Sometimes the solution is right in front of you.
bouncing back
sometimes the solution is right in front
of you
hi my name is i’ve always been
passionate about computers
about any geeky stuff and music as you
can see
my education i can study computer
science at university in paris and then
i went to boston college to learn
about marketing and then as it wasn’t
enough
i went to law school doing audio visual
law and finished my studies at hcc paris
let me get back in time in year 2000 by
then
these are did not exist smartphone did
not exist
spotify didn’t exist youtube did not
exist and internet
well it was about the beginning by the
time i was working for warner music
and i was one of the first employees
doing digital music
and i worked with a great deal of
artists like madonna
the eagles you may not know about them
right and
may you may know this one i want to tell
you about my failures
and there were three big failures in my
career the first one was about mobile
phone ringtones
so in year 2004 this was a smartphone
it wasn’t very smart as you can see and
by the time
i started forewarner music to sell
ringtones
and as an example this is a track from
madonna called
american pie and as you can hear in the
background this was the actual track
now i want you to listen to the what the
ringtone was
see very very different
at the same time this was a huge market
four billion dollars market the price of
a ringtone was
three times the price of an actual track
a single
i knew this market by heart i knew the
tech
i knew the content i was a lawyer and a
tech guy
and i did not create my ringtone company
no i did stay
where i was at warning music this was my
first fail
then i went to streaming i moved from
moana music
to orange and by the time these are did
not exist tiktok did not exist
instagram did not exist smartphone did
not exist i
remember the iphone was 2007. youtube
did exist by the time though
i created a subsidiary of orange called
wormy
we were doing music streaming at the
time and
it was a great success in 2010
i sold wormy for the account of orange
to deezer
i’m sure you’re pretty familiar with
these are and these are
wormy but oh i just got a handshake
another failure so time for a break in
my career and my life
in short i worked in the music industry
i saw the digital revolution
i understood the innovations but hell
why did i miss so i went into analysis
and introspection how education
so went back as i told you studying at
hcc paris for an mba
i just needed to put my ids
right back in order then
i created my own startup so
the startup was called relive real life
was a software that could let
any artists record and sell the audio of
a show right at the end of a concert
it was great many artists did trust us
likes of vienna i’m sure you know
viennese amir
or kerenan they loved the concept we did
tons of tests with them
and i created this concept with a friend
i built it from ground up
even the technology and artists loved us
and
unfortunately record companies well they
stay record companies
so another failure that’s failure number
three
and now as i learned about the failures
went back to orange and took
the director position of a project by
the time that was called libon
libon is an operator within the operator
within orange it’s actually an operator
in the app
that is targeted to all the displaced
people around the world
and at orange i led lebon
because i led the project before it was
called wormy
i saw an opportunity this opportunity
was to buy out libon
i bought libon and now libon is
independent and i’m the ceo
and i saw this opportunity because i
missed the opportunity with the
ringtones
i raised 2 million euros by the time to
create the company
and i raised it because i tried a lot to
raise the money
with relive and failed
today libon is a global mobile voice
operator
hundreds of thousands of customers in
130 country
we have a great team of 35 people and a
great valuation
so i did
made mistakes and failure
is pretty okay only if you learn for
your mistakes
only if you learn from your mistakes and
i will end
this talk but by a quote from
a very well-known man steve jobs who
said
you cannot connect the dots looking
forward you can only connect them
looking backwards merci