Loic Le Meur
Seesmic and LeWeb

Loic Le Meur is the founder and CEO of Seesmic, a suite of social media management and collaboration tools. With his wife, Le Meur also founded LeWeb, the number-one tech event in Europe. LeWeb brings 3,000 entrepreneurs together every year.

Prior to Seesmic and LeWeb, Le Meur started four other businesses. The first one, founded in1996, was B2L, one of the first web agencies in France. It was sold to BBDO in 1999. In 1997, he founded RapidSite, a shared hosting company that he sold to France Telecom in 1999. In 2000, he founded Tekora, a packaged web site solution. In 2003, he founded Ublog, a weblogs platform that was acquired by Six Apart in 2004.

Pedro Santos: You founded several companies in France prior to moving to the US—all of them doing different things. You also sold a few. Can you talk briefly about each one of them and what lessons that you learned from them?

Loic Le Meur: The first one I created on the campus of the business school I graduated from. That company is B2L. [It] was a digital web agency—one of the very first ones in France. It was founded in 1996 and we were basically creating web sites. We created also one of the first advertising banners in France as well. That company I created without any funding. I didn't know what a business angel was. It grew from zero to one hundred people. It was breakeven, profitable, one of the top three agencies in France in a few years.

Self-funded, I launched this with the remainder of my student loan. I sold it to an ad company, BBDO, in 1999. That was the first one.

B2L was focusing on large brands—so Chanel Peugeot or Twentieth Century Fox, all large companies and were pretty expensive.

I had a lot of demand from small businesses, so I thought I should address those in a separate company. In '97 I launched a company called RapidSite. Then my wife joined in and managed it with from the beginning. That was web hosting for small businesses. We were the first to introduce shared web hosting in France. RapidSite grew from zero to twenty thousand customers in a few months and became very successful, also with no funding. It was breakeven when we sold it to France Telecom at the end of '99.

Those were my two first experiences. Then I started investing in many start-ups. Frankly, I think around fifteen start-ups. Remember the context: it was the 2000 bubble. It was before the bubble.

Santos: Yes.

Le Meur: So, that wasn't the best choice, let's say, but I learned the hard way that being a business angel or being an investor is not as easy as it might seem because I invested in a lot of companies that disappeared. But from let's say 2000 to 2004, I also invested in LinkedIn. It wasn't a big deal, because that's pretty much what investors do.

You lose on most of them and sometimes you have a winner. That was very key that I invested in LinkedIn. That was a big win for me.

Then, in 2003, I launched a company, which I acquired from a developer who launched a service, called Ublog. That was one of the very first, if not the first, European blogging companies. I started to focus on promoting and growing the software as a blogging service phenomenon in Europe.

If you look at how I evolved, B2L was very, very French and actually very Parisian. It was designed for Paris, like other agencies with customers in Paris. RapidSite was very French and nationwide, so I wanted a little more in terms of reach. I really wanted Ublog to be international on day one. That was my goal.

I decided to discuss collaboration with the leader in blogging at the time, Six Apart, who is not the leader anymore, but was way before WordPress even existed. Then WordPress won, but at the time Six Apart was a leader and we merged. We were acquired by Six Apart and I became the head of Six Apart Europe. I kept going for a few years as the head of Europe for them, and you know the rest of the story.

WordPress grew very fast and then Six Apart was acquired by SAY Media, which I think is doing very well now. It's not such a bad thing. It's actually a pretty good story, but it's not a worldwide leader in blogging anymore.

In 2004, in parallel to that, I launched LeWeb, which was called Les Blogs—“the blogs” in French.

The idea at the beginning was to promote blogging, but also I started to feel like I wanted to help Europe in the entrepreneurship scene. So LeWeb grew very fast and after two small editions, we had two hundred, and then four hundred people. LeBlog turned into LeWeb. Just because I wanted it to become a place for entrepreneurs. The goal was very simple. It wasn't meant as a business, which was an interesting change for me because it wasn't that. I really wanted to help address the European entrepreneurs' problems, and I knew them. One of them is that we're all too local. If you're in Spain, you tend to focus on Spain. If you're French, you tend to focus on France. If you're in Germany, and so on, and so forth. By the time you own your city or your country, generally there is an American business who did better, bigger, faster, and takes your best.

