The aim of the blog (http://francerevealed.blogspot.fr/) is to try to explain or give a perspective on France (especially economics, politics and society) to english-speaking people (the blog is in english), especially americans. It's also about to pinpoint the similarities and differences between the two cultures, knowing that I'm french, always lived in France (and still is) and US-passionate. At least one other person will join me in the "adventure" to give another perspective (french-born, living in the Silicon Valley for 15 years). Other contributors are welcome (americans ?). Editors, online newspapers are welcome to take the blog under their wings in a win-win deal (content/visibility).
A place of debate about economics, politics and french governance
Economics, sociology, philosophy, psychoanalisys and other mood outcome
Olotels is a skyrocketting e-business company focused on travel biz. This kind of acceleration put a lot of pressure on G&A department, especially finance. My mission was to analyze the operations model, map it to finances, and reinject it into the IT ops system to get more reliability and fluidity in the ops/finance chain. Tough but exciting job ! Met great profesionnals there from call center folks to CEO through techs or sales people/ Corporate finance consultant
Working for AMKEO, I was in charge of 1st round fundraising for FDTC. I worked the Business Plan with the CEO, challenged the numbers & model, wrote teaser & memo, presented it to VC along with CEO. I left AMKEO before final paperwork was made but fundraising was pretty secured. Got a strong advices/backup from AMKEO and inspiring discussions with FDTC's CEO so this work was exciting, challenging and I learnt a lot.
Exaprotect had been acquired by LogLogic (HQed in California) in May 2009. Following the acquisition, my role had evolved toward :
Exaprotect was a software manufacturer in IT security field. About 70 people and offices in 5 countries. I was in charge of Finance, Legal (Corporate + business contracts), HR and internal IT business specs & management Had been deeply involved in 1 acquisition (SOLSOFT, oct 2006), 1 subsidiary sale (Exaprobe, July 2007) and the company acquisition by LogLogic (Due diligence process) in 2009 VCs relationships & reporting In charge of 6 companies located in 4 different countries (legal representant)
Exaprobe was a subsidiary of Exaprotect dedicated to IT security services & integration at a regional level. Exaprobe was employing about 25 people and had been sold in 2007. I worked part-time on finances/legal/HR aspect along with presales manager activity. As Exaprobe grew, the time slice for presales management activity had declined. I also worked closely with technical director to compute all metrics to lead the activity (% time of engineer sold, avg manday price, avg & breakdown gross margin on product resales, ...)
After having sold by own company to Exaprobe, I've integrated this company as presales manager. I've led myself a lot of presales meeting, RFP answers, sales/technical docs, working closely with the technical director. A lot of time on the road, teaming-up with sales people, meeting a lot of customers
As Cyber-Networks was acquired and new shareholders had none interests for out-of-Paris areas, I've decided to found my own company with one of the former founder of Cyber-Networks as a sleeping partner. The company was focused in regional IT security services and IT security software resales. Company was profitable since day 1 and acquired nice regional references (e.g. Interpol) Headcount rose to 6 employees at the top. Again, I was exercising different range of activities from presales to consulting, adding this time the legal & finance side to run the company. An associate entered the capital late 2002. Due to different objectives, we decided to sold in October 2004 to Exaprobe which was a regional IT integrator ran by Jean-François Dechant
After the founder of the branch office left, it was just me and a techie. I took over the responsibility of the branch office, working many different ways : management, sales account manager (ASF, Sanofi-Pasteur, ...), presales, deployment, consulting, ... Then I've hired some talented people, the team grown to 6 people, we won very competitive case (SAPRR). I was able to step down from some roles (no more deployments) and the branch office was profitable. Presales and integration engineer
At the beginning of 1999, Cyber-Networks was a IT security integrator and consulting company only located in Paris (approx 15 people). They were seeking to open a branch office in Lyon. A sales guy had been hired couple of months before myself. I used to play multi-role : sales engineer, integration job, consulting, support. Had a lot of fun, get some great references (e.g. ASF or UNEDIC) and hired a third fellow (tech) for the branch office
Start working stand-alone on a fax-server project, taking the relay of the job that had been made by an employee leaving the company. Went to the end of product. Developped in C on different Unix platform. Learnt the basics of C, UNIXs (SCO, HP-UX, ...) and fax technologies (G3) Then moved to a binomia working on a very ambitious project that was basically an early version of Netscape SuiteSpot : have a whole bunch of Unix server (DNS, proxy, mail, LDAP, FTP, web) all configurable through a Windows client interface instead of cryptic configuration files. I was in charge of taking all the servers from the public domain, modify them to bring some more professional features and develop the API to communicate with Windows Interface (developed by my fellow worker), first proprietary then using LDAP backends. Project was a lot of fun and I learnt a lot about technologies. Commercialy, it was a disaster. Too early ... and when the wave came, there were too big fishes on top : Netscape and Microsoft. Project was stopped ... and I left.