Loic Le Meur Blog

How You Can Start A Business in 2009, With Passion

Each edition of LeWeb inspires more participants to start a business and it is one of its main purposes. I am always getting many questions about how to start a business after LeWeb, years ago I had written a series of posts, "create a company" that I should have continued, but instead of doing that I started other businesses. To help the few friends who are dying to start their businesses in 2009, here are some very quick thoughts that could help them get started. This is NOT a comprehensive post, just sharing a few top of mind ideas that I would tell you if you asked me how you should get started.

-just throw yourself in the water and swim, stop thinking. Most people I know hesitate too much to start, they think too much, just do it and learn as you go
-it is not where you start that matters, it is where you take it that matters, as Jason Calacanis says, not where you start
-stop waiting for the idea of your life, just focus on something easy to explain and that delivers a service people will like
-identify "empty space" that is a service or product that does not exist or badly delivered by your future competitors
-remain in your area of expertise, it is generally what you have the most passion about and where you are the best
-do not spend months on the business plan, do something simple and start selling it as soon as possible, your business plan will be wrong anyway
-do not spend time on market research, it is useless. Just search the web for who is doing it or not, read blogs about it, search on twitter, etc
-got your idea? good, just start. Do not spend months writing it in details or doing the best powerpoint ever, it is pointless. Just write it in bullet point format.
-share it as much as you can to friends and other entrepreneurs, on your blog (start blogging if you don't) and get advice. They will only care about the bullet point, short executive summary.
-do not be afraid that anybody "steals" your idea, there are hundreds of people who have the same idea right now and probably some already working on the same. If you do not do it, you will only have to complain when someone else has done it, and it will be useless as they will always say they had the idea before (and it will probably be true, maybe not, who cares).
-repeat after me "ideas have no value, only execution matters". When you are done repeat that again. -try to start without resources or if you can, raise some money with friends and family, do not go and spend time see VCs at start, especially in difficult times
-start building as soon as possible, don't wait. Ship anything you can, a simple website, even with bugs, call it alpha :)
-you are not a developer? go find one, you can either give him enough shares for him to be cofounder, or just go to elance find resources generally for not much. You can have an entire site done there very cheap
-once shipped, get friends and family using it and giving you feedback. Blog it, tweet it, share on Facebook, any means to get the initial community going is the best
-don't do marketing, do a better product first
-use a feedback tool such as uservoice or getsatisfaction and ask your community to give you feedback and vote on the most important features they want
-just deliver the most popular features your active users want and deliver often, don't try to make the perfect product, it will not happen.
-run as fast as you can as being transparent implies that competitors will also read your community feedback and often copy cool ideas, sometimes deliver them faster than you do
-once your product is ready enough, start selling something, find real customers. This does not mean it should become entirely paying, the community would not like that, rather ship a "pro" more feature packed product, or start adding some non intrusive advertising but in recession times, do not count too much on advertising revenues...
-write a weekly or monthly newsletter, email marketing is far from being dead, use one of the tens of free tools around, make sure you let people unsusbcribe easily if they like, avoid spam.
-keep in touch with the community as much as you can with events (can be virtual events such as questions, challenges) every week or even every day
-keep improving the product regularly, do not let too much time in between two versions
-if you have some friends and family or better seed or VC money, "hire slowly and fire fast" as you will read very often, it is always good advice. As tough as it can be, it is a question of survival, always make sure you "have enough runway" ahead of you. If you don't, your team is too big.
-success takes time, give it the time it needs. LeWeb, my conference, took 5 years to gather nearly 2000 participants and establish its brand (that can even survive some logistical issues, or at least I think!) and I did not even think about it as a business when I started it
-don't think you will never be able to execute your idea with almost no means, there are solutions most of the times and great "bootstrapped" companies are the living proof
-in the current tough market conditions when it is extremely tough to raise money with crappy valuations, the best is obviously to work on ideas that generate revenue as soon as possible.
-have passion about your business. Do not sleep much and focus only on your business. Do not do anything else, except taking some good two hours lunches from now and then.
-work like hell. Be always on. Know your space and focus focus focus.