The number of examples—YouTube vs. Dailymotion in France. Facebook vs Tuenti in Spain, or StudiVZ in Germany. Foursquare vs. tons of competitors, clones, and so on.

I decided I wanted to help Europe, and I thought I'd get started by an event entirely in English, all international. Where the entire ecosystem would be. Entrepreneurs obviously, business angels, investors, bloggers—still are first-class citizens of LeWeb.

LeWeb grew from 2004 to today, from 200 people to more than three thousand people in sixty countries. We didn't raise money—it wasn't meant as a business. Today, it's a business lead by my wife and it's doing amazingly well.

I created Seesmic. Now we're in 2007. What I wanted to do with Seesmic was to help the French president do his social networking campaign. I led the social networking efforts for Sarkozy for four months. I call it an internship in politics, and I know I'll likely never, ever get close to politics again. It was a good experience. It was a very interesting experience, but I didn't like it much.

Santos: Before we go into Seesmic and your move to the US, the lessons you actually learned along the way apparently broadened your horizons. You said that you were looking more and more to the world and less to the local.

Le Meur: Yes, I learned that it's very difficult to build. I wanted to build something worldwide, which was a leader and was international. What I learned is that you tend to focus too local and that is a problem.

Then, the second lesson I learned is that copying US successes is a mistake. It's killing European innovation. That's the second one. I never did it that much, but I learned that. You need to focus innovation on something new and not look at importing models from the US that work. It might work. It might make you money, but I don't think it's the best you can spend your time on.

Some people are proud of copying and making successes. I actually have friends who do that. I always give them a hard time because I don't think it's the best use of your time, but that's just my opinion.

Generally, my answer is, yes, that it's much simpler to just make money. My goal has never been to make money first. That's for sure. Ever. I make money, but it's never been number one.

Any entrepreneur that puts financial success as number one generally won't succeed. I know a few who succeed, but it's very rare. They just focus on the one thing, I think.

Then what else? I think the execution matters much more than the idea itself. I think that's a European vs. US thing. I see two problems. One is their fear of failure, which is much more important in Europe than in the US. Here, [in the US] it's okay if you fail. We accept it. It's obvious. But I guess I should say it: people are much more fearful of failure in Europe.

Then, two is the fact that they try to wait for the idea of their life, like a revolutionary idea, and that never comes. I think you should focus. Many people do that great in Europe, of course, but one of the lessons I learned is that you should really find a need, whatever the need, a little niche.

Focus the time as much as possible in the beginning, and execute very well and just iterate. This is much more important than just trying to find an amazing idea. I think it's much less about a revolutionary idea than execution. Execution matters much more than the idea.

Santos: What was the biggest problems that you had to solve and overcome, or not, in your companies?

Le Meur: I'm hesitating between a few of them. One is dealing with the investment from VCs. That's something challenging because you have to be sure. It's not only about money, again. You have to surround yourself with smart people, who are ideally former entrepreneurs, because they understand you much better. That's the challenge. Frankly, it's the same in the US here. You can't raise money from people who will keep asking you to justify every single decision you make and ask you to put them on paper and do another business plan to see “if we do this, then how would we look financially?”

My point is one of the issues you can find evidence of pretty easily. I've seen many entrepreneurs do that. Even as an investor, as an entrepreneur myself, it makes the entrepreneur lose time by justifying himself all the time. That is a huge challenge.

When anyone raises money, they should be really, really careful not only about the money, which is kind of secondary, but with who they are working with and how they will deal with that person or company. I would put as the number-one criteria a former entrepreneur as a VC is always better I think.

Then another challenge, obviously more specific to Europe, is managing human resources. Definitely what is challenging for me has been adapting to cycles. Technology is all about cycles. It's cycles of three to five years. It goes up and down with the economy. But if you look at the last twenty years, it's pretty obvious that it's three- to five-year cycles.

What's challenging is you have to keep adapting yourself to those cycles. When the economy is good, it's easy to raise funding. Companies get acquired. You can hire easily. And then suddenly, with a down economy, you have to let some people go and that's very tough, especially in Europe. It's very difficult because you don't have the flexibility which is here in the US.

