I'm 27 years old, until I was 18, I grew up in Tahiti in French Polynesia and all my family was deeply into politics. They have all worked in politics, they are all involved in the life of the city in that way. So I grew up with my grandfather who works at the Territorial Council of French Polynesia, so they've all worked in politics and I wanted to do likewise, in order to get involved in society, I mean, doing politics, having ideas, voting for laws that you can change, improve the environment that you live in, in this case it was a small island, Tahiti, and I told myself that it had to be the same all over the world and so it was the best way to improve the world. And then, we set up a blog on the current state of politics in French Polynesia, it was the very first blog, we were 18 years old, including three mates. And we had, it was the most widely read blog on the island. We were all anonymous, so people didn't know who we were, and in that sense, I was able to grasp, well, actually by writing articles on economic politics, putting forward ideas, seeing what it was like to take part in the political debate even if you had only just reached voting age, and had never turned out elections but we were commenting on the current situation and our ideas
were taken up. But after two years of writing on this blog, I thought to myself that things were changing to slowly. And so I got more interested in other forms of engagement that were more to do with setting up companies, changing things in the environment in which we live, by directly creating an economic activity we have no need to wait for politicians to get round the table and decide on things. And so I got more interested in what you can do by creating companies to better combat unemployment, create companies to improve education. And that is when I got interested in social entrepreneurship. So after Tahiti, I went to business school in Marseille. And there, I was part of the BDE (Student Union). It was really a great experience but then, I started to wonder: might there be other, more meaningful activities? Initially, I was thinking about a personal meaning, forging my career, so I thought about doing Junior Enterprise. So I applied to Junior Enterprise and I was accepted. But upon finding out more about their work, or what they did, I thought that it would be interesting but I thought to myself that I was going to spend the next 20 years of my life doing what I was actually going to be doing with Junior Enterprise. So I backtracked, telling myself that I should maybe try something that I wasn't going to be doing for the next 20 years of my life, and so I decided to get involved in a college association called ACCEDE which actually helps entrepreneurs who are currently out of work, i.e. you've lost your job, you're on the dole, you go to the job centre, and you tell the advisor that you'd like to set up your own business, and so we would be doing market research for
these people. So it was really interesting because you work with different profiles, it could be anything from young guys to engineers who were let go from the major technology firm they'd been working for and who were founding a technology start-up and were going to raise two million euros, they raised two million euros three months after we did the market research for them, to the beautician who wants to open a salon in Port-de-Bouc, and you really see the different categories of profile and it really gives it meaning, you do exactly the same work as in Junior Enterprise, market research, but it gives it meaning because it has a story behind it and you tell yourself that you're helping somebody's personal career, and that's when I told myself: "Ah, I can see that I'm on to something that I really enjoy." And then I discovered the books of Professor (inaudible) and social business, and so then I told myself: "Wow, that's amazing!" because it's a whole company focussed on having an impact and improving the daily lives of the people they serve. And so it was that step of what happens next that I was able to understand at ACCEDE. And so what sparked things off, because I didn't come up with the idea on my own, I was with a college friend, Romain Ringa, who actually came up with the name MakeSense and together, that is really what generated the enthusiasm for us to start up. And together, we decided to test the MakeSense concept: that is, create a collaborative platform on which volunteers will offer their time and ideas to social entrepreneurs. We said to ourselves: the best way, to find out whether the idea works is not to do a market study or business plan, but to go out and test it in the field. And from that moment, we took our backpacks and went out to meet social entrepreneurs, collect their challenges, make short videos with our smartphones, we put them on line and began to test volunteers' engagement. And once really you get stuck into a project, and you go from "it's just an idea" to "we've begun to make inroads, begun to take up a challenge, try to bring people in to solve it, then it becomes difficult to stop, because from that moment when this tiny initial stage works, and the next stage, the next stage, and then you're drawn into an unstoppable machine. I think what really sparked things off was being with somebody with the same desire, the same enthusiasm as you to test something that nobody believes in at the start because it's a new idea. And then just having the strength to say to yourself go on, I'll dip my toe in the water, and then things steam ahead of
their own accord. It's difficult to backtrack because you meet people, they want to help you and then it's hard to stop. The next stage after the initial spark is: am I going manage to, given that setting up a company or social enterprise is something of a marathon, will I be able to live off it? So the next step is enthusiasm, enthusiasm, enthusiasm, I'm managing to generate a bit of money to live off and then, it goes through other stages on the way to deployment etc, but the phases that spark things off, I think the first thing is finding the right associate who shares the same desire and then testing on a small scale, even if you have a big dream.
