“I am experiencing an entrepreneurial experience like no other”
My educational background is an unusual one but one that was entirely of my choosing: professional secondary studies, my first computer at the age of 18, then 3 years of HEC preparatory classes in France for professional Baccalaureate graduates, and then a Finance track at ESC Dijon. At the beginning I was not sure what direction to take, so I ended up launching a large-scale entrepreneurial project called SESAMm two years ago. The idea is to offer automatic analytical tools that enable you to extract relevant information and make accurate forecasts. We therefore created a financial index developed via social networks and offering forecasts three days in advance.
Our innovative algorithms are incredibly effective. We obtain a high degree of correlation between the forecast and the actual data, thereby enabling us to produce in the space of 11 months performance levels of 31%, compared with less than 10% for the market.
SESAMm comprises two engineers and myself. During the launch phase we spent a year within the ESC Dijon incubator and took part in about a dozen entrepreneurship competitions. We won half of them and as a result of one of the competitions we were then incubated at SEMIA Strasbourg.
Today we have reached a critical phase in the life of a company, as we are in the process of running a €500,000 fund-raising campaign that will enable us to continue developing our business. We also hope to recruit complementary profiles that will help us in achieving this new objective.
An assault course in an unforgiving world
Our findings also drew attention to an investment fund in the city in London, a fund with which we have been working since January. We are in the process of developing new indicators and are also broadening our extraction sources.
More recently we were approached by a digital press agency in order to work on a series of new developments. Our expertise in the big data, algorithm and statistics areas enabled us to provide a tailor-made solution for our clients.
Today we are facing a very peculiar situation, the money and speculation market. This is another world entirely, one with its own codes and an unforgiving side to it. This isn’t helped by the very bad press it has received for some years now.
It must be said that the kind of business we do is like doing an assault course. This is the lot of any entrepreneur, but the particularity is the range between the funds that have to be raised and the sacrifices made to do so. So what keeps me going? Clearly, the project itself, which is like no other, what it took to set it up and now develop it further, all with our own resources.
At the moment I am on a gap year. I completed a 6-month internship and 2 months of temporary work in a bank based within a trading room, an experience that enabled me to learn so much and also make the savings I needed. As for the future? Well, next year I will be going to HEC Liège, an ESC Dijon partner school, to take their Entrepreneurship track. Regarding SESAMm, I am planning on doing my end-of-studies internship there and then work there afterwards. The rest remains to be seen.