On Tuesday, March 10, the special event-day “Devinci Startup Day” was held at the Pole Leonard de Vinci. The event programme has featured a round table with various entrepreneurs behind some French success stories, including Louis Marty, co-founder of Merci Handy, and Steve Abou Rjeily, co-founder of Doctolib. The two startup entrepreneurs are EMLV alums.
“Do you want to start your own startup but you don’t know where to start? Do you want to become an entrepreneur but you don’t have the “idea” yet? Are you unsure whether to get business experience or to start right after graduation?” The answers to these questions and many others were the subject of a special one-day event on entrepreneurship, organized on March 10th by the Devinci Startup Department.
This support structure of the Pôle Léonard de Vinci provides students who wish to start their own business with a pre-incubation space and a launch pad. Devinci Startup uses a network of entrepreneurs, offers coaching, and a full programme of events and meetings on entrepreneurship.
From student to successful entrepreneur: how to create the job of your dreams?
The Devinci Startup Day was held as part of this acceleration program, with a round table discussion themed: “From student to successful entrepreneur: how to create the job of your dreams?”.
Guests at the event included student entrepreneurs, as well as those wishing to develop their own business. 4 successful entrepreneurs shared their backgrounds, their stories, their startups’ lives, their routines, and their typical days.
- Steve Abou Rjeily, co-founder of Doctolib’ (alumnus of EMLV)
- Charlotte Appietto, founder of Posetadem.com
- Matthieu Dallon, co-founder of Toornament.com & Trust-Esport investor
- Louis Marty, co-founder of Merci Handy (alumnus of EMLV)
Following the leads of Doctolib’s Steve Abou Rjeily (EMLV, class of 2013)
Steve Abou Rjeily, a former EMLV student, got the inspiration for his future successful startup during an exchange program at Konkuk University in South Korea.
During his year abroad, Steve discovered that online medical appointment booking was already a common model in Asia at the time. But the co-founder of Doctolib had for some time been attracted to entrepreneurship. At the age of 14, he was setting up a structure for the sale of personalized t-shirts.
“You have to be extremely structured. I don’t just have typical days, I have typical weeks. An entrepreneur is not always a person who creates a business, for us it’s someone who has a project, and turns it into a result. A nurse can be an entrepreneur if she wants to! We have created Doctolib alongside 500 practitioners. We have two missions: to improve the health sector and to create a company where life is good. ” (Steve Abou Rjeily, co-founder of Doctolib)
Tips from Louis Marty, co-founder of Merci Handy, EMLV 2012
Louis Marty, former EMLV student and cofounder of Merci Handy, the fun brand that re-enchants antibacterial gel, has an equally offbeat vision of entrepreneurship.
In 2014, Louis Marty set up his business with two partners and a starting capital of merely €3000, from “love money”. The first encouraging sales enabled the start-up to secure a bank loan. The last step was a €3 million fundraising campaign to go international.
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- ” Why am I doing this? What do I want it for? “
- ” Learn to aim for experience. That’s Rafael Nadal’s philosophy: you have to train continuously.”
- ” Work hard. This is the Swcharzenegger philosophy: “work-work-work” and love it. You have to put passion behind what you do. “
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Matthieu Dallon, serial esport entrepreneur
Matthieu Dallon, the Founder of ESWC and co-founder of Toornament.com, a platform used by thousands of organisations around the world, is one of the fathers of esport in France. Matthieu Dallon has led and managed numerous structures in the sector (Ligarena, Games Services and Oxent), and has organised more than 70 international events, including historic shows at Paris Bercy and at Paris Games Week. Over the past 15 years, he has led the development of the Cyberleagues, Gamersband and Toornament platforms.
- ” Being an entrepreneur is about a desire for freedom, a desire to combine one’s passion and vision of the world with everyday life. It is both intimate and connected to generosity, to others. It’s this love of freedom that won’t make me go back. The ability to lead in your own life, to carry out projects and to blossom generates a completely different relationship to work.” (Matthieu Dallon, Trust Esport, esport investment fund).
- “You must always have honest stakeholder relationships. Strategy, yes, but not lies. You have to be true to yourself and to your colleagues, and that honesty will always be reciprocated..” (Matthieu Dallon, Trust Esport, esport investment fund)
Charlotte Appietto, founder of “Pose ta dem'”
“Pose ta Dem'” is a coaching service and support for people who have resigned from their jobs and is at the same time an online media for a community of more than 2000 people involved in retraining projects. After setting up her own company in January 2018, Charlotte has set herself the goal of helping others to “live their professional life the way they want it to”.
- “I was triggered by an urge to resign from my job. There was a quest for meaning, a rejection of the traditional model of a big company and the career that would follow for years to come. So I resigned and joined a start-up company, in an incubator”. (Charlotte Appietto, Pose ta dem’)
- “It is important to listen to customers and stakeholders, of course, but you must also listen to yourself: trust your intuition, your feelings and your own analysis.” . (Charlotte Appietto, Pose ta dem’)
This post was last modified on 28/04/2020 19:57