Obvious? Yes. All the above is obvious. But you cannot imagine how many friends I know who never start because they do not follow the obvious. I forgot things? Of course, this is why there are thousands of books about entrepreneurship. I did not talk about human resource for example. I just tried to gather a few quick thoughts. I wish you all to start a business in 2009 and will be happy to help as much as I can, just keep in mind that I am very busy trying to make mine, Seesmic, a great success. Fortunately I have some runway ahead of me as the most "new" and "innovative" a product is, the longer it will take to find its use, but the more exciting it is! If you have any motivation issue, just watch Gary Vaynerchuk at LeWeb and you will "just crush it".

Andries Molenaar, Enterprise Ireland

I like the Irish government approach with startups. Instead of investing hundreds of millions of euros in search engines nobody uses, they invest the same amount in startups, along with VC funds. One could argue that public money is not here for that but Europe does not have enough entrepreneurs and when they start their business it is too difficult for them to find seed money. Andries Molenaar explains us how Ireland helps. Congrats.

Start a business - 7: Entrepreneurs do make mistakes, learn from them and react. PR and blogs and how your Company should deal with them

I take the recent events I have been going through as an opportunity to continue my series "Create a company" which I will just call now "Start a Business" as many people suggested me I should.

Good entrepreneurs are not the ones that never make mistakes, they are the ones that learn the most and react the best to their mistakes.
I don't know if I am a good entrepreneur, but I know I make a lot of mistakes.

I hear a lot about people who talk about my mistakes as an Entrepreneur in 8 years of business, usually they talk about them criticizing me sometimes strongly.

I make mistakes all the time, every day. I learn much more from my mistakes than my right decisions and people who want to become entrepreneurs often do not launch their projects because they fear making wrong decisions. I believe they should just take it as a normal entrepreneurial behavior.

Same with people who laugh at entrepreneurs who make mistakes, they clearly do not understand it is in the exact definition of an entrepreneur do make mistakes all the time. The people who do not take risks make fewer mistakes.

One of the last mistakes I have made is to disclose [FR] the information of my company Ublog being acquired by Six Apart to the French press before releasing it on my own blog and to Ublog users.

I read many people writing about my mistake who say "How can he make such mistakes having graduated from the business school that he did? Didn’t they teach him communications and marketing there?". Well precisely this is not the type of thing people learn at business schools -or at least the type of thing "I" learnt-.

How do you get PR ?

You learn PR by experimenting it. When I graduated from the business school, I did not even know that a PR agency even existed and I was wondering how my competitors or other companies got the press they got. Since the launch of Ublog as a company, we got a lot of press [FR] in France about Blogging, Ublog and Typepad. Now I see many bloggers in general or bloggers from competition who wonder how and why we got so much press, why does the journalists only talk about our solutions and not theirs, and they even laughed at the journalists on their blogs calling the articles advertising.

Well, as I commented on some blogs talking about this, getting press is not rocket science for most people and for most journalists, the subject must be interesting for the journalists, you have to prepare their work as much as you can if you want to speed the process by writing notes about what you may want the press to talk about (so that their articles are easier to write), and finally, you have to get the message to them.

For this, if you have had relationships with journalists for years -like me, but I started with none-, it helps, but also a good PR agency helps. The agency will write a press release if you are not capable of doing it yourself, send it to their journalist database if you don't have your own and call them back to possibly get their interest if you are lazy, don't have the time, or don't simply don't want to do it yourself.

Obviously, my above remarks cannot be generalized and good journalists do not wait for Press Releases or calls from PR agencies to arrive, they choose a subject, make an exhaustive research on it, verify their sources and in that process may finally integrate information coming from PR agencies, but not always.

How may you even get more PR ?

So there is something I learnt over the years is that when you have something important to announce for your company, your PR agency will always ask you to give the exclusivity of the information to some influential titles to try to get a better article. What they call "exclusivity of the release" is actually just giving the information to some journalists before others. When I was running a Web Agency back in 1996, we kept using this as we kept being asked by journalists the exclusivity of the new competitions we won (usually large brands such as Chanel -the site design is still mostly the same graphical charter we designed in 1998 or 99- would always make agencies compete to win the business).

So when I announced the acquisition of my Company by Six Apart, my PR agency and myself called a few journalists, some of them were interested by the news, and some of them asked us for exclusivity. I thought a lot about it as I know how PR is changing with blogging and I hesitated a lot this time, because not only did I think about the consequences with the bloggers, but I also actually hate this because when you give exclusivity to some journalists, the other ones are upset.

