B2B SaaS · AI · DeepTech · Digital · Media · E-commerce
Europe · Asia · US — 20+ years scaling tech companies internationally
Timing beats conviction. Confidence beats timing.
In 1997, I went to see the revolution in progress, not read about it in a magazine. Meetings with the French network at Bell Labs and the HP Lab — the conversation that changed how I saw the world. People I met were ready to hire me on the spot. I was still a student, and the openness and energy of that ecosystem hit harder than I expected — I didn't yet have the confidence to stay and see where those conversations would lead. I went home to finish my studies.
What I brought back never left: the certainty that this kind of ecosystem was possible, and the intent to find my way back into it. Building and scaling, through every wave of digital transformation since — storefront sites to e-commerce, media and advertising going digital, retail, supply chain, banking and insurance, and now AI.
My first conviction, taken head-on by the dot-com crash. What the crash didn't take: the method I pulled out of it — and the range I was forced to build. Still a young dev, I ended up wearing the CPO hat by necessity: managing an institutional tech partnership with INRIA on knowledge management, a senior developer, and a London-based frontend partner — because there was no one else left to carry the company.
A chain I put to work for startups and large corporates alike, ever since.
Turned a local ad-tech platform into scalable B2B infrastructure. Having proven my own technical range — languages, databases, architecture — I took R&D on alone to build the foundations of the new platform: the first real lesson in product-led scale, what breaks first when volume triples.
€5M to €40M revenue. 21 countries in 18 months. I walked in as Director of International Development and asked to have the title changed to COO & CTO — the moment I moved from pure execution into business, product and marketing, not just tech. International scale at full speed, the operating model rebuilt in real time as the company outgrew it every quarter.
€350M revenue, 30+ countries. Started as deputy technical director; within months the mission expanded to reorganizing and optimizing the entire international operation, and the COO role at board level followed naturally. Post-M&A integration, governance, and performance structuring through a pre-IPO trajectory.
Toward the end of the Digital Virgo years, I found the same ambition I'd carried since 1997 already at work in Silicon Sentier, the association founded by Marie Vorgane Le Barzic. When the structure went private under the name NUMA, I asked Marie if the associative side could live on — and co-founded, with Sofian Meguellati and others, the association Le Sentier, active through the program of the same name.
It's at NUMA that I attend a masterclass by Eric Ries on lean startup, and confront my own track record — Kappa Valor, Kwanko, Dukan Diet, Digital Virgo — against his view of product for the first time. A little later, conversations with Strate and Schoolab expose me to Design Thinking, which I confront the same way. Out of both confrontations comes the method that has shaped my work since: technology stops pushing — it answers a real, measurable, usage-centered customer friction instead.
In 1997, what struck me wasn't the technology — it was the ecosystem: startups pulling each other forward instead of guarding their edge, contracts signed in days thanks to the Small Business Act, and an unshakeable ambition to change the world and lead it, from day one. I saw that wave before almost anyone in my generation — and still went home, because I wasn't ready. Since then, I've learned that seeing the future first means nothing without the confidence to act on it. That's the gap I help founders and corporates close today.
I watched French entrepreneurship grow up in real time — from an era when founders like Xavier Niel and Marc Simoncini were the exception, and funds rarer still (Marc later became a shareholder at Dukan Diet, where I was COO), through 2015-2020, when easy money built entire fundraising narratives on a concept alone, no traction required. I've lived every side of that story myself: a seed round at Kappa Valor in 2001, months before the bubble burst and frightened shareholders shut the company down; a Series A at Dukan Diet to fund international expansion; and an IPO at Digital Virgo we prepared for in the data room but that, in the end, never happened. What I trust now: the return to classic markers — ARR, traction, proof someone will actually pay — over the story alone.
Barriers to entry that used to protect a strategy for years now erode fast — compliance is easier with AI and digital tools, customers are more volatile, and new global leaders emerge from nowhere with every wave. In that context, the real unfair advantage isn't a big-ticket partnership whose ROI looks more like branding than value creation — it's a strong customer relationship and a team agile enough to adapt to whatever comes next. I've built and merged teams across 20+ countries, and the operators who actually move the needle are the ones who embody it — authentic, past the political posture, building the trust that pushes teams through cultural, technical and financial barriers toward the wins that have to happen. That's co-creation and co-development in practice: giving field teams enough freedom to find their own path to local growth. That's the difference between scale and chaos.
