Hello.
Man, he has always had a very special relationship with time.
Sometimes it goes too slowly, sometimes it goes too fast,
and yet it is he who rules the universe.
Thanks to him, we have the movement, it is this physical phenomenon
which allows the particles to interact with each other,
sometimes in a simple and understandable way,
like an apple falling from a tree,
and sometimes in a totally mysterious and magical way,
like the love that can be created between two people.
These interactions, they occur unexpectedly,
but one thing is certain: when they took place,
nothing you can do can change that.
So, if you do not want to control these future moments,
Man has lingered to control the past moments,
that is to say, to engrave them in memories,
whether through prehistoric engravings,
or via the photos and videos of our smartphones today.
Man, he always wanted to materialize somehow our memories,
as if the memory itself was not enough.
So, the world moves very quickly,
today we arrived in worlds filled with paradoxes, more and more.
Have you ever been in such a situation?
Where, instead of enjoying the moment, you were behind your camera.
It was exactly this problematic
that we wanted to meet with the first start-up that I co-founded,
which was called Smart Zeroes.
SMART:
the acronyms of Time Machine System.
Our ambition was to develop connected objects,
to capture what we were living at the very moment.
And this, after having lived it.
So, our first product
focused on the auditory sense.
Thanks to connected jewels placed at the level of the ears,
we can capture the sound in four dimensions.
In four dimensions, there are two features.
That of 3D, which captures the sound in its spatiality,
so that behind, when replayed with headphones,
we are totally immersed in the same way,
which we lived in originally.
The second feature,
it’s the fourth dimension, you guessed it,
it is that of time.
It’s a feature that allowed you to capture,
with this 3D immersion,
something that had already happened.
So the technical feat is relatively simple.
In fact, we had a buffer,
which continuously recorded everything that was going on,
in three dimensions,
and when you lived one of those moments you did not expect,
we press a button.
By default, the last 42 seconds are taken from this buffer
and stored in hard memory.
The longer you press, the more you go back in time
and we store what happened.
If we had not had the chance to experience something extraordinary,
we did not do anything
and the memory faded as it went.
The idea had a lot of fun,
still today, we do not have one person
who told us it was a stupid idea.
It all began on January 7, 2015,
where I met the one who was going to be my future partner,
Sashi.
This idea has earned us the 1st prize of the City of Connected Object,
a competition organized for their inauguration,
in June 2015.
We had the opportunity to meet major players from France,
such as Emmanuel Macron or François Hollande.
And from there, it was the snowball effect,
but literally,
that is to say, we had the chance
to go on big TV channels,
in the local and national press, even international,
and on the radio too.
I must admit that we have benefited from these six months.
It lasted six months, we were rock stars,
everywhere on Angers in VIP mode.
And I admit that it was very pleasant.
The icing on the cake was when you were invited, all expenses paid,
at CES in Las Vegas in 2016.
We were probably the youngest start-up in CES history to exhibit.
Do not think that in the world of start-ups,
everything is pink.
There are more complicated moments,
we had to work very hard,
sometimes days of 10 hours, 12 hours, even 14 hours.
I was scared to work,
I realized that yes, I was able to work
on a project that fascinated me.
We had goals, we knew where to go.
However, since it was our first entrepreneurial project,
we did not know where to go, what path to take.
It has brought us questions,
where we hit the bottom more than once.
Are we continuing? Do not we continue? Etc.
And unfortunately, for me, that was the end.
This is a big challenge, which earned me my departure from the company.
It was very hard.
For six months, I questioned myself:
do I stay? am I leaving?
I had given a lot of my time, energy, too.
I had committed myself to the project, as if it were my own baby.
And this, I put it in context,
there are 90% of start-ups that fail.
And here are the reasons, the top 20 reasons.
I would like to focus on the three main ones,
those who touched us.
Obviously, they do not disappear, but … that’s it.
There is the need of the market.
We paid a lot for a market study
to try to validate the idea.
Everyone told us: the idea is great.
OK. Very good. Do you buy it?
It was one of the first slaps we took,
people did not want to have memories that audio,
as immersive as they are.
However, we were lucky
to put your finger on a market that was not identified:
it was the visually impaired.
It seems they do not need a visual.
So for us it was the ultimate reflex for them.
There, we had the opportunity to rotate.
In the jargon of the start-up,
to pivot is to change substantially or completely the product,
to tackle a new market.
And this is where our respective visions have diverged with my former partner.
There is a fourth reason, which is not listed,
the one I added is to make the difference
between passion and reason.
It probably happened to you, you start a project,
body and soul,
and as time goes by, there are blinkers that are created
and you absolutely want your project to succeed,
but because of them, you can not get away
nor rational decisions for the good of the project.
All of these four reasons,
that’s what justified my painful departure from the company.
So, in France, failure is seen in two ways,
it’s a bit binary.
Either we take a side, we succeed, or we take the other side, we fail.
We learn this from school,
you have the average, you pass, you do not have the average, you redouble
and we see you as a pseudo-miss.
Who today is proud to have redoubled?
And yet,
here if you take the direction of failure,
you won the jackpot.
We categorize you as a failure
and often, your credibility is questioned
for future projects.
That’s France’s own.
As I said to you,
that’s how we see it in France
and most people who have succeeded
know it’s not like that,
that in the end there is only one path that leads to victory.
There are just a few who will have more obstacles than others.
The only real failure in life is that of not trying.