Discussing with some of them, I finally decided to give only a few hours advantage to Le Journal du Net (article [FR]), one of the most known online source in France for Internet business, and in print to Les Echos (article [FR]) which is one of the first financial daily in France, it belongs to the Financial Times. I apologize to other French journalists who may be reading this, but both journalists who wrote these articles insisted on the exclusivity and I accepted. Actually, Le Journal du Net did not benefit much of the advantage, although the article was ready quickly, they only uploaded it on their servers hours after some of their competitors. This I would say was not a mistake PR wise, it was a mistake blogging World wise.

The old rules have already changed, blogging changes the deal

Obviously I had thought of sending a special email or releasing the information on the Ublog home page before or at the same time as the press and honestly I had decided to do so. Discussing with my team, we talked about the impact it could have on the few angry Ublog users (on 22 000 blogs created even though not all are active) as we already had a lot of discussions months ago when we disclosed the fact that Ublog became exclusive representative of Six Apart in Europe, which this time we disclosed first on my blog (on my Ublog blog [FR] and my brand new TypePad blog [FR]).

The fact that we released it first on my blog before the press did not change anything to the fact that some Ublog users were not happy about the news and we launched a discussion immediately [FR] about it to try to solve the issue. So back to the decision about informing our users first, we had learnt from the past experience that some users were unsatisfied by us offering them to switch to TypePad (if they wanted to) and we knew these users will react strongly to any news anyway.

We also believed most of the Ublog users did not care at all about the news of Ublog being acquired by Six Apart as our product offering would not change at all (TypePad was already offered to them for a long time). As we expected the strong critics and insults from the users that we knew would react, we decided not to send anything to anybody. Having seen the reactions we had recently, this proved to be true in most cases and we saw many comments that showed that people do not care much about the company being acquired but more about the product offer, and that is normal. However this still was a mistake as it gave an additional argument to the angry users to say how poorly we communicate with them and gave some people interested by the story such as Stephanie (note) strong arguments too to explain why we don't talk well to our users.

So yes, it was a mistake, the articles we got in the press were clearly not worth all this.

Now if you look at it in a more detailed way, I think again about people who tell me that I should have learnt at my business school not to make mistakes like this one. What they do not take into account is that generally the rules of anything in business change all the time and Entrepreneurs learn more by experience than by what they are taught at school (actually many do not have business education and the business school I graduated from trains many managers and very few Entrepreneurs).

This time is special though, I have been reading and blogging a lot about Journalism & Blogging. My three main sources on this topic are obviously Joi, Dan and his new blog about his book, and the excellent PR Blog I can only advise you to read (check this interview of Dan on it). PR are changing completely with blogging, not only because the journalists do not have the exclusivity of writing the news anymore, not only because they want the Companies and the PR agencies to talk to them in a different way, but more importantly the clients of all products and services of all companies start to write their thoughts about them every day.

How did we react to the angry U-blog users ?

Immediately at the time of the launch of Typepad on Ublog, back in May 2004, we started a discussion on my post [FR] about the test Ublog users were doing with TypePad and I tried to listen as much as I could. There are tens of comments on these posts, with many satisfied bloggers comments too, and we also answered many emails. What people wanted mainly to hear is that we were not of course asking them to switch to TypePad by force, it was only an option, that the Ublog service as they knew it would stay if they chose not to shift. Also, to thank them for their trust since the beginning, we offered our paying users to have a TypePad pro account, a 15 euros per month value, for 4 euros, which is what they were paying. TypePad Pro has many more features than the old Ublog paid product, even though it lacks integration in the Ublog community. Many understood and either shifted or stayed on Ublog, which is fine too. The most angry people asked me to organize a chat, which I gladly accepted, and they unfortunately never joined it.

What was very difficult for us as well, is that there was no common voice, no common grouped request from them, even though they form a community. After this failed chat, the comments stopped on my blog and the complaints stopped for months. In the meantime, about 10 000 new Ublog blogs were created, not all of them being still active today of course.

When we announced the acquisition two weeks ago, I started a discussion [FR] again on my French blog (even though I started it too late) and it is going on now. As I have the same frustration as last time about the fact that a grouped angry users request does not exist, I have put together a proposal [FR] for them. In short, I reassured them again that
-if they do not want to switch to TypePad, they can stay on Ublog, we will maintain the service as long as we can
-we will make TypePad blogs ping the Ublog homepage so that the TypePad bloggers feel as still being part of the Ublog community if they like
-we will make the old paying Ublog product become free for its current users at the subscription renewal date, but we will leave them with all the current product features they have

One day after having posted this proposal, it seems that people came down and that we are solving as best as we can the issue. I continue to listen and to talk.

