Claire Besset

What do you do at Tecton? What does your team do?

I am Head of Growth at Tecton. My team’s role is to make Tecton more widely known to the people who might benefit from using it. We do this by continually optimizing our website, hosting or taking part in events, etc. 

We also dedicate a lot of time and effort to create resources to share with everyone in the machine learning community, whether or not they are a potential Tecton buyer. For instance, Tecton regularly holds the apply() virtual conference, which is completely free and accessible to all, where we invite speakers from the machine learning community so people can learn best practices and insights from their peers.

What did you do before Tecton?

Before Tecton, I held a similar role at a startup that sold a machine learning solution for B2C marketing teams. Essentially, our product helped these teams leverage what they already knew about their customers to optimize their marketing communications so that they could reduce the number of promotional emails sent (or other messages) while improving their results. It’s all about matching offerings with people who actually want them versus spamming everybody, so it’s a win for the public and for the brands!  Advanced machine learning allowed our product to make it much more relevant than traditional re-targeting methods. I learned a lot about machine learning and its exciting potential there.

What’s your favorite software package or tool you’ve ever used?

My team could tell you I’m addicted to Notion. I like how flexible it is to create your own project management tools—even though the flexibility in itself can also be a curse, and the tool still misses a few features to make it really scalable. They do regularly ship new, useful features though. It’s become essential for me to plan our growth marketing roadmap and keep track of everything that’s happening.

What’s a fun fact about you?

Back when I was living in France, I used to practice “stick and staff fighting.” It’s a French martial art with some similarities to fencing, except that you fight with either a stick (walking-stick style) or a staff (about 6 feet long, it’s wielded with two hands). It is said to have its roots to when duels were made illegals in France—people had to start being creative instead of using guns!

It’s actually really interesting to study, practice, and watch because it has evolved to incorporate a lot of rules meant to make it not so much an “efficient” fighting style, as an “elegant” one. If you want to look it up, it’s “canne de combat” and “bâton de combat.”

What’s the most influential book you’ve ever read?

I recently read Mathematica by David Bessis, who actually happens to be the founder and CEO of the startup I worked at before Tecton. Before founding his startup, he was an academic mathematician, and this book is a fascinating account of how mathematicians actually think about mathematics. Beyond this, it’s an exploration of how the human mind works and why traditional teaching methods often fail. It’s a surprising book with a very optimistic encouragement to always be curious.

Where did you spend the pandemic lockdown?

I was living in Brooklyn and about to move in together with my now-husband when the lockdown started. We weren’t able to move into our new apartment, which we had had so much fun selecting together; instead, he moved into my current (and much smaller!) apartment as a last-minute decision. We spent a fun couple of months living at my place with his boxes everywhere and double the furniture!