Who are the creators of start-ups?
In the journal Travail et emploi of the Directorate for the animation of research, studies and statistics (Dares), in 2019, the researcher Marion Flécher drew up their profile.
80% of the sample of 501 respondents have a bac + 5 or more, 21% come from engineering schools and 35% from business schools.
83% said they had set up their start-up out of an entrepreneurial spirit.
A desire shared by our three witnesses expected at the VivaTech show (June 16 to 19): the manufacturer of a luxury hydrogen car, an entrepreneur who explains the blockchain with Lego, a solar airplane pilot.
Olivier Lombard, the car driver converted to hydrogen
Olivier Lombard has always had the "entrepreneurial spirit, the desire to create something".
Like his great-grandfather, an entrepreneur in the entertainment world.
And like Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, whom he likes to cite as a model, "because he has proven that an ambitious project can be achieved by starting from little".
So when the opportunity presented itself to him, he didn't hesitate for a second to go for it.
At just 30 years old, this former racing driver is at the head of Hopium, a start-up he created in 2019 to design “the first high-end car running on hydrogen”.
His goal is to market a model in 2025. A real challenge that the young Ile-de-France native of Poissy (Yvelines) has set himself at the risk of his career.
Winner of the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2011, Olivier Lombard is approached by the Swiss laboratory Green GT, which is working on the design of a hydrogen competition car. He becomes a development pilot. “I was testing the performance on the track so that the engineers could adapt the settings,” explains this accomplished sportsman who quickly became passionate about this new fuel. For 7 years, he will be the only one to drive this “clean” racing car. So, when other manufacturers enter the nascent hydrogen vehicle market, he immediately imagines the role he can play there. “I had the vision for the brand I wanted to create,” he says.
Olivier Lombard sketches the outlines of an elegant vehicle, much more “efficient and aesthetically appealing” than those already in existence.
He called on Félix Godard, a designer who worked for Porsche or Tesla, and recruited around twenty engineers in France and Germany thanks to several fundraisers for a total of 7.3 million euros.
Its sedan, which should be marketed around 120,000 euros, is also designed to appeal to technology enthusiasts "with a mix of services, such as gaming" and "the use of blockchain to ensure data traceability. : owners, carbon footprint… ”.
He sees big, and far.
There is still some way to go… but his project is moving forward.
Every day, Olivier Lombard goes to the workshops of Montlhéry (Essonne) to check the last adjustments of Alpha 0, the first rolling prototype that he will unveil on June 17 in the 8th arrondissement of Paris.
The startupper salutes the work of its teams who released this prototype in “6-7 months, a very good performance”.
While waiting perhaps to go touch the stars like Elon Musk, he keeps his feet on the ground.
Online on the
VivaTech
website
.
Registration open for the prototype exhibited on June 17 in Paris
.
Laure Merlin explains the blockchain by Lego
Now 48 years old, she became an entrepreneur late in life.
With Laure Merlin, we are far from the stereotype of the business school start-up.
By choosing literary studies - Hypokhâgne, then university of philosophy - she wanted instead to become a writer or a psychoanalyst.
Community life in a Parisian artists' squat initially wins.
Her fascination with this "crazy, underground world, with a diversity of profiles" is such that she immediately gives up her first position as communications manager in a small publishing house and the salaried staff that goes with it to paint.
“I didn't sell anything and lived on RMI,” she recalls.
Laure Merlin, founder of Playmytech, popularizes the operation of complex technologies using Legos.
Sebastien Salom-Gomis
After two years of this life apart and thanks to a little money earned by helping an author, Laure left for Ethiopia at the age of 29. Instead of staying there for two months, she lives there for two years and returns to France. Her husband works, Laure prefers to immerse herself in books and nature. The birth of her two children is a click. She understands that the world of work has changed, and that of tech too, that their “impact can be generous”.
“My time has come,” she said to herself at 39, when she discovered blockchain and cryptocurrencies. According to her, what is happening is as strong as the arrival of the web. Divorced, and living in Nantes (Loire-Atlantique), Laure makes a place for herself in this ecosystem, works in a start-up, meets a new community ... The original way she found to explain blockchain and bitcoin with Lego, on the occasion of the inauguration of an incubator, is a success.
“For this subject, the language is not appropriate,” she explains. It's like the tango. Saying to put one foot to the left and to the right works less than to hold you in the arms to show the right steps. Initiating technology and making it digestible in a company involves all employees. These are the building blocks of its start-up Playmytech, launched in February 2020 for companies concerned by traceability issues and "not wanting to miss the blockchain". The timing does not work in its favor because, with each confinement, the potential customers stop everything. "My tailor-made workshops are done in person, it cannot be digitized", she insists, forced to put "her business on hiatus".
A member of the Orange Women Entrepreneurs program, she relies on VivaTech to restart the machine, find clients and an associate.
With the dream of convincing the National Assembly and the State services of the possible implications of blockchain.
Visible at VivaTech on the Orange stand, location H10-044, Friday June 18.
Raphaël Domjan, the ambulance driver turned eco-adventurer
His awareness of climate change dates back to the summer of 2004. “I returned to Iceland, where I had set foot for the first time in 1993, in the footsteps of Nicolas Hulot,” says eco-adventurer Raphaël Domjan. .
In just eleven years, the glacier had retreated three kilometers.
For me it was a shock.
Since then, this engineer, born in Neuchâtel (Switzerland) in 1972, has traveled the planet to promote solar energy, initiating the craziest challenges.
After a brief career as a motorcycle mechanic, the young Swiss had a dual training, engineer and ambulance driver.
In 2003, he created with his brother the first web host running on solar energy with which he "fell in love".
Raphaël Domjan is preparing the first flight with a manned solar plane in the stratosphere.
LP / Olivier Arandel
"It is the most available renewable energy, the most equitably distributed and the cheapest in the world," explains the man who has succeeded in mobilizing the best brains and the richest investors to carry out his projects. "You have to know both how to sell dreams and have a sufficiently pragmatic project", confides the initiator of PlanetSolar. This large solar catamaran allowed her to go around the world between 2010 and 2012, with the support, among others, of the Prince Albert of Monaco Foundation. In 2015, he set out again at sea, on the icy waters of the Arctic, with a kayak equipped with solar panels ...
After water, air.
Today, the explorer is preparing the first flight with a manned solar plane in the stratosphere.
This is the SolarStratos project, a six-hour mission: three hours of ascent, a quarter of an hour more than 15 km from the ground, three hours of descent to the ground.
A daring project, carried out via his start-up.
Raphaël Domjan confided, a few years ago, that his parents had instilled in him "total freedom to realize [his] dreams", which had pushed him to dare to undertake anything.
"You also have to be able to share your dreams to get a team on board, to get them to join an adventure", confides the founder, who has already flown 40 hours aboard his solar plane.
The mission, which should be completed in 2023, had some technical problems: “We redone the electrical system, broke the wings…”, says the pilot.
But these delays - the pandemic has also been there - have not marred his optimism, nor discouraged financiers.
“Apart from a family company sold to investors, no partner has let us go,” he says.
We even signed a new contract with the watchmaker Longines.
On the first line of the contract, we undertake to do everything to succeed… not to succeed.
"
The SolarStratos project is to be discovered at VivaTech on June 16, 17 and 18 room 1, stand H21.
