Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
My name is René Silvestre. I am a real live Southerner, native of a little town in Provence called Nove.
I have three generations of Southern roots, but I am a Southerner who has worked for 40 years in Paris.
Therefore I am an immigrant worker.
Today, what is Pépinière 27?
It is a place to house new businesses, in return for a fee.
It’s a place that gives them the possibility to have good accommodations in good condition,
and at the same time to come alongside them in their entrepreneurial endeavor.
Thus that is what we are doing,
and it comes from the fact that I myself am an entrepreneur,
because it is the only job I have done in my life,
and I continue to do this job but by proxy.
That is what an incubator is.
To sum it up, you could say it is a success factory (when all goes well.)
As for me, I founded l’Etudiant.
My great professional adventure is l’Etudiant. I founded l’Etudiant forty years ago now;
therefore I’ve learned a thing or two!
I directed it for thirty-five years, I sold it at the end of twenty-five years,
and then suddenly I was in my sixties.
And l’Etudiant left the premises where we are today
to go and set up shop in another place.
Since I was the owner of this building, I said, “Well, what are we going to do?”
I had the choice between renting, selling, etc.
And I said, “Why not create a business incubator?”
That is, why not continue the adventure of l’Etudiant,
which was a fabulous enterprise creation adventure,
(and I was going to say a continuous creation because it was twenty-five years of really creating)
by establishing an incubator.
And doing it this way, the fact is today, some sixty enterprises are being founded here.
Therefore that is how the thing clicked into place, and there it was, as so often happens in life,
a combination of circumstances
where you grab the ball on the bounce and say to yourself, “Let’s go and why not!”
It was a better way for me to spend my retirement than playing golf,
because I don’t know how to play golf.
I always wanted,
even as a small child, to build, to arrange,
to organize, motivate people,
and all that shapes your personality you know. The shrinks will explain that to you better than I can.
It shapes your personality as a child,
and later there is a “Eureka!”
My “eureka” surely came from something that was a failure.
When I was doing my college-prep training,
like a lot of people I was looking at HEC, ESSEC, etc.
I wasn’t a bad student,
but unfortunately or fortunately, I failed at all that.
I found myself in a situation of failure,
academic failure.
And I said to myself, “Now there are two solutions.
Either you can be flattened by this, or you can get back on your feet.
If you get back up, the only way to get through this
this is to show that you were capable after all,
but perhaps the academic system was not suitable for what you wanted to do.”
So then, I did what you normally do in these schools.
Normally,
you start a business.
At the time, it wasn’t the style at all, at the time you went to Procter & Gamble.
But there it was. I did it partly out of defiance.
You do nothing by reason, you know.
The big decisions of life, you make them by your gut.
You make them because at the moment you want to,
at the moment you have the hatred, at the moment you have the fury.
And this fury can be turned positive. You must turn it positive, otherwise it will become aggression.
But I mean that all the decisions in life, and again even the personal decisions.
For example, you don’t get married because it’s the right person,
but because at the moment, the idea of this person gets in your gut,
and as Edith Piaf said, you’re stuck on them.
If you’re not stuck on them,
it’s just a marriage of reason, and marriages of reason don’t last,
or if they do it’s called a marriage for tax purposes.
Only simple ideas are strong ideas.
When you create something, it must be simple. If it is complicated, it won’t work.
So when people tell you, “I am going to do something that will do this and that but at the same time…” watch out!
Thus, start with a simple idea, and what’s more you will see that the ideas that have worked have been simple.
Even the ideas that seemed complicated, when you take them apart, are very simple.
Therefore that is the first thing, to start there.
The second thing is that when you start with an idea,
you must put as little time as possible between saying it and doing it.
And don’t just say it, because there are people who make excuses: “Oh, it should have, you only have to…”
You must do it!
The word “do” is a very important word.
In the Bible it says, “Do and you will understand.”
You must move on to deeds very quickly.
“I have the idea, I do it.”
You must of course believe in your idea.
You must believe in it, naturally,
and you must believe in it for a long time.
That is called perseverance. It is the least you can do.
If you don’t persevere in life at something, at whatever it may be, your studies or other things, it doesn’t work!
But what is fundamental is that at one moment there is a “eureka.”
At one moment, you are close to giving up;
at one moment you are close to breaking.
And then you must believe in it when others don’t believe any more.
That is to say, at that moment,
do not let go of the thing.
And often it is at that very moment that everything turns.
The experience of l’Etudiant is a succession of problems,
of kicks in the teeth,
of failures, but
but when you do something you must accept failures.
And you must accept that failure is part of the action.
The only problem with failure is not getting back up.
If you don’t get back on your feet, then the failure is definitive.
The problem of the boxer who puts his knee to the ground
is that if he doesn’t get back up, he has lost.
If he gets back up, he can win.
The problem of a football team that wins a match is to win the next one.
Therefore the failures, good Lord, at l’Etudiant I nearly filed for bankruptcy ten times.
And when I say ten, it is because I don’t know how to count.
It’s no big deal, that’s how you build character.
You build character in adversity,
you build character with problems.
So I don’t want to talk out of turn,
but nevertheless, those who believe that life is a long tranquil river
because you have a good business plan and all will go well, they are wrong!
