A Fresh Start (up)

I am forcing myself to keep updating this blog, even if I start doing a much better job at calling all of you regularly to give “in-person” news, which is still much better.

I have worked like crazy these past few weeks but it seems that it will be slowing a bit down now. I am actually going to Vegas tomorrow for 3 days for the Shop.org conference, and I hope that I’ll manage to have some time in the evening for a bath in the Luxor’s swimming pool :-)… I feel that I really need some holidays now, fortunately Hawaii is not so far away (2 weeks!!!!) and I’m counting the days. These past few weeks I was really wondering: why didn’t I go into banking? I would do the same hours and be paid 3 times more… and then I read the news about the bankruptcy of Lehman, and I realized that I probably made a safer and more fun choice

Nothing much apart from that: Remy and I went to a fundraising event on Wednesday (the Director of my group is on the board of the association) for an association called Summer Search, which helps high school students in tough situations to go to college. It’s a very great project, and the event was amazing, at Villa Montalvo in Saratoga (a beautiful villa with an amazing park). Today we went to a BBQ at Annabelle’s place (which is gorgeous, in San Mateo) and that was again another “Melrose Place” moment, eating burgers around the pool (see pictures). Then we had dinner with Nicolas, his brother and his brother’s partners in SF: they’re both just absolutely handsome, it’s a real look for women

Remy is having his conference at Oracle World next Sunday, and he seems to be in a lot of stress: he is experiencing a weird pain below the ribs, and we even ended up at the hospital on Thursday night about that. After some blood tests, it seems that it has nothing to do with the liver, and it is just muscular or stress-related. I can understand the stress, it’s kind of a big deal to speak in front of so many experts, and I’m sure he’ll do great… Anyway, I can’t wait for this conference to be over and Remy and I to be in the plane for Hawaii

Talk to you when I’m back from Vegas guys!

I am exhausted… but delighted! On Thursday and Friday, I was in Chicago to attend my first eBay Live!, the annual gathering of eBay buyers and sellers. I can’t really say a lot about it since it is work-related, but I can tell you that speaking with all those sheer entrepreneurs and passionate people, really inspired me and made me realize even more that I work for a company like no other (and these are my views and not the ones of my company… legal stuff ). In strategic jobs, when you spend most of your time in front of a computer, it is essential to have moment like these to meet with your customers, especially when they are so atypical, to understand clearly the impact of what you are doing on the people that depend on your company to pay their son’s college tuition or to pay their employees. Whether they are happy or not, our customers really care about what we are doing, and this is already a huge motivation factor. Anyway, I’m glad to have had the opportunity to see so much energy, passion and originality gathered in a convention center. All the official eBay pictures are here. And I’m still in love with Chicago!

Yesterday we spent the day in SF with Audrey, doing a lot of shopping . Pictures here. She cooked a delicious “poulet basquaise”, so now I’m obliged to try to reproduce her recipe  for Rémy… He’ll probably be very disappointed

And finally tomorrow I’m heading to San Diego for a 2-day offsite with my team, this is going to be fun, if we don’t get eaten alive by the nice sharks of the San Diego bay!

Since the past week has been everything but interesting, I thought I would pass on the traditional weekly update, but Seb started complaining that without any article, he couldn’t know what I had done this week. Since the answer is nothing, here I am, writing about nothing. I’m wondering how long I can continue that; after all, I went to a business school, that shouldn’t be a problem

So, to sum up nothing, I had a pretty uninteresting week, waiting for Rémy to come back from Chicago, and then spending the week-end working. Work is getting tougher, but also more motivating. I also called a few friends; I think I will never get over the fact that I miss you guys! But I might end up not missing you for long: whereas Remy got a receipt saying that he got accepted at the H1B visa lottery, I still haven’t received anything, which is not a good sign. So I might end up going back to France, whether I (and you ) want it or not!

Apart from this (still) not interesting topic, I registered for the continuing studies program in Stanford, and I will be taking a class of… acting this summer! I can see all of you think “oh my god, she really wants to end up in Hollywood!”

What else? Still a lot of nothing to talk about… Oh yes, I am getting more and more obsessed with the idea of going into the hospitality industry sooner or later, and started devouring some books on the topic. It’s weird, I feel like once you have started in a sector, it is really difficult to go into something radically different later on… Now I start understanding people going into consulting! Those who know me well know that I’ve been talking about managing a hotel for a long time, and now I feel that I really need to do it, at least some day … So who wants to buy an Inn with me? I already have a partner (Manue, if you read me ) but except if she has been hiding her fortune for many years, I doubt that we will have enough money to do that now and alone … Hopefully, my grand father always told me that passion is more important than money to achieve your dreams, and, stupid as I am, I still believe him!

Ok, enough “nothing” for today! Just in case you stumble upon this blog looking for interesting content, insights about tech and entrepreneurship, I remind you that this blog is now for friends and family, or people interested in expatriation (or interested in “nothing”!) but that I still continue to publish more interesting things (it’s not hard!) on Tech it Easy. My latest pieces include an interview of Alain Romang on how museums can benefit from the Internet, and a book review of The One Minute Entrepreneur from Ken Blanchard. Enjoy (or not) !

