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© Grégoire Pleynet
amélie despot,
dotcom
veteran
The dotcom boom was a time of unbridled
enthusiasm for online companies, when scruffy
entrepreneurs lunched with deep-pocketed
venture capitalists with a fetish for the next-bigthing.
We know now that a lot of the great ideas
that typifi ed the era were just that – great ideas
– and led to one of the most spectacular crashes
trading fl oors have ever seen. Still, though. It
must have been fun. Amélie Despot, is cofounder
of Internet Attitude and a dotcom boom
veteran. Her war story begins in Brussels sometime
in the mid-nineties. “I studied at ICHEC,
where there was a program to send young people
abroad to conduct market research for Belgian
companies.” Amélie was sent to the US to
conduct market research on the internet, right at
the beginning of everything. “When I tell people
this story, they presume I was in San Francisco
or Silicon Valley, but it was even before Silicon
Valley, when everything was happening on the
The start-up special
East Coast,” she laughs, “so it’s quite a while
ago…” While the other program participants
were researching foreign trade-related matters
in places like Indonesia and Bangkok, she
admits she lucked out. “I realised that this was
something a lot more important. There was
a real feeling that something was happening.
I came back to Belgium and sold 2,000 copies
of my market research.” But despite the reception,
there wasn’t much else going on. “It was
diffi cult for me because I really wanted to work
in an Internet company but there was nothing
here in 1996. There weren’t really any tech
companies. I had a feeling the Internet would
come to Europe through advertising, so I spent
the summer working for an advertising agency,
and I read about this guy who wanted to launch
an Internet advertising agency, Arnaud Huret.
So I called him up.” At the time, everything
was developed in HTML and she looks back
fondly at the memory, “The fi rst advertising
banners were animated gifs. It wasn’t very
fancy! There were no standards so we had to
defi ne measurements for advertising performance.
The hardest thing for us was that we had
to educate the market. We spent so much time
and energy explaining how internet advertising
worked. Now, that seems ridiculous.” While the
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past decade has been fi lled with a new kind of
realism about the internet economy, it was a different
time. The sky was the limit. “We launched
it in September 96 and in December 96, IP
bought 40 percent of our shares. It was typical
of the time. We created 10 startups between ‘99
and 2005, totally addicted. We couldn’t really
expect at that time the explosion that was to
happen.” The market, she says, couldn’t keep
up with the ideas. “The problem at the time
was that we were too far ahead of everybody.
The cloud applications you see today: we were
in the cloud ten years ago!”Some of Amélie’s
dotcom ventures have survived in one guise
or another, like dating site Rendezvous and
Contact Offi ce. Nowadays, she spends her time
scanning the Belgian horizon, looking to invest
in tech based startups. “Today, it’s usually a
one man show, maybe two, whereas for us it was
always a group adventure. Now people want a
safe job, safe salary. That was not a question for
us. We took more risks. We worked days and
nights and weekends and holidays, and now
when I hear entrepreneurs looking for a better
work-life balance, I say sorry guys that’s not
compatible; you have to live with your startup,
eat with it, sleep with it and that is the key to
success.” (RK)