Now be careful, what happened to us will happen to you, too

We are a blogging company. What we wake up for every morning is to provide our clients the best tools to express themselves and build an audience (be it only their friends & family or a wider one). So no, we are not surprised that our clients use our own tools to say that they are not happy about our own services, this is absolutely normal. It just changes completely the way a Company interacts with its clients in general, it is happening to us first because we provide the tools (all our competitors, too).

This is why I think it is not fair and fair at the same time to say that all blogging companies communicate poorly with their users (see the comments: "Every blogging company whose services I have used has had an awful record for communicating with their customers"). Now when it comes to people wonder if I have tried to hide this issue to Six Apart, which is obviously not true, I am glad that Stephanie quickly updated her post.

We are all learning how to communicate in this new world. I am learning everyday and I learnt a lot in the last week alone. Don't think it will be only limited to blogging tools providers, expect your clients to "seem to feel that it is them who actually own the company" as well anytime soon. It is already happening to many companies such as Netflix, with the unofficial Netflix blog, hacking Netflix that the corporate communications department is ignoring so much right now (for how long with 30 000 customers reading and posting on it ?). I agree with the main author of the blog, "I think most companies don't get blogs yet".

This is going to spread to all businesses and we will all have to deal with it. As far as mistakes are concerned, expect me to do many, many, many more mistakes, and I will always try to listen, learn and react the best way I can, such as this time with close to a hundred comments on my French post that addresses the issue with the angry Ublog customers. I also address the issue in english too, to respond to this post, as not only your customers take part in the debate but also anybody interested in the issue.

As Didier says, "we see here clearly a side effect of using the blogs as a base for business communication. a few unsatisfied people can have a huge impact on the overall customer community and its feeling. some posts are acting as "unguided missiles" in the blogosphere. on the other hand, is the propagation of information really working in another way in the "real" world?"

I like this new World a lot, even though it is sometimes very hard to learn how to deal with it and it is clearly not the last time it will happen. This will just become business as usual. All Companies will have to listen to their clients and people interested in their products much more than they are used to, and they will have to talk to them in a different way, not through the standard "official story", which is dead.

I really hope the issue with our angry Ubloggers will be solved soon even though I have no doubts it is impossible to please everybody when you have thousands of users of any product.

Building a business friendly Europe: Change the image of entrepreneurs in Europe

During Eastern, I have been traveling to four of the ten countries that will join the EU on May 1st. Incredibly interesting trip not only for the countries we have been visiting, but also for the meetings we had in the Euro Identity Caravan that Miha Pogacnik launched. The discussions we had helped me prepare a session about the future of business in Europe I will be speaking at the World Economic Forum's European Summit end of April in Poland.

The below text is only rough notes from some of the ideas we discussed and I will try to put them in a better writing as soon as I can.

Entrepreneurs often have a bad image or no image at all in Europe.

Risk is part of their life, every day, and failure is not perceived as being part of the game. The business life of an entrepreneur is full of challenges, it took him time to find an idea and also time to make the decision to take the risk to launch it, very frequently he has left an interesting position somewhere with a good salary and created risk for his own family as well.

In most European countries, there are not enough entrepreneurs, the Financial Times rated France and other European countries as one of the last three countries in the world in number of entrepreneurs per inhabitant for example.

Nine companies created out of ten disappear during the first three years following their creation. So failure is not only something that can happen, it is actually a fact happening to most entrepreneurs.

Most Entrepreneurs who fail in Europe get criticized, do not dare to talk about it, and generally many people will tell them they should not start again because they failed.

The entrepreneurs who are successful in the US are often considered as heroes. In Europe, most of them hide themselves because success is not something you can show to the same extent, because many people around them start to become jealous.

The image of European entrepreneurs must change. They are creative, they take risks, they create jobs, they put their life and family at risk to start their businesses.

Europe needs more entrepreneurs.

Solutions coming out of the brainstorming:

Education of the young Europeans

-integrate teaching Entrepreneurship in very early classes at school, make all students understand what is an entrepreneur and that they can be one, too
-have entrepreneurs explain what they do to schools and universities
-make the internships in companies compulsory throughout Europe whatever the specialization of the student is and increase their rate

Simplify the process of creating a company and the administration during the first years as much as possible

Small businesses need to have different regulations for the first years of their growth, make their life easier, it is already difficult enough to find the first clients, keep them and find new ones not to have to worry all the time about administration.