Hopefully, I will have cooler things to say after Memorial day week end in Yosemite!

I am finally not a desperate case! It started really badly though: I arrived 45 min late because my instructor refuses to buy a GPS, and the examinator I got started by saying “oh, you’re from France? I hate France, people are so mean and rude there!”… It turned out that the guy was delighted to see me smile, since he thought that it might be the sign that “new generations are probably France’s last hope”… The guy was actually really nice, and I couldn’t really disagree with what he was saying: I did leave France for a reason! He ended up the conversation by asking me if Carla Bruni was smart, and I was… speechless! So now I’m going to buy a car… without knowing a single thing about cars! Any advice? I want to keep it under $10,000 (used) and ideally be able to resell it.

Well, this week is completely crazy at work, so I’m going to bed now, but just for info I posted an article about the New Media Arts conference on Tech IT Easy here, and an article about a great conference I attended today by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, about customer satisfaction, here.

Hi there! As promised, I am going to tell you more about my first steps as an expatriate… I landed yesterday in San Francisco, and, after a cab ride that cost me $100 (glups, this was a good start) I arrived in my temporary apartment found by my company in San Jose. What a good surprise when I discovered that it is an amazing place, with all the outside (spa, pool, volleyball court, barbecues…) and inside (dishwasher, washer/dryer, mixer, and even the special pizza knife!) amenities you can imagine… Besides it is well located close to a “tram” station that will drive me directly to my workplace.

The only problem: I had no idea that San Jose was such a huge city and I won’t find everything I need close to my place! In Miami and L.A., I got the chance to live in some really lively areas with plenty of stores, but now I realize that it is not possible everywhere in the US and that my residence is simply in the middle of nowhere!

So today we rented a car (but were obliged to go by train and bus to the airport to find a rental company!) to get the “survival kit”: a wifi router, a printer, and things to eat! Who said that the wifi router isn’t part of a traditional survival kit???

After buying basic things at Walmart (first time I went there, after so many case studies about Walmart when I was in HEC!!!), I decided that I missed Whole Foods way too much so we went to Palo Alto to find one… and we bought things to eat for at least a month!

And to make the most of having rented a car, we made a stop at Stanford University… and the pictures (even if I didn’t have my good camera) speak for themselves!

So here are the pictures of my residence and apartment, and of Stanford Uni!

Just a quick post to get your opinion on something that always interests me: innovation. So I would like to know which technology or business model in the tech sector you’ve found the most surprising / interesting / innovative this year, and how it is likely to impact the sector.

My choice is 23andMe, which is, as most of you know, an Internet based service allowing you to read and understand your DNA thanks to your saliva. I heard about them of course because of Google’s investment in this startup, and I find it really interesting because it broadens widely the perimeter of “search” and then the mission of Google of making all the information of the world accessible. The idea of “Googling your genes” was already mentioned in The Google Story from David Vise, and even if a lot of people read it already, I will probably review it on Tech It Easy soon.

Anyway, please let me know your choice for the most interesting technology / business model for 2007, as an “end of the year” gift

This is it: I’m leaving L.A. on Sunday! It is of course a good occasion to step back and think about the results of this exchange and what has surprised me in general.

Having already been a B-school student, I thought that this Exchange would be valuable mostly for the international experience rather than for the content itself. But, apart from the obvious things (discovering life in a US university, having the occasion of meeting people with very different backgrounds due to the “aggregator” role of universities…) I have really enjoyed spending a term in an MBA program because:

• The courses are much more practical than in Masters program: for example, when dealing with innovation, professors don’t say basic things like “you have to hire creative people” but on the contrary explain all the stages of an innovation program and the different tools to foster innovation based on real companies’ experience because their audience has already dealt with practical problems and want practical solutions.
• The courses are much more interactive: all the students have on average 5 years of professional experience, so it’s usual that they have already been confronted to some situations that we talk about in class and can bring their experience to the discussion.
• People are not here only to enjoy parties and get drunk like in B-school: they have paid a lot to be there and want to make the most of it. Therefore they are really open to networking, and are most of the time delighted when you ask them questions. I have had particularly interesting discussions with people having worked previously in the Internet sector (Yahoo!, AOL, Google…) in senior positions, which is a unique opportunity to understand the career development in this sector. I was afraid that this difference in terms of professional experience would prevent me from being really integrated, but it wasn’t the case: American people really admire Europeans having learned English and ready to bring their knowledge to a US university, so they welcome any insight. I must anyway acknowledge that my year of internship has been really useful in this context, at least to better understand some particular management problems that can’t be considered from an empirical point of view (like resistance to changes, that I have experimented during my internships).
• I have gained a lot of knowledge about the corporate environment in general thanks to a lot (and I mean A LOT) of case studies. Having to read 2 entrepreneurs’ stories every week plus having a guest speaker every 2 weeks gives a better understanding of entrepreneurship than some PowerPoint slides saying “you have to be able to take risks”. Same thing in my course “Technology Management”: I didn’t know anything about the hardware or biotech industry, and now I understand what are the big challenges, and how to compare the different tech industries. Even in the Internet one, I got a more managerial and broader view to analyze the sector. MBA students have most of the time (like in most jobs) been focused on details and come there to get the whole picture on what they’ve done and where they’re going.
• This exchange has also had an unexpected effect. I have been having fun during 3 months  with people that I could have met during recruiting processes, in suit and ties, asking me “what do you think that the company should do if competitor X enters the market with a price lower by 28%? how will the operating margin be affected?”… It has allowed me to clearly acknowledge that after 5 years of professional experience, these people know a lot more than I do, but that it doesn’t mean that I don’t have a chance to impress them by showing some maturity and an organized reasoning, because I have shown during group meetings that I was up to the task.