Here, people say that they fire fast and they hire slow. In Europe, it's impossible to fire fast. That is probably something pretty controversial I'm saying here, which I've blogged a lot about and I've gotten a lot of Europeans going after me for this because Europe likes social protection, and I understand why.

I'm not that crazy guy who thinks everything should be money-driven. On the contrary, but just the fact that if you can, as a CEO, adapt the size of your team, based on the economy, fast, then you can also hire really fast when it comes back.

In Europe, a big problem is obviously all the social blows that make it extremely expensive to decrease the size of the team. Therefore, people hire less because they are scared. They don't know how they're going to adapt easily.

That's a challenge for sure in Europe, which I don't think has evolved at all since I started working in '96. Over the last fifteen years, I don't think much has changed.

Something I find in Silicon Valley is that people can find a job so easily that they understand if something bad happens. It's more like the CEO is actually weaker than the employee here. You have to understand that. Even in the recession, people find jobs more easily. But it's more like: if you have an engineer, you worry more about keeping him, than the reverse. It's very different than Europe.

People in the US think as freelancers. They are very independent. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. That's okay and they find something else. In Europe, I don't know why, there always has to be some kind of crisis.

You don't feel that much here. It has to be a tension in Europe. While here, I have to say—and again, this is probably something controversial—I had to let go of some people. We had a very smart, normal and good conversation about it. We both thanked each other for the opportunity and we kept in touch. I gave him a recommendation on LinkedIn. Often I help them find a job as well, but it doesn't have to be a tension.

That's a huge difference between Europe and here. I find that it's very often tense—something that has to end up in a conflict somehow in Europe.

Santos: I would like to move on to Seesmic and your move to the US. Was it personal or was it related to the company?

Le Meur: It was personal. Seesmic did not exist when I was in Europe. Seesmic has been here since day one.

Santos: But did you move to Silicon Valley with this idea already?

Le Meur: No, it was a personal project that I wanted to do, but it's related to my business obviously. I was frustrated to be too … isolated, meaning, if you want to do a deal with Twitter, there is nothing with Twitter in Europe. Maybe there is one now in the UK, but you see what I mean. If you want to talk to Facebook, generally in Europe, it's more like marketing and sales. So, I wanted to be close to the heart of the engine. The heart of the engine is here. The core is here. So, that's something I'd been wanting to do for fifteen years.

I decided to do that. To do that with my whole family, my three boys and my wife, because I just wanted to be at the center and see how it is and how different it is from Europe. It was really unrelated to Seesmic.

Santos: When you founded Seesmic, your vision was to create an online community for video bloggers. Correct?

Le Meur: No, not video bloggers, per se. That's how people think about it, but what I thought about was very simple. You could see the rise of social networking already in 2007. Facebook was there and smaller networks were there. I had a very simple thought. I thought about the talk shows you see on TV. You have talk shows on the radio. People debate society, technology, whatever. They debate, and they debate online and text a lot.

All the threads, the comments, the forums, whatever you want, the blogs, but it's all rigid. I thought that video was fantastic in a way that you could see the feelings. You get so much more from a person if you see that person, or if you hear that person, like we're doing right now, than text only.

I wanted to build a place where we could discuss building video, and I think it will still happen. But I think I was probably literally ten years too early. That's my conclusion.

We launched it and we picked one hundred thousand users, which were early adopters who like video. Then we hit a wall because it didn't grow more than that. With the wall not being technology—it was nothing to do with technology—but because the quality of the video was poor. That changed a lot today, already. What you can get on an iPhone is amazing compared to 2007. The quality of the video was bad and people didn't like the way they looked.

Then there are human factors that people don't like very much generally in video, even in HD. They don't like to record themselves. It's very challenging to talk to a camera alone, obviously, and they are shy. Video is something that you can do in private. That's why Sky Video and so on is going so fast, but not so much in public.

If you think about it, most of the people who show up in public in video are professionals, journalists and crazy bloggers and things. So, we decided to give up because it wasn't growing anymore. I bet it will still happen, just to close that chapter. It will happen.

