An amazing IE-Club event at Microsoft France's business center in Paris – France strikes back!
I was abroad between June 2005 and September 2006. I had left an old and rusty France. Nothing was really happening, and I followed this French Web 2.0 thing from far away – not really believing in its actual depth, and actually assuming the Israelis and Americans were doing it better. I was ALL wrong. 14 months seems to be nothing, but in the digital world, 14 months is pretty much a century.
France is back on track! It’s the first time in my lifetime I heard serial entrepreneurs speaking with their heart, soul and brains rather than with their ego and virtual bank account bottom line. Some people really want to build true, self-standing, long-lasting European success stories. And maybe they already have.
Frankly, listening to these driven entrepreneurs rose in my deep inside some pride, pride of being French. Those who know me will start thinking that I’m going nuts, but this is true: I was proud that such change agents were from France and not from … Well, I don’t know. You fill the … yourself.
Right now I’m exhausted, but I’ll post IN ENGLISH (I received exactly 14 e-mails today asking me to do so, thank you NYC friends 
for giving me homework, as if I needed more than I already have) the full minutes of this great great lecture in the upcoming days.
Picture – from left to right: Philippe Berna of Kayentis, Pierre Chappaz (standing) of Index Ventures / Wikio / Netvibes, Pierre Krings of Price Minister, Tariq Krim of Netvibes, Stéphane Bohbot of Modelabs, Pascal Lorne of Miyowa, Dominique Agrech of Xange Private Equity, Eglantine from IE-Club.
Related posts:
- Minutes of the IE-Club lecture at Microsoft France on European Rising Stars of the Internet
- Tomorrow night at Microsoft's Paris office for a symposium on "Tomorrow's Stars", meet me there
- Microsoft IDEAS software startups web 2.0-style
- Lessons from Microsoft's acquisition of ScreenTonic
- Study Trip to Silicon Valley / San Francisco
Entertainment, Entrepreneurship, Europe, Finance, Globalization, Internet, MNC, Microsoft, SME, Silicon Valley, Software, Telecommunications, Venture Capital, Video, VoIP, innovation, media, user-generated content
IE Club Conférence – Les stars de demain – Web 2.0 – Microsoft Center Business
Pour commencer cette note, merci à Julien Codorniou de chez Microsoft pour l’invitation et l’organisation de cette conférence, réunion de l’IE-CLUB.
J’arrive à l’entrée, j’ai l’impression d’etre un peu jeune dans la salle ! Et oui je…
[...] Julien Codorniou had written on his blog (in French) that students like me would learn more about business in one single event than in 3 years of business school studies. This is obviously wrong (and I’m sure Julien knows it): studies and attending such meetings to get to see how things are in the real life are both necessary. Whilst listening to all these successful entrepreneurs of yesterday, today and tomorrow, I couldn’t help, as written in a precedent post, to feel some sort of pride for France and Europe. At last, we made it: we’ve got great, driven entrepreneurs; VCs have cash available to invest; and we’re working hard to get better and better through the transmission of these values. This latter point was the raison d’être of the event. And the event was a big success. [...]