Founding Tools: Lucas and Vincent (toby)

Interviews with early stage founders about the tech stacks that power their business.

Meet CEO Lucas Campa and CTO Vincent Wilmet, founders of toby, a platform enabling you to find, hire, and work with multilingual talent.

They started the company in January of 2024 and met last year in New York through mutual friends, before moving together to San Francisco earlier this year. Vincent speaks English, French, Mandarin, and Lucas speak English, Spanish, French, Mandarin — a lot of overlap between the two polyglots, and explains why they wanted to build a real-time audio translation platform that lets you work with anyone in any language.

Of course, if there’s one tool they use religiously, with customers and each other, it’s toby.

We talked about everything from when to implement Kubernetes and multi-cloud, to which freelancer platforms are worth the effort.

This is an honest account of the software they chose, why they picked it, and how they feel about it now (including early mistakes and what they would’ve done differently).

💼 CEO STACK – Lucas, the focused seller

Can't Live Without

• Communication: toby - duh.

• Payroll: Gusto - Chose it for its self-serve setup and excellent customer support (which they were worried might be hard to reach). Lucas noted, "I just pick up the phone and call them, and I feel like I've always been treated super well."

• Research: Wayback Machine - They use to research companies that they want to learn from. Lucas explained, "You can see what the thesis has been over the last several years, and how things have changed — it's good to learn from history."

• Sales: Apollo - Lucas found Apollo to be the most comprehensive for finding emails, especially for contacts in Latin America. He tried out Hunter and Interseller, which just didn’t have the global coverage he needed.

Wouldn't Recommend

• Payroll: Rippling - Aggressive upselling and slow onboarding process left a bad taste in their mouth.

• Website Building: Wix - When they needed to get a landing page up, Lucas and Vincent used Wix. They quickly realized that they couldn’t customize their website or make it interactive, and are about to launch their new site they built using Webflow.

Honorable Mentions

• Search: Perplexity - Lucas has "essentially deleted Google" in favor of Perplexity. (Vincent said “I use DuckDuckGo because I’m a CTO.”)

• Inbox full of newsletters: Stays up-to-date on the latest in startups and tech through his favorite newsletters like Big Desk Energy, Strategy Breakdowns, and Platformer. Meanwhile, Vincent is completely unsubscribed from all content and can only be reached by Signal.

• One-off outbound sales: When Apollo doesn’t have the email of a prospect, Lucas uses a combination of RocketReach and MailTracker to do free, one-off email lookups and tracking.

What They Wish They Knew

• Startup discounts aren't always useful: Many discounts only apply to basic tiers that lack needed features, and chasing them can often end up being a distraction.

• Self-serve products can still have good support: Their experience with Gusto supports that, and they’ll continue to seek out self-serve options with a quick onboarding flow and no “schedule a demo” button.

• Invest in what matters: Don't skimp on critical tools like payroll, legal, and accounting, even if it means paying a bit more.

Wishlist (Open to suggestions!)

• AI-powered sales tools: Lucas wants to continue to learn about emerging AI agent platforms for sales outreach.

• People search: Exploring ways to find talent with AI-powered options like Juicebox (PeopleGPT), but always on the hunt for new platforms.

🤖 CTO STACK – Vincent, the hacker man

Can't Live Without

• Version Control: GitHub Desktop - Vincent isn't ashamed to use the GUI, stating "I don't have the ego to think that I'm ‘Hacker Man.’ I just need the thing to work." He prefers it for its user-friendly interface for diffs and branch management.

• Infrastructure: AWS - Used for both training and deploying models, with a custom load balancer the toby team built for their international users.

• IDE: VSCode - Vincent spends most of his computer time in VSCode, "like a gremlin."

Wouldn't Recommend

• Overengineering early: Kubernetes - Vincent described K8s as "seriously a pain in the ass" when implemented too early.

• Single cloud implementation: Because they can’t have any downtime in their product, they architected toby with a multi-cloud setup in mind.

Honorable Mentions

• Monitors: Multiple screens - Vincent uses 3 monitors total, including one vertical for code viewing (or maybe just to look cool?)

• IDE for C++ Development: Qt Creator - VSCode wasn’t built for C++ so Qt Creator provides a really user friendly alternative.

• Freelancers: Upwork - Found good talent for their one-off needs, for example a load balancing developer they needed for a standalone project. Fiverr didn’t have the caliber of talent they needed and Toptal wound up being too expensive.

What They Wish They Knew

• Geographical distribution for GPUs: The off-the-shelf options for cloud providers are quite US-centric. They wound up building a custom load balancer to serve Latin American users better.

• Modular architecture: Vincent emphasized the importance of adaptable infrastructure over specific foundation models or cloud providers. With so many startups going out of business or pivoting, building with stability in mind matters more than ever.

• Ship quickly: "Use what you need, and really incrementally improve when needed." Both founders emphasized the importance of iterating, rather than getting bogged down in perfecting tools and processes from the start.

Wishlist (Open to suggestions!)

• More reliable serverless GPU options: Too many startups in this space are pivoting or running out of money, making it hard to rely on them for long-term needs.

• Better tools for network traffic protocols (WebSockets, WebRTC, etc): Most companies like Twilio, Vapi, and Daily handle network traffic to communicate with robots, but there are very few tools that help communicate human-human at low latency (like an open source Zoom or Clubhouse). In the meantime, they’re building it themselves!

Thank you Lucas and Vincent for sitting down to share all about your Founding Tools! And check out toby for all your real-time translation needs.