And I would like to share with you a quote from Nelson Mandela:
“I never lose, either I win or I learn. “
That’s really the philosophy of the entrepreneur today,
to succeed.
Here is everything I learned, many things,
and I would like to share with you now
what I could learn with ten key points,
if some of you would like to start a business start-up.
Start-up, I define it quickly,
because on Wikipedia, you have two definitions.
Start-up, which is a little popularized,
which is a business that starts, simply.
It’s not the one I like, or the one used in Silicon Valley.
In Silicon Valley, the start-up is an innovative young start,
which has a high growth potential
and which is often subject to fundraising.
When you start, you will ask yourself questions.
Where to start ?
How am I going to go about it?
How to do well?
Who do I associate with?
And eventually,
where can I find money?
These questions are legitimate; every entrepreneur asked them at the beginning.
One must not be ashamed to ask them and to seek the answers.
You will start with the idea,
obviously, you have to start somewhere.
And as you have seen through my experience,
the idea itself is not enough,
you have to confront it to the market, do a market study,
who will validate, yes or no, the solution you propose.
Once validated, you will surround yourself with a first team
which will not be the one that will constitute the company.
It’s a first team
who will help you produce what is called the MVP.
So, I’m going forward –
A good MVP is called the “Minimum Viable Product”,
it’s the prototype
that you will be able to present to your potential consumers,
so that they have a reliable idea of the solution
that you propose to the problem posed.
To have a good MVP,
there must be a little bit of each criterion:
functionality, usability, appearance design too.
If you only develop one of the criteria thoroughly,
your potential customer can not extrapolate with the final product.
From this MVP, you will redo a market study,
to validate this time the solution: the product.
It’s not because people validated the idea,
that the solution you bring as a product is correct.
There, you will validate the product.
Once it’s done,
you will be able to get into the hard of the subject
and with a kanban model, we will not go into details,
do not read what is in yellow, it is undrinkable.
But that’s absolutely essential to go through there,
it will highlight actors and stakeholders
in the project mode:
How will I market my product?
How will I reach my clients?
Who are my clients already?
What are the key partners? Etc.
From this business model,
you will train, as a result, your team, the “team”,
the one that will constitute, suddenly, the drafting of the statutes,
of the pact of associates, creation of company.
And here it is important, very important to define the role of each one.
It was a mistake we made, we were both engineers.
It is important to distinguish the role of each to avoid conflicts:
it’s up to me to do it, no it’s me who will do it.
Everyone has their role,
and that must be put in the pact of associates.
From there, you will have done, in parallel, a “Business Plan”.
In fact, it is the key document
that you will present to investors,
it is a pile of answers to all the questions that can be asked
on your project.
There will be everything you’ve seen before:
market research, competition, your team,
what do you have as resources internally,
the forecast cash flow.
This document, it is essential
to get the investors.
And here I am going to give you
how can I start from scratch
and start a business?
Because most here are students.
Even the others, if one day they want to start,
how do you find money?
You have the choice to work as an engineer
or as an employee and earn your crust,
or you start entrepreneurship,
and here you have the problem of money that undeniably arises.
And you are lucky to be in France,
which is a country where it is, undoubtedly, the best to mount a box.
I will accompany you.
The first step is going to be PoleEmploi and CAF.
If you have contributed, you are entitled to unemployment benefits,
you will touch them until you can turn to CAF,
where you are eligible for RSA and housing benefits.
Little anecdote:
I touched the RSA for two years, it allowed me to live very well
in the city where he does the best living in France,
in Angers.
You will create the business,
you are going to want to make an initial contribution,
what is called starting capital.
If you have money aside, you put it,
otherwise, you will turn to love money.
Love money is the money of the heart,
that of your loved ones,
your grandmother, who gives you 1,500 euros, to help you,
the parents who are there,
a friend gives ten euros, the other 50,
all that put end to end, you will want to make a starting capital.
The amount I recommend is 30,000 euros,
because the helpers, especially the BPI,
the Public Investment Bank,
who created the French Tech Scholarship,
which makes it possible to support a stock exchange
which is up to your capital.
If you have 10,000, they will give you 10,000,
so make it as profitable and have the 30,000.
With that, you have the loans of honor,
they are loans to the entrepreneur, loans at zero rates,
that you repay as you go.
So you only repay what you borrowed.
There are two different ones,
to that is coupled a very preferential rate bank loan,
still up to the capital.
So, in fact, with these three steps,
if you have 30 000 Euro in capital,
you can get away with 150 000 €
without company dilution,
that is to say that you and your partners remain 100% masters of the company.
You’ll have the rest, but without going into details,
it’s just to show what exists in France,
as public and private devices,
to grow very quickly, at the level of your start-up.
A little wink,
bottom right, there is the criterion of innovation.
It is imperative that this start-up – and I come back to the definitions –
it is innovative, with an innovative character,
compared to what exists on the market,
to be eligible for all these subsidies.
I finish my talk with a question that is often asked to me:
why did I want to become an entrepreneur?
When I stopped studying,
I did a sabbatical year right and left,
I worked at McDo, as a server, I was a caterer.
I absolutely wanted to disconnect from the world of engineering.
By chance, I met my future partner,
who offered me that and I did it.
I’m trying to find the reasons on the internet:
why entrepreneurs prefer entrepreneurship to wage labor?
I see my friends making a lot of money,
they have beautiful apartments, beautiful cars,
except that I do not feel this need,
because I will miss two invaluable resources,
that money can never buy:
it’s time and freedom.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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