Rules and regulations, tax and laws, should make it much easier for an entrepreneur to create his own business

Education and support to Entrepreneurs

-create a European support program to help entrepreneurs get the answers and the support they need.

A pan-european communications campaign for entrepreneurship

-increase awareness on why entrepreneurship is good for society (taking risks, creating jobs, success is good, anybody can do it)
-talk about success being good and that "you can do it"
-talk about failures, explain why and what failed and make people aware that failure is part of the risk
-we could create a day of the entrepreneurs in Europe, like for the day of music, to promote their role, hold conferences, have companies open their doors, make the public understand that it is not that difficult to create a company, give everybody the will to take risks

Get the successful entrepreneurs share their experiences on a European level in any form, best could be in written form (we should get as many entrepreneurs as we can start a blog and share their experiences).

Create a Company - Table of contents

Welcome to my living thoughts about how to start and grow a business.



These articles are not meant to be technical or theorical but only based on past experience.



I will try to keep a pace of writing one article a week... Please be nice with me as I am growing my own company, Ublog, I do not have much time.



Create a company is a discussion: please continue to contribute, let's write it together !



I would like it to become a place, become the opposite of a book, a permanent living discussion for will-be entrepreneurs, current and former entrepreneurs.



I have been amazed by the audience stats, comments, emails and links the notes I have posted have generated thank you for your interest !


It has been months already Create a Company is number one on more than 7 million web pages in Google and many other search engines, this is also amazing for me.



Past articles:

1 - the idea has no value, only execution counts

2 - find the best people and trust them

3 - work long term rather than short term

4 - respect and talk to your competitors

5 - raise funds or not ?

6 - networking is key




Future articles ideas (please help me if you see a subject I should cover, sorry no special order, I will order them when written...)


speed of execution

be extremely focused

build to sell fast or for the long run ?

define the market

timing: not too early, not too late

do not listen to people who tell you that you will fail

do not try to do everything yourself, your are the head of the orchestre, not the musician

be cash flow positive or burn cash

build buzz and momentum, and keep it

live and breathe for your very first clients

learn how to get press and talk to journalists

acquire companies or focus on internal growth ?

go public ?

gather an advisory board

get funds from friends and family or business angels

the difference between an advisory board and a board of professional investors

understand the different agenda that VCs have with you

hire many people or subcontract as much as possible ?

use Internet and Intranet tools to gather and share information

work day and night during the first years

start a business without passion will lead to failure

make your team happy, talk to them, love them

keep moving, be always ahead of your business, like a plane pilot

don't play with the law, refuse anything that looks suspect long term

small is beautiful, don't be scared by large and powerful corporations but respect them

get regularly out of your daily business

the importance of trust in business




to be continued... any other idea ? please comment...

Create a company: 6 - Networking, networking, networking !

Business is people. Networking is key. To my knowledge there is no successful company without a highly networked person managing it.

You should look at what business associations exist for the business you want to start and join them.

There is none ? Fine. Start one yourself.

This is what I did back in the early Internet days when Isabelle Bordry (from Yahoo, Patrick Robin from Imaginet and ROL at that time, Guillaume Buffet from Singapour, Catherine Barba from at that time Optimum Media, Jean-Pierre Levieux from Microsoft, Godefroy Jordan from Alpaga and many others -who will forgive me for not quoting them- started the French Chapter of the Internet Advertising Bureau. We were either competitors or in some kind of client/suppliers relationships but we all had interest in the internet advertising to be better known in France, and we succeeded. Many well known brands joined us or listened to our presentations and press releases and finally bought on-line advertising.

It was a great way to get known, get our companies known, and finally get new customers.

If you are an alumni from a business school or another kind of school, that is also a good way to network of course. I actually never used the alumni book "cold calling" someone to try and get a new customer. I do not think it works really. What I thought more efficient was to go to the different events of the Association HEC and get to know people on a different topic than your business. It can be anything, including sports (in my case, sailing races, golf).

Yesterday I had a few drinks with Pierre Reboul who started his own network, the Electronic Business Group EBG. Pierre did an incredible job gathering all the key large companies e-business managers and specialists together in France. It is now the number one e-business association with 350 members and weekly events on e-business. One of his key to success was to get fast enough into the club very well known and influential French business men, such as François-Henri Pinault.

