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September 28, 2006
On the Internet, Nobody Knows Your French
That one liner came from Olivier Ezratty, a variation on the Peter Steiner classic cartoon, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”. The context was a chat about the chances of startups over here becoming dominant, or global players, on the Web. He is just one of the many people we met this week at an event organized by IE Club in Paris. (Thanks to Julien Cordoniou for the invite.)
Also on hand was Tariq Krim, founder of Netvibes (who still owns the majority of his company – we learned) along with Pierre Chappaz, founder of Wikio and Kelkoo....
They talked about what it is like to go from garage mode to building an organization, something every startup has to go through if it is in it for the long run, as well as Pascal Lorne, CEO of mobile messaging startup Miyowa who spends most of his time travelling to mobile network operator customers – he actually likes the selling game. Interestingly, he based his R&D in the Southern French port city of Marseille, where wages are 30 percent lower than in Paris and employee loyalty higher.
Also Philippe Berner, of Kayentis, whose company is doing some neat things in the e-Health area with pen and paper computing (it’s like Anoto but you don’t need to buy special paper). The startup has some pretty big name life science customers using its applications.
And Modelabs founder, Stephane Bohbot, impressed us with the financial performance of his company which floated in April – there are not too many that go from zero to €140M in sales in a couple of years, even if they are able to execute on acquisitions with the alacrity that Bohbot has done.
Bohbot’s prior venture, mobile audio technology firm Digiplug, was acquired by Japan's Faith Group in 2002 and his tales of trying and failing to raise VC had a few of the moneymen squirming we noted.
Marc Simoncini, the founder of publicly-traded dating company Meetic, who has exceptional public speaking skills, talked about web technology trends that have impacted business. He said that what made the Web really viable for business was not hypertext but the emergence of photos and images "… pictures of people, books, products, that is what was the big thing.”
He added that video and wireless are the next things but that it is still early. In other words, it might be another five years before we see the real benefit to businesses of online video and connecting cellphones to the cloud.
Ezratty told us about several startups he is working with, eHealth software firm Voluntis, u-lik, user generated shopping application, and n-generate, which is a Franco-US startup developing software to make the use of corporate design easier . He worked in marketing and biz dev for Microsoft for 15 years and has a popular blog that has some meaty insights into Microsoft, digital technologies, and entrepreneurship.
The panel members posited the idea of a “mondiale” player emering here. Who knows if that will happen, but if it doesn’t, it is not going to be due to lack of founder ambition at the early stage. We get the feeling these entrepreneurs won't be content selling their companies to the likes of Yahoo this time, or even floating to become a French success story, rather the desire is to go further and try for a seat at the table with Google, eBay and Co.
The IE Club is kind of like First Tuesday of old. If we say it’s like First Tuesday, we mean it in the sense that it is an open and relaxed place to meet high quality entrepreneurs to learn more about building a successful tech venture and hook up with potential business partners.
We also eyeballed a couple of partners from French VC firms. So for entrepreneurs it’s worth going to make some contacts and set up meetings.
It doesn’t have the same feeding frenzy that FT used to have. For one thing the management consultant types are not swarming trying to make a buck off over-funded startups or over-enthusiastic investors. In fact, we met a couple of advisers that told us that they are working gratis for startups in the hopes that their investment in time will pay off in fees or valuable shares when the company hits its stride– we can assure you that this was not the case during the bubble era. There’s optimism in Paris, but no euphoria.
Posted on September 28, 2006 05:09 PM | Posted to Events | Permalink
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