Guillaume Decugis co-founded three startups - one in France in the early 2000s building the first mobile music platform, another in 2007 focusing on mobile internet which pivoted to a social news reader in 2010, and finally Scoop.it in 2010 addressing information overload through content curation. While the first two startups met with challenges around funding, distribution, and business models, Scoop.it found product/market fit and has grown monthly uniques 5x year-over-year by addressing how people discover and share ideas that matter. Through these experiences, Decugis learned that teams are more important than ideas, super powers are not required, and that sometimes the real risk is not taking any risk
6. @gdecugis
Exercise: calculate the odds of success
for a startup…
+ Launched in 2001 i.e. between the Internet
bubble burst and 9/11
On an idea that required
3G and multimedia phones
… that eventually hit the
market in 2004
In France a.k.a. the Silicon Valley of
Wine, Cheese and Luxury
brands
= 0.0000001% said a lot of VC’s
8. @gdecugis
To do that we had to innovate constantly
2002: mp3 ringtones
2004: full-track downloads
2005: smart radio
9. @gdecugis
We finally met success
• Late 2002, we painfully raised $5m
• 3 Months later, we realized we no longer
needed them by becoming profitable
• We grew to $35m revenue / 200 FTE
• Late 2005, Openwave acquired Musiwave
for $121m (and sold us back to Microsoft
late 2007)
10. @gdecugis
Why not being in Silicon Valley didn’t
matter
• Carrier relationships (local, regional)
• Music labels deals (local, regional*)
• Mobile phone manufacturers (regional*)
*back then
16. @gdecugis
In 2010, we decided to pivot
We had learned a lot
We had identified a pain point in social media
We had trusting VC’s
We had burnt little cash so far
We had built a scalable social media platform
And…
20. @gdecugis
The Interest Graph: where Social
Discovery meets Search Relevancy
relevantnoisy
find
discover
Search
Social Graph Interest Graph
21. @gdecugis
We became Scoop.it: a new way to
organize and share ideas that matter
• A publishing platform optimized for
content curation
• A big data semantic technology
connecting content and people around
interests
• A quickly-growing community of curators
who develop their online visibility faster
Scoop.it
Eventually decided to go back to Paris kind of forgot about doing a startup…But after a few years I finally did
Caught between giants, innovation was our only added value.
TRANSITION: so this is the first part of my story but after having been successful once, I wanted to see whether it was just luck and I started another company.
TRANSITION: so this is the first part of my story but after having been successful once, I wanted to see whether it was just luck and I started another company.
I didn’t actually go back to school but it felt like I had to re-learn everything and meeting people in SF really helped.
But I guess it all depends on the VC and job market in your own area.