When I had my first successes achieved selling the companies and getting some buzz, I joined more networking clubs outside of my e-business business, such as Le Club des Jeunes dirigeants of Loïc Tribot La Spierre, Le Cercle des Vigileants around Marc Ullman, La revue des deux mondes of Marc de La Charriere, head of Fimalac.

This was all very French. So finally I got lucky enough to be invited to join the Global Leaders of Tomorrow network of the World Economic Forum. Its flagship event is of course in Davos every year, where I met Joi and Antoin, early bloggers.

Business events are also very good for networking.

Now I think blogging is excellent as I am much more interested in international matters, businesses and people. This is real time networking, no need to join any association or event.

Any other idea about networking ?

Create a company: 5 - Raise funds or not ?

This is a question I am currently totally asking myself right now for my future company.

If you start your business and execute it well, one day will come when you will either want to look after funding or better, investors may call you.

Here are the pros and cons as I see them.

-Raising funds allow you to go faster by hiring more people, doing advertising campaigns, opening new countries, etc. -Raising funds help get you in a leadership position when your competitors do not get as much funding. -The investors on board provide you with support, ideas, constructive criticism, partnerships, etc.

Yesterday I had a meeting with one of the best entrepreneurs I know, Denis Payre, who started Business Objects and recently Kiala in Brussels. Business Objects is one of the rare French startups that managed a great international growth, a successful Nasdaq listing and thousands of satisfied clients around the globe. Launched less than three years ago, Kiala has bridged the last mile for many ecommerce and mail-order companies in Europe. It has achieved a leadership position in Europe with about 6M€ in revenues in 2003, 30 forecasted in 2004, 25 000 deliveries a day right now and about 5000 Kiala points where you can get your delivery. Basically its concept is you do not have to go to the Post anymore to get something you ordered, you can go to Kiala points such as Fuel Stations, anytime you want. Kiala has a team of 50 people in Brussels from 12 nationalities with clients such as Quelle, PPR and Otto. It even managed making great deals with La Poste and TPG, the Dutch post, who looked at Kiala as a competitor at the beginning.

Well, despite the tough environment for investing, Denis managed to raise about 20M€ in less than three years. Denis argues that of course he got dilution, but he could have never achieved a leadership position without these funds. He has less and less of his company but it is worth more and more. Of course in paper for the time being, but Business Objects transformed the paper into cash in the past so when your company is successful, exit comes one way or another.

Let's now have a look at the negative points

-Especially these days, the investment comes most of the time with preferred shares, anti-dilution clauses, full rachet and other bad news for your founder shares. Basically if you fail to sell the company at a higher price than the one they invested in plus a high interest rate (25% ?!) sometimes, your shares will just be worth nothing until they get this exit. I understand it, of course, but it is sometimes very tough for the entrepreneur and can create difficult relationships at a board level. -Having more cash can lead you to more mistakes. How many Internet startups have we seen burning way too much too fast (sometimes with the influence of the investors themselves, sometimes only because the entrepreneur just wanted to go fast and forgot the P&L). The worst thing: you wait for the next round to get refinanced and it never comes... -Spending a good share of your time managing investors relationships (Denis has 7 investors, it takes time) than creating value for your company. Because a board also comes with monthly reporting, that you need anyway, but maybe if you were alone you would not do it that detailed. -Raising a VC round means also a lot of time preparing it and closing it. It also comes with lawyer fees that can make 100s of thousands $ disappear from the cash you raise. -Usually very fast the entrepreneur loses control on the company. Talk to Denis, he does not care, he says "If they fire me it is good news because it means they have found a better CEO and my shares will get more value".

Well I agree with you Denis (start your blog by the way !), only if their judgement of what a better CEO is is the right one ! In any way the entrepreneur will always have more power, even if he lost control, just because investors do not manage the company.

So now that I have thought of pros and cons, I still think achieving a leadership position and fast growth is a good deal over tough negociations and possible control issues. So I will probably raise funds again -if investors are interested and trust me- as I did in the past.

Any other pros and cons you see ?

Create a company: 4 - Respect and talk to your competitors

Talking to your competitors is key. I know a lot of people who keep criticizing them all the time. I have always discussed with them, met them, and on the contrary try to build something with them.

