A recent publication by the excellent ParisTech Review draw my attention. It’s entitled Three lessons from Parrot’s saga et you can read the entire article here (www.paristechreview.com/2016/09/28/three-lessons-parrot-saga/)

I already posted about Parrot and its founder Henri Seydoux (see www.startup-book.com/2012/08/10/parrot-and-henri-seydoux-a-french-success-story/) and I was lucky to listen to him at EPFL in 2014. I encourage you to watch to his presentation below, where he gave five advice: follow your own ideas, people will help you, focus is essential, be cautious with money, and… good luck.

In this new series of advice, I did not only notice Seydoux’ three lessons (1- it’s perfectly possible to create an industrial company in France. In fact, it’s even easier than ever. 2- high technology works in cycles, and you can’t expect to sell the same product for decades. 3- the software industry is fundamentally oriented towards B2C) but also some striking points:
– Parrot was many times close to bankruptcy but thanks to the courage, vision and yes, luck of its founder, Parrot avoided the worst.
– To his regret, [he] never managed to convince French brands […]. No one is a prophet in his own country…
– To innovate, Seydoux created « internal start-ups », with small talented teams with “two main prohibitions: no specifications, no market research”. Some tinkering, trial and errors and “gradually, we accumulate knowledge and sometimes, it ends up working”.
In 2016, Parrot has a market cap. of €300M, sales of €300M and close to 1’000 employees. A beautiful European success story.