If you look at hangouts in Google+, it has something of Seesmic video from seven years ago, because you can see the video of the person talking. It's just much better execution because we couldn't do what they can do today in terms of quality.

Santos: The technology evolved a lot since then, of course.

Le Meur: Yes, but it failed. Let's face it. It failed. So, I went to my board and we discussed the options. One option was just to stop. But there was funding in Seesmic and that was definitely an option. The other option was to focus on this new shiny thing that was growing called Twitter. I suggested to my board that we [do] that because I had so much passion in Twitter. I decided to suggest to my board that we should focus on that and build applications, and I thought there would have been a huge success or huge successes around Twitter, like there were around Facebook.

The future proved me wrong, but that's how we felt at the time. We decided to change Seesmic's direction and started to build Twitter applications on the desktop, web, and mobile. For the last two years, we created iPhone, Android, Windows Phone 7.0 even, and desktop and web applications for Twitter. We reached a very good number of users, still today using it, but Twitter completely changed.

It was heaven with Twitter. We were presenting our road map and everything that we were building to the whole Twitter company at lunch. I remember that moment very well. We had most of the Twitter team in front of us, helping us and telling us, “This is awesome. We're just the type who love to offer something on our ecosystem.” All of that. Suddenly, they changed strategy.

Anyway, they changed strategy and decided to—this is me speaking—compete with Facebook. One of the things they wanted was to control the UI and the way their users interact with them, so take control of the applications at all times.

At the time, they had no mobile applications. We and others were making mobile applications. They acquired Tweetie on iPhone, so that was the beginning of the end for clients like us—a total change of direction without any notice to the ecosystem. They were threatened by someone called Bill Gross, who was about to acquire TweetDeck, which accounted for about ten percent of the tweets being sent daily. Bill Gross tried to acquire it, so they acquired TweetDeck so he could not have it, and it was my main competition. I ended up being a competitor to my main partner so I had to change.

Then, finally, to finish it, they decided to communicate very clearly that you didn't want developers like us creating clients that would compete with theirs. So, we had to, again, change direction. That was a pretty wild entrepreneurship adventure: I think I can say I had a lot of headwind…

Put on top of this the fact that I launched this thing in 2007. Then there was a really bad crisis in 2008, so that wasn't the best year.

Anyway, that's the story of Seesmic. So, we had to give up, which is very difficult for a company, when you've done it once, to do it a second time. We did it. We started to focus more on another ecosystem, which was a sales force, that kind of an ecosystem.

We are just opting now to build mobile applications, which are more like social CRM. Most of these are customer relationship management to help salespeople manage their leads and opportunities.

We have, however, a few products that are hits. For example, our Android app is a big hit. It's installed in over half a million phones and it's going really, really fast. So we are keeping them, but we're also doing something else. I don't know if it's going to work or not because we launched two weeks ago. That's where I am. I hope it will work, but it's been a pretty wild adventure.

Santos: What is the main lesson that you took from the first pivot, and also from the dependency of a single vendor in this case, which was Twitter?

Le Meur: Well, that it's very risky, obviously, to build on only one platform. That was pretty obvious. I knew the risk, but of course I think I'll probably be much more careful in the future. It's interesting, by the way, to see these things we are doing today that are the completely the opposite strategy of Google+. Regardless of whether Google+ succeeds or not, it's very interesting to see how Google does it this time. They don't open the API. The API is barely opened today. You can do pretty much nothing. You can just look for files.

They don't let developers in, and I talked to Google about it. They said, “Yes, we don't want you to be angry. We are changing the core tools so fast these days that if we had developers in here, we could break your apps. So, we decided to not open it.”

It's very interesting because it seems to me that even Google learned from it. Because at first, they had not done that, right?

I think Google learned from what happened in the Twitter ecosystem by doing the exact opposite, so that's interesting. Their working with platforms has definitely been extremely interesting and a good learning curve.

Santos: What else?

Le Meur: Well, that you have to be very agile as an entrepreneur, but I think I've always been. I think whatever the success or not of Seesmic is that people recognize that. I think as an entrepreneur you have to try and to keep changing, inputting, and just keep moving, right?