I created RapidsSite France in 1997, we were the very first to launch "shared web hosting" in France. At that time France Telecom and others were offering web hosting services at around $800 per month minimum.

We launched our service at $25 per month, and managed a 20% per month growth during two years, starting the business with only $10000 , like I did for B2L. We managed to get to a number one position on the French market, with about 600 resellers throughout France and more than 15 000 clients in less than 18 months.

We had a marketing campaign with a picture of castle on the ad, reassuring people that our web hosting service was rock solid (it was not made by a great ad agency but it worked). One day at the end of 1999, I almost felt from my chair reading a monthly paper when I saw an ad from France Telecom. This ad was for the launch of a direct competitor to our services and... they used a castle on their ad too !

Imagine that, France Telecom, so much more powerful than us, copied our advertising !

Here two reactions are possible. One, you sue them, call them to insult them, criticize them in public. This is an option many business men like. I took the opposite one. I called them, took my nicer voice and asked them why with all the financials means they have -working with the best ad agencies- they took the same ad as we already had. I kind of joked and said you could have chosen something different or are we such a model to you ?

Well that was clearly the best option. They changed the ad immediately, invited me too lunch and... bought my company to become the French leader in shared web hosting one month after, integrating it into their Wanadoo Internet offer in 2000.

Would that have happened if I would have taken the wrong way to react to their ad ?

Create a company: 3 - Work always long term rather than short term

Your business life is like living in a very small city.

Each time you work with somebody, you leave an impression. I started my business in Paris, and I thought it was big. I realized fast that information goes so fast about you and your company providing a good or a bad service. So fast.

I looked at my very first clients as gods I had to worship, think all the time about the trust they had given me. I had to give them back much more than their trust, exceed their expectations, not just what they had paid for.

Shortly after I had provided that great quality with my team I realized how fast the word spreads around, we won many new clients thanks to our first clients recommandations.

Of course when we made mistakes the word spreads even faster.

Working long term for me is just asking yourself the question: will this client or person going to call me for another business in the future ? This may sound so simple but I have seen so many people and suppliers think short term. Like taking an opportunity to charge much more than the market price for a product or service. It is likely you will not have a repeat and loyal customer, it will be a one time only. Short term.

Now with blogging it is going to be incredibly fast. Transparence everywhere. Your clients will start blogging soon about you, your company and the quality of your services. Your employees may start blogging about the way you manage it, I actually wonder why trade unions have not started blogging much (do you know any trade union blogs ?).

You will have to answer these blogs, especially the ones criticizing your services, so that they do not appear higher than your own website on google and other search engines. By the way, where is the answer from the Hippopotamus restaurant chain on my post ? ;=)

Create a company: 2 - Find the best people and trust them

One of the most important part of creating a company is getting the best people with you for what you want to do.

When I launched B2L, two friends, Antoine Bello and François Lamotte who launched Ubiqus, hosted me in their company as I did not have the means to rent offices. I had an "office" in front of the lift entrance. Launching a web agency, I naturally thought I needed to hire a good engineer as I only have a business school background.

Hiring an engineer from a good technical school when you are the only employee in the company, when you have no offices and three months of cash ahead of you and no references is not an easy task. Finally I could convince Vincent Maurin to come to the interview and I remember it very well, as I was actually taking an interview, not him. This was normal as I had basically nothing. I had to convince I would get my first clients, I would have enough cash to pay his salary.

The person who probably impressed me the most was Jean-Jacques Borie (I am getting him blogging... but did not start yet). He sent me a CV at the very beginning of B2L that was quite empty I should say without offending him I hope. I was one of the few that received him in interview because his CV was expressing passion. Most people at that time did not have Internet experience so experience mattered less than passion and passion to learn. Jean-Jacques was reading an Internet developtment book every night and learnt as fast as crazy, he quickly became the best technical person of the team and the fastest to add value for our clients. The lesson here is be careful with large and full CVs, I have made a lot of mistakes when I forgot that passion was the most important.

Another important thing is to provide your team with vision, vision about what your long term aim is, your own passion in building the company. Managing a team is not about giving orders, it is about sharing a long term view with your team and their motivation comes from your own passion. If you are not very highly motivated yourself, do not expect your team to be motivated.

Trust. I have never checked anybody's work or working time. My only concern is result. This is especially important when I experienced having employees working on a distant site, you just cannot check anything but results. I always had good results with distance work and will start it again with my new company. The more trust you give to your team, the better the results.