BUILT TO THRIVE: HOW XAVIER STARKLOFF TURNED A DISMISSED CATEGORY INTO A CONSUMER LEADER

When you enter Joko’s offices in Paris’ 3rd arrondissement, the first thing you notice is not the techy or consumer style atmosphere, but the refined and elegant style.

There are no aggressively colorful walls, no neon slogans trying too hard to signal startup culture, no carefully manufactured coolness. The space is full of natural light and large open volumes. Sofas, plants, wood, glass, discreet artwork: everything follows the same restrained aesthetic language. The design feels premium without being ostentatious, thoughtful without feeling staged. Nothing appears accidental.

Xavier Starkloff, Joko’s co-founder and CEO, has always believed that beautiful offices foster ambition and creativity. “People do better work when they’re surrounded by beautiful things,” he says. The sentence could sound superficial coming from another founder, but at Joko, it feels more like an operating principle. This attention to detail extends far beyond the office itself.

Joko, on the surface, is a rewards platform. The company indeed offers rewards to more than 6 million users across France and the United States, boosting their purchasing power whenever they shop online or offline with merchants like Amazon, Carrefour, Decathlon, Sephora, Nike, or thousands of others. But reducing Joko to cash back is to miss what the company is really building and how far it intends to go.

For decades, the category had remained stagnant: useful but uninspiring, a structurally large market but with poor execution. The user experiences were clunky, the products hard to navigate, the branding absent. Joko approached the category differently. Leveraging the emergence of open banking infrastructure in Europe, the founders believed they could reinvent the experience entirely, not only technologically, but emotionally and visually, too. People love getting rewarded, even the wealthiest (American Express built an empire on it), but they expect and deserve a great product and experience, and that is what Joko set out to bring.

In France especially, that level of obsession around consumer product quality remains relatively rare. Xavier is obsessed with changing the way consumer products are built and has organized a culture around user obsession. Inside the company, every employee reads user feedback daily. Everyone uses the product themselves, and since recently, every employee can fix bugs or build features and push them directly into production, through their own internal AI coding platform with built-in safety guardrails. The distance between builders and users is intentionally kept extremely small. “We are not building one more cash back app” explains Xavier “we are building a new shopping experience for consumers”.

Seven years after launch, Joko has become the leader in France, continuously expanding its product with features like buy now pay later, a loyalty wallet, and price comparison, opened in the US market and launched its new AI shopping assistant Juno, the boldest expression yet of its ambition to reinvent how consumers shop. The category itself has barely changed. Joko, meanwhile, changed almost everything around it.

Against the odds: how 3 young graduates took on a category everyone had written off

Xavier did not grow up around entrepreneurs. There were no startup dinner-table conversations, no mythology of risk-taking or company-building around him growing up. Xavier did not initially follow what would traditionally be considered an entrepreneurial path. Instead, he followed the route of French academic excellence: École polytechnique, then the Corps des mines, the most prestigious educational tracks that lead its graduates straight into the upper echelons of the French State. It was there that he met Alexandre Hollocou, future co-founder and CTO of Joko. Alexandre recalls: "It was an instant friendship connection, the first time we met, we talked for hours about our projects and ideas, completely oblivious to the other students." He adds: "I immediately thought to myself that this guy was going to do something incredible."

Together, they took a course called “Web Mining” back in 2013 where students were asked to scrape data, build machine-learning models, and imagine business opportunities around them. Xavier and Alexandre decided to predict the commercial success of movies using data extracted from IMDb, the Internet Movie Database. “Immediately we wanted to spin off the project, talk to film producers to test the appetite, but we soon realized it wasn’t a very good business,” they admit today.

But something more important had slowly started taking shape during that period: the realization that they genuinely enjoyed building things together. It was the beginning of a friendship and professional partnership.

After a first internship in a large corporate that moved too slowly for his taste, Xavier left with one clear conviction: he wanted to build something inside a fast growing company. He was originally supposed to move to the United States to work at Algolia, shortly after the company emerged from Y Combinator. Then, two weeks before departure, the plan fell through for administrative reasons related to visa applications and he had no plan B. But through a series of coincidences, he met Paul Midy, then CEO of Jumia Travel and today a member of the French National Assembly. Jumia urgently needed someone in Senegal. Xavier accepted almost immediately. Two weeks later, he was on a plane to Dakar.

It was a totally different experience. Jumia, the ‘Amazon for Africa’, was growing at extraordinary speed. Teams were building in real time, adapting constantly, solving operational problems with intensity and urgency. Xavier discovered something there that would shape the rest of his career: he loved the adrenaline of building consumer products used by millions of people.

It was also in Dakar that Xavier met Nicolas Salat-Baroux, who would later become co-founder and CRO of Joko. The two found themselves working together on weekends at a local beachfront hotel, drawn by the same appetite for intensity and execution. "He was a real execution machine," Nicolas recalls. "Not only brilliant academically, he had the pragmatism of an entrepreneur. We clicked instantly."

Years later, when Xavier and Nicolas brainstormed together to look for the name of the company they wanted to build with Alexandre, they remembered this period. The name Joko actually emerged inside a Starbucks near Saint-Lazare station in Paris. After weeks spent brainstorming, searching for something simple, modern, dynamic, a name that meant nothing and could eventually become anything, Xavier thought about “jokko,” a Wolof word roughly meaning connection or community, a reference to Senegal. They dropped one “k” to keep it simple and easy to pronounce. Nicolas worried people would not know how to pronounce it. So they started asking strangers inside the Starbucks to read the word aloud from a piece of paper. One after another, they pronounced it exactly the way the founders hoped: “Joko.” The trademark was available and Joko was born.

However, before building the company together, both Xavier and Alexandre still had to complete their obligations within the French state system as part of their track at Corps des mines. Alexandre joined the Ministry of Defense and Xavier joined the Ministry of Economy and Finance.

As Xavier was working there, the PSD2 - the European regulation that would unlock open banking - was being voted through. He instantly understood the massive opportunity: open banking was about to unlock new economic models around personalization, rewards, and commerce, and change the relationship between consumers and merchants, giving consumers more power over their own data. At the time, he was continuously brainstorming with Nicolas, then working in Nigeria, and Alexandre, who was completing his PhD in machine learning while working for the Ministry of Defense.

Eventually, Xavier brought them together. The founding moment of Joko happened in a Mexican restaurant near Les Halles in Paris, where Alexandre and Nicolas met for the first time. The chemistry was immediate and the day after they decided to quit their jobs and started to build together. “Looking back, founding Joko was actually quite irrational,” Xavier admits today. “If we had done too much market research, we probably wouldn’t have started.” Alexandre recalls “I instantly trusted Nicolas, we didn’t do any founder questionnaires or even reference checks on each other, we had the passion and the same objective to build a global consumer company, and it was enough”.