I
was born and raised in provincial France, near Valenciennes.
Up until the age of 18, I was basically "small-town" with
the occasional study trip to Germany and England. After a
baccalauréat scientifique (high school scientific
track), I wasn’t sure that the French higher education
system was the right fit for me. My parents had the
foresight to send me for a year as an exchange student to
Maine, USA.
My horizons were, consequently, first broadened by
spending one year in the USA as an exchange student,
essentially mastering English and discovering the culture.
My year abroad was the catalyst that led me to choose a
hybrid solution for my university studies: an American
education on French soil. AUP would take my initial
experience in the States to a whole different level, thanks
to a common language combined with a most diverse
international community of students, faculty, and staff.
This was an unanticipated and highly rewarding benefit for
me.
AUP had a small Computer Science Department, but more
importantly, a liberal and pragmatic approach that would
allow me to identify my true interest quickly. My only focus
was to get a degree in Computer Science – fast – in order to
gain the necessary credentials to enter the marketplace.
With a few more credits gleaned here and there, I finished
AUP in under three years.
As an undergraduate CS major I naturally became involved
with the Computer Lab, and also raised funds in 1992 via the
SGA and other sources to bring top-of-the-line computing
equipment (namely 3 NeXT workstations) onto campus. This
allowed me to offer the first round of institutional emails,
at a time when faculty had just a personal CompuServe email
account (if at all). If I recall properly, I worked on the
layout of the AUP Yearbook in what would appear to be an
antique version of QuarkXpress!
The AUP classroom experience? I remember the small
classes, and the accessible and sometimes eccentric faculty…
debating Ethics while sitting in a circle in Professor Jim
Latham’s own living room… and deliberating on an independent
linear programming project with Professor Jim Clayson. My
hang-out was the lab in Grenelle, sort of the antithesis of
the AMEX café in Bosquet!
I undertook an internship during my last semester,
working for a financial software company in La Defense, now
a subsidiary of Reuters. This company ended up offering me a
full-time position right after graduation, and essentially
defined the field of my first “career” in software
development, leading me to various jobs in financial
software (but also in cartoon animation@Dreamworks!).
I then decided to complement my technical degree with a
formal business degree, obtaining an MBA from INSEAD in late
2001. But unlike my peers who went back to consulting,
finance, or higher management positions in the industry, I
decided to start my own venture, ETHERYL, specializing in
online community and collaboration systems, using the
Software-as-a-Service model (SaaS). I eventually sold a
majority stake of the profitable company to a group of
private investors in 2007 to start focusing on new projects.
The rest of the story remains to be written…
Quite simply, my career started with an international
spin despite being a Frenchman based in France, much faster
than would have been possible otherwise. This dimension has
defined my professional and personal life ever since!
AUP broadened my horizons and basically turned me into a
global professional and citizen. It was the perfect
compromise for me… with a lot of unexpected perks. |
