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68 The specials papers
Making a
success of
failure
Closer scrutiny of entrepreneurial success
stories reveals plenty of failure to go around.
It’s common currency in the business that
occasional setbacks are often instrumental
in shaping the overall success. How? Well,
success is a bad teacher. A very successful
Sébastien Doyen is intensely cheerful about
his defeats, something that seems a bit jarring.
He wholeheartedly agreed to a request for
interview on the subject, answering the phone
on the fi rst ring, throat cleared, ready to delve
into the details of the misguided ventures that
almost cost him everything. “I started my
fi rst company three months before I fi nished
school. I passed the exam but… in my mind
I had already left!” says Sébastien, who at the
tender age of 24 had 20 people working for
him. “I wanted to make internet access free, so
I set up an ISP with my brother. But we had to
fi gure out how to make money with free internet
access, so we created another company to sell
advertising. We were the only internet provider
in the world that was making money at the time.”
After three years, they sold the advertising
company to France Telecom and the technology
to Microsoft. “You know when your friend
connects on MSN messenger and a small pop
up appears with their name? It’s our invention.”
But they never received much from Microsoft,
and consider the deal a bit of a rip off. “We sold
it for a fee, and each year, we were supposed
to get a cut for the publicity… but they never
used it for publicity. We were 20, 24… too
young. We should have sold the company for
much more, but we were too technical.” For a
year, the boys did very little, except travel and
spend their money. “After selling to Microsoft
and to France Telecom, we felt like gods, you
know? They invite you in fi rst class… you
become crazy. But the reason we’re still here
is that the deal with Miscrosoft was not great.
After one year, we realised this, and so we said
OK, we should continue to work a little bit!” In
2003, Sébastien and his brother had another go.
“It was a nightmare period. We set up a publicity
company in Paris, but we made two big mistakes.
The fi rst was to try to do something in a
country we didn’t know, and the second was to
think we were so clever that we didn’t need to
research the market. When we sold to France
Telecom, one of their guys said “Wow, boys if
you were in France with that thing you would
have 20 times more customers,” and when
you hear that from the biggest guy in France
Telecom, you think shit!” They decided to take
their business directly to France. “We thought
that because we had made two big sales, we
could enter a country and achieve the same
thing, and of course, you can guess what happened…
ha ha! That part was less funny. It was
a big, big mistake. We stopped the company in
2005 after losing many millions.” Of the 12
companies that Sébastien has been involved in,
eight have succeeded. “You know, I still think
money is just to create something. If you make
a fi rst company and you lose all the money,
you can’t raise money anymore. But you make a
small company, make a small success and sell it,
give back the money to the VC. And the more
you make companies and the more success and
failure you have, the more people trust you.”
With a shrug, he adds “If your company is
not working, then you just create another one.”
Spoken like a true entrepreneur. (RK)
© Grégoire Pleynet