It is going to be hard, and it is good that it will be hard because it will be fascinating.
So you must find the happy medium between difficulty and success,
but I don’t know any success without difficulty
or you’d have to explain it to me, but as for me, I’ve never seen it.
And once again in every field,
I have seen examples of this.
And I think often that a business story is like a love story,
for that matter it is a love story, it’s the same thing!
Thus if you have a love story, it’s complicated, it’s hard.
It’s hard to live with someone for fifty years, it's behind the scenes of the thing.
but you must overcome it,
that is where the success comes from.
It is not because you don’t have failures.
Those who tell you, “Oh, there are failures, it’s a catastrophe,”
but finally those who don’t have failures in business, in romance, or in politics,
because we have just gone through an important political epoch with the presidential and other elections.
That’s politics, overcoming failures.
Those who win in politics are those who overcome their failures.
You won’t find an example to the contrary!
You can always ask yourself the questions,
“Is it smart to create a business at the age of 24?”
“Isn’t it too early?” “Will this…?”
Well there are disadvantages: you are too young, you have no money, you have no experience.
But others will tell you,
“Yes, but it’s advantageous because you have less to lose,”
because you aren’t married yet, you don’t have children yet, so there are advantages.
Well you must forget all these discussions because they are nothing but nonsense.
Take me for example.
When I founded l’Etudiant, I was already married,
and when I established my enterprises I had my daughter at the same time, one month apart.
So you ask yourself what you must do.
Some will tell you to wait until you have some professional experience elsewhere,
until you have earned some money,
all sorts of things.
But I say again, excuse me for insisting on the point, but it is like being in a love story!
There is not a particular moment
for marrying or for living with someone, there is not one right time.
It is the moment of meeting,
the moment when you meet someone, and you say to yourself, “Now's the time.”
This moment could arrive at twenty years of age, but it could arrive at 60.
There are no rules, and for establishing a business it’s the same, there’s no rules.
You start a business when in a moment you say to yourself, “That’s it, I’m going.”
It’s irrational, it’s capricious, and it’s like that.
You must jump in the water when you say to yourself, “Now’s the time.”
Fine, you can reason it out for hours,
and it’s true that at the time lots of people told me,
“But you are crazy, but this, but that…”
Of course I was crazy. If I hadn’t been I would have gone to Procter & Gamble or to BNP Paribas, obviously.
You must be a reasonable crazy person. Well you are going to tell me that’s an oxymoron, but no!
You must be a crazy person who can keep himself from going out of control,
because otherwise it’s sheer folly.
You must be a crazy person sometimes,
and at other times capable of reigning in the craziness.
This is a great difficulty, because otherwise you quickly become truly insane.
. When you are establishing a business, you must have moments of insanity,
moments of exaltation, moments of all that you want,
and then at other moments you must say to yourself, “Good, let’s calm down”
and you reflect.
You make decisions like this and like that.
It’s the mixture of all that, this alchemy that makes it work.
I believe that to resolve a problem is to prove your imagination
that’s the rule.
There are times you must say to yourself, “How am I going to get out of this ***?”
And in general, it’s at that moment that the imagination works very quickly,
because your back is against the wall, and it goes very fast.
And as for me, that happened to me very often that I would extricate myself thanks to a new idea.
I found a product idea;
I found a financing idea, etc.
I found tons of little ideas, and some slightly bigger ideas,
but I believe that those were great moments of creativity.
Creativity is not something you have on a shell-covered beach.
Creativity, once again, is when your back is against the wall
and you must find an idea.
And then it’s often pressing and urgent!
And as for me, I very often resolved problems at l’Etudiant like that.
I had to find something, and fortunately I found it.
So why? How? Well in reality, maybe because you are always pondering
about ideas, and then they come out at the moment
when they must come out, and then at that moment you don’t ask anymore.
You know there is a sentence from Carnegie, who was the American king of steel in the 1900s.
He had them write on his tombstone,
“Here lies a man who was successful because he knew how to surround himself with men more competent than himself.”
As for me, I think first that acting alone, well that bores me stiff.
. I like being surrounded by people,
I like to communicate,
I like to see how the ideas I have are perceived,
and then I also listen to others.
And then I believe that adventure is always a collective adventure;
individual adventures don’t exist.
All the great adventures of the earth,
such as a family adventure is a collective adventure,
a religious adventure is a collective adventure,
and a political adventure is a collective adventure.
I know a little about collective adventures, and be that as it may, an individual adventure doesn’t interest me.
“Living” and “existing” are not the same.
As for me, I believe that I have always wanted to live.
So when I founded l’Etudiant,
what pleased me when I did it, and what I tell myself today,
and what I tell myself today,
is that maybe tens of thousands of people would perhaps not have had what they had, if I did not start this.
That is very satisfying.
In life, there is a privilege.
It is the privilege of living.
I believe that I said it a while ago, try to live instead of existing.
Try to use all the capacity
for dreaming that you have. You must dream,
dream about what you can do, because it’s the only way to manage to do it!
Try to believe in what you do.
Fight for it !
It worth it, and it will be so rewarding !