Seven pieces published between May and June 2026, including a four-part series on how AI is restructuring decision rights, the COO role, and where competitive advantage actually lives now.
Argues that the old boundary — the CIO governs, the CTO builds, the business executes — is dissolving, because choosing an AI tool now means choosing a workflow and an operating model in the same decision. Uses Duolingo and Moderna as early signals of enterprises being redesigned around AI rather than simply tooled with it.
Read on LinkedIn →Every technology wave promises decentralization and ends up creating a new center of gravity — AI is accelerating that pattern across models, compute and cloud. Makes the case that open foundations are becoming a strategic investment for leaders, not just a technical preference, drawing on perspectives from IBM's Arvind Krishna to Palantir's Alex Karp.
Read on LinkedIn →AI spreads decision-making across the organization faster than it spreads accountability. Uses a McKinsey case of 80 AI models deployed across an insurance claims journey to show what happens when judgment gets distributed but responsibility doesn't — and argues decision architecture, not more governance committees, is the real fix.
Read on LinkedIn →The COO's job is shifting from protecting scale through controlled duplication to designing a portfolio of operating choices — drawing on the Dukan Diet country-launch playbook and Digital Virgo's multi-country integration work, alongside operating principles borrowed from Claire Hughes Johnson, Sheryl Sandberg, Tim Cook and Gwynne Shotwell.
Read on LinkedIn →Buyers increasingly form their shortlist through AI-mediated research before a salesperson ever enters the room. Argues most companies are still optimizing the back half of the funnel while the real decision is forming upstream — using Perplexity, the Salesforce/HubSpot comparison dynamic, and Alan as cases.
Read on LinkedIn →Capital no longer funds growth narratives it can't verify. Includes a candid account of a capital allocation decision at Dukan Diet, where dividend and e-commerce investment diverged from the coaching-engine story being told to the board — alongside Klarna, Gorillas/Getir and Mistral AI as cases.
Read on LinkedIn →Features that used to take eighteen months to copy now take three weeks. Uses a personal account of a 2013 mobile-first bet at Digital Virgo that optimized the wrong layer of the business, alongside Intercom and Figma, to argue defensibility now lives in workflow position, not features.
Read on LinkedIn →KPIs, OKRs, team design, delivery governance.
Europe, Asia, US — market entry, GTM, strategic partnerships.
Restructuring teams and operations in AI-driven environments.
Business, product, tech and operations, one shared plan.
Organizational transformation, team merging, culture alignment.
Complex, multi-country environments.
Corporate & startup references, supported through innovation, transformation and operator-led execution:
And 150+ B2B SaaS, AI and DeepTech startups, including:
Takes COO, CPTO, General Manager, or Operating Partner roles inside B2B SaaS, AI and DeepTech companies to run international scale, post-M&A integration, and AI-driven transformation — from a hands-on CPO role at Kappa Valor, to COO & CTO at Dukan Diet (€5M to €40M in 21 countries), to board-level COO structuring through a €350M pre-IPO trajectory at Digital Virgo.
A traditional COO joins one company, full-time, indefinitely. An Operating Partner takes the same operational ownership on a defined mandate, for a portfolio company or a scale-up navigating a specific inflection point.
Primarily post-Series A through Series C — companies facing international entry, post-acquisition integration, or scaling a team past the point where founder-led execution still works.
Open to full-time executive roles, executive interim mandates, and operating partner mandates. Every engagement includes direct operational ownership.
How AI is restructuring enterprise operating models — decision rights, the changing role of the COO, and the three contractions of 2026: the customer path, capital patience, and product time. Grounded in direct experience at Dukan Diet, Digital Virgo, Kwanko and Hack40.
COO, CPTO, General Manager or Operating Partner — full-time, executive interim, or operating partner mandate in a B2B SaaS, AI or DeepTech scale-up.