do you identify and then develop leaders inside the business versus you know how many are you hiring from the outside?

Nicolas:

I don't hire from the outside. I train my own workforce and I turn them into seniors, and then I get them to become coaches, and then I get them to stick around and mentor others alongside me. So that's really because you don't understand what code box is and what we're about if you haven't graduated from code box. And there were eras during the growth of the company where we couldn't do that. We had to hire from outside and we had to somehow trickle down our culture to senior people who were not receptive. They were there were remnants of elitism in their heads, and we had to unmetal all of this. And this was a problem. It was taking time, and there were this unavoidable culture fit conversation that needed to happen. So we had to kind of drift away from hiring for culture fit from outside, and we really doubled down on the internal development of our resources.

Justin:

That's really great. You know, all the research would say that you know, those internal promotions are way more successful than trying to hire that from outside the organization. I'm curious, it sounds like you have a bit of a unique business model. Tell me a little bit more about kind of how your business operates, kind of bringing people in and bringing them through the program.

Nicolas:

It's specific because it's highly risky. So we take a lot of risks doing what we do. First of all, the people we cater to. So our audience, the people we want to train and the people we want to work with are tired nurses, fed up teachers, people waiters who remember everything, but they're just tired in their body. Starbucks, baristas, Uber drivers. So we have these people who've seen life, they've seen, they've seen people, they've seen, they have their own life experience, their walks of lives, and we we take advantage as we leverage that experience to turn them into business first technologists. So that creates friction point right there because you need to teach them for most of them, you need to teach them technology from the ground up. They don't know what coding is, they don't know, and we have four months to get them there. So that's a very hard thing to do. And the program that we built is essentially built into giving them experience through simulation and help them project themselves into doing the role from four months from now. So that's the first thing that's specific in particular. And some people don't make it because they realize throughout the journey that well, technology is not what I thought it was. I thought it was simpler, it was more streamlined, I thought it was not not as exception-driven. Possible, I wish it had been more about technology than business. So we understand that our approach is not the right one for everyone. So that's one of the aspects that makes it specific. And the second is we take so much risk. So the tuition on the program is only paid if the individual graduates from the program. And graduation for us means getting a job. So if you get a job from a partner, a placement partner that we have, or if you get a job on your own, or if you get a job from get hired by our solutions division, then you receive your tuition invoice. And then we have this payment plan that we put in front of you. Either you can you can borrow money from our financial partners, but most of the time we pay tuition with a sliver of their salary. So they will give us 20% of their first year salary, and that'll be the invoice they get, or they'll be over six, nine, twelve months with a sliver of for the duet solutions. And that's how they use for you can say that you only owe something to cold box when you get a job, actually, when your career has kick started.

Justin:

That's really great. I love that business model, and that's great for the folks that are joining the organization or you know, kind of going through the program to build a career for themselves.

Nicolas:

There's a huge reward in believing in people. You get satisfaction not only by having turned lives around, but revenue from partners you do the course of, you get it from the students themselves who turn their lives around, and you get it from the we deploy to do tailor-made software development, who build agents, artificial intelligence agents. So sit back after tremendous patience and risk.

Justin:

Yeah. And so, you know, I'd love to kind of go back to the you know, identifying and then developing leaders internally, you know, as you're building those leaders in the organization, what are some of the attributes that you're looking for in those folks?

Nicolas:

Well, the first one is definitely results-oriented, or I call them business first. So, what makes a difference between an elitist technologist and a technologist from Codebox is we will teach them first to care. So whether you are working in the wine industry, or that you're working in the resale, recommerce, luxury watch re-commerce marketplace, whether you are working for the goodwill movement, whether you were gonna be working for for Walmart or for it what it it you need to embrace and get passionate about the cause, about what the platform does for a living. We spend a lot of time doing that to get people passionate. So, because if you get them there, they care. And the number one thing that makes software engineers and developers and technologists feel satisfactory to customers or stakeholders is because they don't seem to care. They move on, they have this propensity to call it done and move on and go to the next thing and never come back to it, and which is it's it's not how it works in the real life. So teaching them to care, so being business first is the first. And then the second is humble and coachable. So it's not something that is intuitive to our industry or to our profession, but being okay with the fact that, all right, so there was this conversation or there was a meeting that happened at the end of a day, and I didn't know much about the topic. I didn't know what the technology was, I didn't know what this design pattern was about. And it's one thing to not know about it at the end of a day, and not knowing about it the next day. So we teach our participants, our students, to care enough to ramp up on the subject the very next day they're fluent and they understand. And now what they felt bad about not knowing the day before, they're fully capable of understanding and grasping the next day. So this is also something that we and there are techniques to do this. It's highly appreciated by the stakeholders to have people who can just adapt and turn and become knowledgeable about something really, really quickly.