You can never stay on something that does not pick up. That's something I knew already. I've always been like that. But, if you look at most successes, they've not been what they used to be. Groupon isn't what it used to be. Skype was a Wi-Fi sharing software. We can go on and on. It's just normal. It's just that you need to embrace, as an entrepreneur, the fact that when you start something, what matters is where you're going, not where you started. It's very likely that you will end up in a different place than what you had in mind.

That's why the business plan at the beginning doesn't matter that much, because you keep changing. Take LeWeb, it has not raised funding. It's a very specific type of start-up, I would say. But if you take LeWeb, if you had told me in 2004 it would have three thousand people and be such a huge thing—I didn't have any idea it would become like this.

What matters, really, is to adapt, keep working hard, be always proactive in the relationship to your board if you raise money. It's very important obviously to be straightforward and honest, explain the problems as you know them. Don't hide anything.

Never hide any bad news. Discuss the bad news and be proactive. Meaning, don't expect your investors to come with a solution—always come with an alternative yourself.

That's how I've been doing it, but it's been tough. Let's face it. Should I have known in 2007 in which direction I was heading, I would have probably have done something else.

Santos: I can imagine. How can you convince the board to pivot twice? Is it because you were always open?

Le Meur: Yes, that's one. Two, they value entrepreneurs who keep trying. The history of entrepreneurship is full of stories like this. Look at Twitter. Twitter was born from a deal which was a big failure that the Twitter founders did. They were coming close to being out of cash. They had no idea of re-entry, no idea what to do, and Odeo was failing. That's when Jack Dorsey, who was just a developer at the time, got the idea of Twitter.

Some investors didn't follow into Twitter. They took Evan William's money who acquired Odeo and did not invest in Twitter, because Odeo was a failure. Today, it's a big mistake, right?

Santos: Yes.

Le Meur: So, this story is full of entrepreneurs who fail at something, then make a huge success on something else. You never know what's going to happen.

Santos: Where do you think that Seesmic would be if you would have founded it in France, like any of the previous companies that you did?

Le Meur: It would have been more difficult, I would have likely made something more local. If you live in Paris and you're French, you have lunch with French friends, you see French journalists, and you talk to the French bloggers. There is nothing wrong with that, but what you end up with is a very French company.

What would have been different is that it would probably have been very French. That's the first thing. Two, I could never have done what I've done with Twitter. Now, it was probably not such a bad thing after the fact. But what I have done: being close to a platform [Twitter] and build with them was only possible because we were a few blocks away.

Actually, I'm wrong because there were developers all over the world doing things with them. But let's say it helped a lot. So, that was probably a bad thing after the fact, but I enjoyed it.

I enjoy being a few blocks away from Google, Facebook, Twitter, or half an hour drive, again. I enjoy it and that is a key component of Silicon Valley. I love kayak surfing, for example, and when I go kayak surfing, I always bump into friends from Facebook and Google.

If you go to a restaurant here, everyone you meet is related to technology, and that is very refreshing. Something that gives you good ideas. It also puts you at the top of what's happening here because you get to talk to them all the time.

It's like a big campus. In Silicon Valley, it's like you never leave university, you never graduate. You are here. All the restaurants, all the parties, all the sports, all of the work obviously, everything is between San Francisco and San Jose, and I would even say San Francisco and Black Mountain. Anyway, that changes everything. It puts you in a really different map and I really enjoy it. It helps me become more visible here and I'm more international. But, is that a good thing at the end? I'm not sure.

The deal we did with Six Apart, I could not have gotten them in France. It's just because I got to know them here. I think my personal network has evolved a lot, from being very European-centric, which is not a bad thing, again.

Santos: You got $16 million funding for Seesmic. Did you raise venture capital for any of the previous companies?

Le Meur: Well, Six Apart raised funding, but it wasn't me directly. I raised funding for companies I was involved with in the past, which I didn't describe here because they were more like investments than anything else, but yes, I had raised funding before.

Santos: How different was it to raise capital ten years ago and now? How different is it between Europe and the US?

Le Meur: Well, that won't be easy to answer because most of the funding on Seesmic was raised from European investors. Most of my funding is coming from Europe. I think the way that it's changed in ten years is that there are obviously plenty of business angels, which wasn't the case. There are more and more business angels. I would say it's much easier. Money has become easier to find.

