During an exchange between the very “Street smart” Xavier Niel and the students of a very prestigious high school, the founder of Free revealed his vision of popular intelligence.
Two worlds met last week during a round table whose theme was entrepreneurship at Polytechnique. The very well dressed and young students of the prestigious school found themselves exposed to the philosophy of the experienced Xavier Niel, in his traditional jeans and white shirt. The founder of Free and business angel was thus able to share his vision of entrepreneurship and promote the fact of starting from scratch.
“When you have very little funds, you have to be smart“, he said, for example, during this one-hour conference. “When you run companies with a lot of money, you think less and you do a lot of stupid things” he adds, before pointing out the fact that by starting with very little, it is possible to do alone what may require an entire team in large structures. He then defined what he called “street smartitude” in more detail.
He cites in particular Aude Durant, who is among the people at the head of the Iliad group. He explains that he went “flirting on Linkedin”, looking for someone to replace him with, among the many criteria, being “street smart”. However, he had to concretely define what he meant by this through an example: “the toilets in the building are clogged, what do we do? From that moment on you will find yourself with three people, the first will send you an international call for tenders to find the best person to come and repair your toilets. The second person will tell you “Okay, I’ll call the plumber down the street and I’ll fix them”, and the third will say “he’s bothering me, he’s stupid, I’ll He can fix his thing in two seconds, we're not going to hear about it anymore.” Street smartness is the person who will be able to give you the most efficient and quickest response. “
It is therefore the third profile that interests Xavier Niel, a resourceful profile when faced with a problem, to be able to provide an unconventional solution. While large companies will often “complicate life” of newcomers, making it very difficult to maintain this state of mind over time. An effective and counter-current attitude, reminiscent of the beginnings of Free. “When we create the Freebox, we go to see a large equipment manufacturer called Alcatel” he relates to demonstrate his example, explaining that at the time, ADSL TV lines did not pass through copper lines and that the equipment manufacturer in question rejected them. Even a trip to the United States was not enough, people considering that the project was “like putting an elephant through a garden hose“. Alors Free a “took four people who did electronics and software and we created this product ourselves“. And these people were precisely “street smart” and capable of inventing a solution that did not exist.
The entire conference
This article was reprinted on the Univers FreeBox website