Justin:

Yeah, it's such a valuable skill. You earlier you were talking a bit about kind of creating alignment in the organization. So I'm curious, what's been the toughest part of maintaining alignment and culture as you've grown and evolved?

Nicolas:

Oh, that's a great question. So an obvious answer that comes to mind on that one is when your company starts having a little bit of success, it reveals potential. You get to understand where you could take this thing and what it could be good at and what it could grow into. And uh and you have people uh in your uh surrounding you who start believing, loving this potential more than the actual journey and the actual vision. And they become highly attracted to what this thing could be and what it could turn into instead of being focused on the main topics or the main objectives that we set for the fiscal year, for example. And that creates that puts alignment in jeopardy because now just all of these aspirations kicking in, and it becomes interesting and it becomes both opportunities for growth in your career, but also opportunities for growth in the business model and diversification. So you lose sight of you're at risk of losing sight of what you're doing things for. And especially with Code Box, what created this was okay, so you have like the academy side, which is like educational and it's about changing lives, and it's about it's about delivering high-value technologists to the market, and the other side is deploying those high-value technologists in the market and making revenue from it. And those are two extremely different things. So you gotta put the competency or the what people are attracted to, you need to be very sensitive to what they like and what they want to be performing against or into because you you could get lost and putting someone in the wrong role, and then your mission's out of balance at that time. I don't know if that makes sense, but that's one of the things that really came across as solutions was growing, the learning practice became a thing that needs to happen, but it's actually the essence, and solutions, even though driving more revenue, can no longer cannot be bigger than the actual purpose of the academy.

Justin:

Yeah, I love that. It is making sure that you're just focused on why we're here and not losing sight of it for a shiny object somewhere else, which is so important. So, what's the future look like for codebox?

Nicolas:

So the the future was imposed on us two and a half years ago when OpenAI launched ChatGPT. So it really drew the line. I referred to it earlier, so it leveled the playing field, and now coding is no longer the barrier to entry. So the burden of a technologist has now shifted and split into understanding and expressing requirements correctly, to prompt programming and getting the right result by asking the right questions and understanding the right requirements, because the burden of requirements is always set on the CEOs and the chief product officers of this world. And the other half of the burden has split into operationalization of the code. So the best analogy I can give you is so there's this revolution that happened this year where lovable.dev became this platform where a CEO can literally show his people what he means when he says we should have a platform that says this or does that. So now, and we do have that, we have customers, we have CEOs coming to us with that mock-up all built in.dev thing and let's get it live and let's start making money with it. A really, really bad idea because you need to operationalize this, you need to put it in a server at scale, you need to add the cybersecurity dimension to this, you need to add the scalability dimension to this, the compliance element to that. All of this comes with your as you deploy it in your public cloud, whether it's Google Cloud Platform, whether it's Amazon Web Services, Azure, name it, soon Oracle will become an option. So as you do this, that the burden came onto this seniority is highly appreciated on that front because you've seen things. So that's what I mean when I say the future is imposing itself on us, is because where we used to be required, now we're no longer the value of high-performing coders has been split across understanding requirements right and now asking for the right things and operationalizing the output correctly so that people can make money with it.

Justin:

That's great. Well, Nicholas, I love what you're building. I love the focus on getting new people into these careers, it's just phenomenal. If anyone wants to get in touch with you or learn more about the programs, what's the best way to do that?

Nicolas:

Thank you for the great comments. I really appreciate it. It's always great to have the your Pearson industry when you try to do the right thing. And I appreciate the great feedback. If people want to reach out, wondering what the program's about, what AI native full stack development is these days and stuff, you can always go to academy.codeboxwith2x.com. So codebox.com, academy.codebox.com, and they can reach out to me directly, and I'll be happy to answer all kinds of questions at the nicholas.genest, n-co-l-as.genest at codebox with twoxs.bizbiz.

Justin:

Great. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Nicholas. I've enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for having me, Justin. I really appreciate the invitation.