How the rise & fall of the Minitel prepared 3 entrepreneurs best for the Internet era
For those who might not know what a Minitel is (don’t worry about that, it’s a very French thing), I invite you to read this article published in 1996 in the International Herald Tribune, an all-times excellent newspaper, prior to going further in this post.
Are you back? Great. Let’s get going.
Three of the most successful French Internet entrepreneurs come from the Minitel era: Marc Simoncini of Meetic, Xavier Niel of Free and Thierry Ehrmann of Artprice. See on on your right hand the stockcharts of Groupe Iliad / Free vs. Artprice.
- Marc Simoncini, founder of European dating websites leader Meetic, first started to write software for Minitel service providers in 1985. He was then 22. In 1998, Marc Simoncini founded iFrance, a highly successful website of which he exited in 2000 (selling for about 30 million € to Vivendi Ventures!). Marc Simoncini (also a speaker at the IE Club symposion I had attended 2 months ago) also is a shareholder in many highly successful French Internet websites, one of them being 1000Mercis.
- Xavier Niel, founder of Groupe Iliad / Free, a French pretty dynamic telco operator (see Ouriel’s post, jealous)), started back in he eighties his career in the glamorous-services-over-the-Minitel business, before founding one of the very first ISPs in France, Worldnet. After a comfortable exit back in December 2000 (40 million €), he started all over from the beginning with Free, a pretty disruptive, technologically speaking, and controversial, customer service-wise, ISP in France.
- Thierry Ehrmann, the President of Groupe Serveur, a holding company with majority stakes in about 20 technology companies ranging from tracking technologies to marketplaces, started his entrepreneurial career in 1985. Back then, he pioneered the transportation industry by providing the first freight services marketplace over the Minitel. Thierry Ehrmann is still in the marketplace business, as the CEO of Artprice, a highly successful platform matching supply and demand in the very opaque market of Art.
Now comes the question: in your opinion, on which technology/business/industry should one position his/herself to prepare best for and take most of the upcoming evolutions of the Internet?
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- Microsoft IDEAS software startups web 2.0-style
- Dragons' Den: entrepreneurs pitch business angels on TV
- Tomorrow night at Microsoft's Paris office for a symposium on "Tomorrow's Stars", meet me there
Entrepreneurship, Europe, Internet, SME, Software, Telecommunications, Venture Capital, Video, VoIP, innovation, media, user-generated content
Hello Jeremy,
Your blog is the best, I come and read it everyday.
Trying to answer your question, I would go for embedded software and consumer electronics. iPod is a revolution, not an evolution of consumer habits.
What do you think?
Well, that’s an opinion.
As far as I’m concerned, I’d go for VoIP & rich media (video, flash, pics, text, music; all on a website).
We’re at the beginning of the VoIP trend. And e-Commerce websites like Amazon, eBay & Co. have rather poor interfaces. I believe there’s a huge market (enough for a couple decades of revenues) for people aiming at taking full advantage of multimedia technologies in e-Commerce.
I just wanted to add that the very first internet provider in France was FDN (French Data Network) in 1992. Worldnet was created one year later in 1993.
I stop it now and go back to my financial lessons, I have an exam tomorrow
Oh – yeh on topic.
We used to hack Minitel. 5-bit technology.
not entirely sure why you have a hard-on for ehrmann but good moderation.
you have now benefited from a wikipedia back-link.
Hey Chris,
Thanks for the (good) news!