PiPle: the startup

A big decision has been made. With my fellow Engineer friend and maybe some day fellow scholar, Paul Best, we decided in the summer 2018 to launch, 🚀 PiPle and create a start-up.

We have been working loosely on it since a year now and the need for PiPle seemed to grow both in us and in our circles. We will receive an initial ove money, 💰 investment of 20k€ and be incubated at the Campus Eiffel in the 15th arrondissement of Paris.

After a few months we have launched an MVP, a website, are working with a designer, 👩‍🎨 on our beta version, have implement a 2 year strategy, contacted many investments services/companies and just hired 5 interns.

Being an entrepreneur is complex … and crazy. Being an entrepreneur in France is even worse.

Help is here. support is scarce, investments are low. I have witnessed a lot of entrepreneurs in France and the start of an ecosystem but it is not enough it seems and does not welcome innovation enough. We are still working hard, 😓 with my co founder and can rely on courses, some previous knowledge, MOOCs and hard work to help us along the way.

What I have learnt

From the emotional perspective it is like a first run away as a child but from a perfectly functional family, it is like doing mountain, 🏔 climbing, 🧗‍♀️ , for the first time without ropes nor guides. It is an emotional roller coster that just never stops.

The initial PiPle team

What it takes is courage, a ballsy kind of courage. It takes passion and also craziness. But most importantly it takes a team. A team for the company, a team for your family a team for your friends, 👫 . If you loose support in any of these circles, the mountain climbing just got a lot more lonely and dark.

What one learns from such an experience is everything from management, to finance, marketing, design, accounting, 🧾 , business, (in our case web /android /ios dev)

Some advices? work hard, learn as much as you can, be confident and follow yourself.

On creating a company and doing research

Many times I have heard, from both sides, questions about the rationale of creating a company and doing research, I think, 💭 it is actually a different underlying question about the rationale of doing both entrepreneurship and academia. If it is not clear let me give you this quick introduction to my way of understanding both:

They are the same part of a coin called innovation. You need both in order to make it work. and in both you get a lot of overlaps:

• Team management

• Project management

• Financing effort

• Presentations

• Hirings

• The community

Still not convinced? Just look at these guys:

Brendan Frey, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Hagan Bayley, Jim Simons, Craig Venter ..