About me

I am French from Reunion island* and decided to start this blog to share my experience of starting the first “start-up launch” event in China with my friends Olof and Dawn. Effectively, back in 2010 I was still living in Beijing, I was a huge fan of the tech blogs from Silicon Valley such as Venture Hacks, Paul Graham, ect and we organized iWeekend and got connected to the local grassroot Tech community. It was such an amazing experience that I decided to record and share it here.

In 2012 I took a leap of faith and worked for a few months on a business idea to connect local grassroots events to sponsors online. I crashed lamentably but fortunately meet wonderful people with Airbnb and took time to travel with friends and family which inspired me to take the next step. I realized I needed to leave China because after 5 years there I started feeling oppressed by a society that breaks you if you do compromise harmony for your freedom of speech. Kaiser Kuo expressed this feeling very powerfully in this podcast. And I always knew I didn’t want to settle down in China.

Between 2012 and 2014 I explored the USA, more particularly Silicon Valley. My interests there is for startups and people who want to impact the world. I also believe it is a place for innovation, where people don’t judge failure but reward taking risks. I was curious to work with people who are better than me (and some who just claim so).

Since 2014 I  happily moved back to Europe in the small international artsy and lefty village of Berlin.

This is a blog about being an idealist, about being an entrepreneur, about start-up life, about practicing improv as a religion, about being an expatriate having not geographical home, about feeling different and ordinary, about believing in smaller community driven systems rather than one-system-for-all, about learning to be tolerant and about never stopping growing.

I share here as much dull as serious stuff. Things like my all-time favorite web comic The Doghouse Diaries. Life is short, don’t take yourself too seriously but also don’t watch too much Netflix.

Hope you enjoy.

*a tiny French tropical island near South Africa. Total population closed to 1M (as of 2013), the city where I grew up is about 150K and the city center is pretty much closed at 7:00PM. It is a pretty small place, multi-cultural, where people knows how to enjoy life. I try to go back at least once every 2 years.