Basically, there is one side, which is that there are lots of investors. If you have a good project and a good team, it's pretty easy to raise funding. I would say both in Europe and the US. That has changed a lot in ten years. I think there are a ton of investors. Now, there is not a wealth of good investors, so you need to be careful, of course. That's what has probably changed.

There is a lot of money [in] start-ups. There is a lot of attention on start-ups. We see it with LeWeb. We received more than five hundred candidates for our start-up competition already.

Santos: You also build many different types of businesses. What things do you consider when you start thinking about a venture?

Le Meur: I follow my feelings. As you can see, sometimes I'm wrong, as everyone is. I was very right with LeWeb and very wrong with Twitter or with video conversation. So I don't know. I follow my feelings. I follow the needs I see, the vision I have, and I have made a lot of mistakes. Seesmic clearly was way ahead of its time, and still would be today. But I think it will work. We'll talk about it in ten years.

Santos: [laughs]

Le Meur: For Twitter, I was just totally attracted to it. I thought it was also incredible and I wanted to build something around it. The mistake was probably to put all my bets on one partner, as we discussed.

I think it's a combination of traction—we got a lot of traction in both cases at the beginning—and a vision for what it will be. Clearly, Twitter today is not what I had in mind a few years ago. I would have likely built on Facebook if you had told me what would happen. Then the Twitter app was an opportunity in revenue, of course, which is probably one of the weaknesses of Silicon Valley that I've been influenced by. You tend to be influenced.

Here people build products, full products. They like products, they build a product, a product being a software application or a web site. Obviously it doesn't have to be in hardware. But they build a product first and then they see if it works.

You have a lot of investors who support that. They support it. They put money in the product, then they see if it works, and then they worry about revenues. It's very unusual. Technology is a very unusual business if you think about it this way, because any business would start by revenue first. What's the opportunity in revenue, and then how do you build it, and how much money do you need?

Here it's the opposite. People have ideas for a product. They go to investors who bet on those products and revenue is generally secondary, because they all think big, which is very refreshing. Here either your reach begins with users or it doesn't matter that much.

You could criticize that, but it's one of the beauties and one of the weaknesses of Silicon Valley. People bet on products. They don't worry too much about revenue. If it doesn't reach millions of users, then it doesn't matter. You should move on to something else. Pretty interesting way of thinking, right?

Santos: Yes.

Le Meur: I think it's very different from Europe. Europe is probably more down-to-earth, and people think much more about the revenue, which is great to create businesses which last longer. But it is probably harder in Europe in that it innovates less, because you have less-crazy investors financing crazy entrepreneurs, frankly. When they created Twitter, they had no idea about the revenue. Frankly, today, I am not sure if they still know exactly how to do it. I don't know if they are generating too much revenue.

But, in the case of Facebook, it was the same. Zuckerberg didn't want advertising at the beginning—and look at the billions they are generating now. So, if you didn't finance all of that in the beginning, you wouldn't have such a powerful network today reaching nearly eight hundred million people.

The same with YouTube. If you didn't lose money for ten years, you wouldn't have what is today the number-one video content in the world. It is fascinating and frightening at the same time.

You don't see that in Europe. Very rarely. It is much more rare. In fact, I don't know if it's one of your questions, but if it's not, I want to talk about it now. I think Europe is changing and I can see that. I have three examples.

We used to, for ten years, always talk about Skype and lastminute.com, and basically not that many successes and always the same. Today, I think that there is a new breed of entrepreneurs who are a new generation, who don't want to do copycats. They hate copycats and they don't want to copy Silicon Valley and they don't want to think local either, so they don't want to do Germany, or Spain, or France, and they are very ambitious.

So, those three criteria combined. One, international. Two, innovation and no copycat. And then, three, big ambition from the funders surrounded by a new generation of venture capitalists. This makes the beginning of first successes.

Straight in my mind, obviously, Angry Birds, Spotify, SoundCloud are our new generation. This year, throughout the web, we're going to make them icons of this new Europe. If you talk to them, they all say, “We hate copycats.” That's great to see.