And I will finish this post with  a quote that I will remember forever mentioned by my Entrepreneurship professor:

“Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.” Oliver Wendell Holmes

So simply let your music play!

I currently work a lot for my finals about entrepreneurship ideas, and I am imagining some of them in the two sectors I like: the Internet and the food industry. I recently had an idea in the latter one, and I just wanted to get some feedback on it. 

I think that we have all experienced (ok, I amend myself: all the women have experienced) a sudden longing for a specific dish, sometimes in the middle of the night. When I work late at night, at around 2:00am, I am sometimes starving for a “fondue au chocolat”; pregnant women are also well known to feel like eating strawberries in the middle of the night, and I am sure that you can come up with a moment when you think “I would love to have that in my fridge right now”.

Hence the idea of creating a 24hrs delivery service allowing you to make a call and order anything you want, from basic strawberries to the most complex dishes. The company doing that would of course charge a large premium, that I believe some customers (at least women!) would be willing to pay to get what they want when they want it, and have longer delivery time than traditional delivery services. In terms of operations, the “kitchen” would have to be located really closed to a 24hrs food wholesaler so that the company wouldn’t carry any unmanageable inventory.

Of course it is a raw idea with plenty of hurdles, so:

- First, do you think there is a market for this service or am I just the only one ready to wait 2 hours at 2:00am to have some “fondue au chocolat”?

- Do you know if this service already exist? I couldn’t manage to find anything like that on the web. But if it hasn’t been done in any part of the world, it should definitely mean that either there is no market or it is not profitable.

- Do you think that it is manageable in terms of operations?

- Do you think that it is possible to make a profit, knowing that there is absolutely no economies of scale?

It is definitely not an idea I will develop, I’m just surprised it doesn’t exist already, so do not hesitate to bash it, it is just a trial to see if I can get some feedback on my ideas thanks to this blog.

For my course of entrepreneurship, I had to interview an entrepreneur to understand the major obstacles to overcome when creating a venture. Raphael Labbé, one of the co-founder of U.[Lik], has took the time to share with me the story of U.[Lik] from an entrepreneurial point of view. As many of you know, U.[Lik] allows users to share their tastes by creating their own online library where they can aggregate their ratings of cultural products (music, cinema, arts, people…).

You can find the story here on Tech IT Easy. Be careful, the article is really long, but how can you shorten an entrepreneurial story? Since entrepreneurship is all about mentoring, it has been really great for me to discover Raphael’s entrepreneurial adventure, or “rollercoaster”.

If you want to discover my tastes, visit my lounge on U.[Lik] here. Christmas is approaching, so please also check my wishlist ;-). And good luck to Raphael and Mathieu to build this “cultural Babel” (sorry but this expression rocks!).

I’ve already written about the failure of my company creation but that’s not the kind of thing you get over easily especially when a good friend sends you an email proving that your idea wasn’t crap because… somebody else is developing it, but is doing it much better than you were.

When I created BlogEntreprise, my idea was to tackle a growing niche of the blog market: small businesses and clubs, by allowing them to communicate simply and interactively with their customers, members or prospects without requiring a webmaster. Creating a corporate blog platform was also a way of creating a directory of these blogs, unlike other blog platforms mixing personal and professional blog.  As I said in my previous article on the subject, the main problem was the awful design, and the fact that we had absolutely no money to invest in it. Finding investors would have been impossible as neither my partner nor me were committed full time.

Blog4Trade is doing EXACTLY the same: a directory of corporate blogs, classified in different categories of the corporate world,  with exactly the same positioning (”the first blog platform 100% business”, targeting small businesses), with exactly the same marketing speech about the advantages of a blog for a company and exactly the same features (”blog of the month” on the home page).

But clearly, when you look at the two screenshots in this article, would you rather create a blog on BlogEntreprise on the left or on Blog4Trade on the right? The decision takes less than a second. But what is really hard to swallow is just that all the key success factors were there, except one (design) which would have cost no more than €3000, but it is an amount we didn’t have at the time.

No great idea cost nothing. They always cost something, even if “something” is really low. So you really have to evaluate this “something” before because, how great your idea can be, it won’t be revealed unless you finally get this “something”. Now I will leave my bitterness to wish good luck to Blog4Trade which seems to be a really good platform!