They are financed by VCs who understand that and they kick butt worldwide, including in the US where Spotify is winning here now.

That's very refreshing, very new, which probably means that Europe is changing. It is slow, but it's very refreshing. On LeWeb, we've got five hundred—plus start-up candidates to be on stage, which is amazing as well.

Santos: The ecosystem is evolving very rapidly.

Le Meur: Exactly.

Santos: In the last three years, I would say.

Le Meur: Yeah, because with the internet, also, you can be in Silicon Valley without being in Silicon Valley. It used to be difficult to get access to all the sources, what people think and the news. Now, you just click and everybody has the same information.

Santos: What advice would you give to aspiring founders? To the next generation?

Le Meur: Well, I think I'm going to repeat myself, but focus on execution, not really on the idea. So, take something that you think is a need and try to build a prototype as cheap and fast as possible. My favorite quote of all time is Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, my friend, who says, “If you're not ashamed of your product when you launch it, you launched it too late.”

That's really good. So, I think you should launch fast. Fail fast, if it doesn't work.

You should focus on execution. I think that we forget too much, including me, about it in Silicon Valley. You should absolutely think about revenue at the very beginning, even if it is a product you are building. I think you need to focus on international and building for international, day one, and not locally, especially if you're in Europe, because it's tempting. I know if I moved back to France, I would be tempted again to do French just because it's natural. Everybody you talk to, they text and they won't like to see English. They'll want it in French or in Portuguese, and so on. So that's an issue.

I would be careful with taking too much money—I know what I'm talking about—because it can influence you sometimes. Sometimes scarcity is good. If you think about LeWeb, it's a huge success and we never raised money. It doesn't have a team. My only team on LeWeb is my wife and me doing the program, and it's a huge success. Another interesting one is to get the funding you need, if you need it. If you don't need it, you can also do it.

Santos: Bootstrap it.

Le Meur: Right, don't think that raising $10 million is a must-do and it's absolutely necessary. That's wrong. And I actually think raising too much money, too fast, is probably a problem as well. Don't spend too much on the initial business plans, in planning and forecasting, because you will likely give up once or twice more. That's why it doesn't matter that much. I didn't say revenue doesn't matter. I said that trying to model everything is, because it will not happen the way that you thought it would.

Santos: When you hit the real customer it will.

Le Meur: Exactly, and that's okay. You have to discuss this with your investors. If you must have investors, you should only take investors that understand that pivoting will happen.

Santos: What did you see to be the main differences in setting up a business in the US and in France in terms of the legal things like paperwork and accounting?

Le Meur: Frankly, I think that setting up a business is easy both in the US and in France. It's a cliché that it is complicated in France. It is easy. Now, what's very different is that you have much less social rules, and burden and things to do. Like in France, when you start your business and you start adding employees, there are a lot of things to do and you get a lot of mail.

If you decide to begin, you should absolutely—even if you don't have money—have a lawyer and someone doing your books to make sure that you're legal. You have to put this $2,000 a month as the beginning investment in that.

My advice would be don't try to do it yourself, even if it's some money, some investment, just because you will not do it well and your time is much better on your business.

I don't think it's complicated in either country. What's hugely different of course is that here [Silicon Valley], you can be fired as a boss, and with an employee leaving you—and that happens all the time, very fast, with advertising—you can also ask someone to leave. There [France] it won't be. Too many things to deal with. It's just very easy here.

If you ask someone to leave here, there is no notice period. In France, it's a three-months-minimum salary. Then it increases, as employees have stayed a long time. It can be six months. It can be pretty big and expensive.

“Here it is two weeks, if you're nice.” It's crazy. I think it's extreme, by the way. But, as an entrepreneur, obviously it is a good thing, because we are very flexible and very agile.

Santos: You can adapt to the market first.

Le Meur: That and the employees think as entrepreneurs themselves, because they know it can happen. They always think about it. They are more like in a freelancer's relationship. It's people getting together in a team to do a task, and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. There is no drama.

It doesn't work and we move on. We do something else and we stay good friends. That's what's basically very different. That's a huge, huge difference. But apart from that, all the rest is, frankly, creating a business, then dealing with your books and paying your taxes. It's not a big deal in both sides.