Rolling Up Professional Networks: Dan Serfaty, CEO of Viadeo (Part 4)

Sramana: What did you ultimately do with the import business? Did you sell it?

Dan Serfaty: I sold it to my partner and the management of the company. When 1999 came around and the Internet was going crazy, I felt I had the perfect profile to get involved. I had the right diploma, which makes sense for the investors, and I was a proven entrepreneur. In the import business you make money, but you do not build wealth. I wanted to build something with value.

I do not believe that you need to know the business before you enter it. I don’t think that is what makes an entrepreneur succeed. Business acumen is transferable. In Europe, when it came to employees, I tried to look beyond personal experience and rather at their potential. Good business acumen will transfer from software to retail or from retail to software.

In 1999, I sold the retail import business and met Thierry Lunati. He was one of the major founders of the French Internet. He started very early on in 1993, brought the first French search engine, and later did a free e-mail business. We met through a friend.

He is an engineer and not a manager. We were not in a hurry to do the business, so we came up with the idea of establishing an entrepreneur club. The idea was that any entrepreneur who wanted to be part of the club would have to exchange shares of their own company with other entrepreneurs according to their business arrangements. We would be the aggregator and establish a value for the shares. It was new and original at the time.

We started the company in 2000 and had 450 companies in the club. We were organizing a lot of events around the club. What we found was common with entrepreneurs were themes revolving around “What can I sell to you or what can I buy from you?” and “Who do you know?” Initially we thought we were going to create an intranet for the club with a small search engine. When people started using the service, we realized that we were being stupid and that we needed to open it up to anyone. This was in 2004.

Sramana: LinkedIn was already in existence in 2004. Did you know about them?

Dan Serfaty: We did not know about them because we started from within our club. LinkedIn was created in 2003, and we found them pretty quickly once we opened up our network. There were several other companies in France that had created the same thing as we did. Our name come from “viaduct,” which shows our ambition.

Sramana: How many people came online once you opened up from your internal network?

Dan Serfaty: We did it two ways. We had 100 entrepreneurs, and we grew via their address books. We did start this legally as the same company. We raised 5 million euros from the investors who helped us start the entrepreneur club. We broke it into its own company in 2005. Within six months we had 80,000 people signed up.

Sramana: Was your service free?

Dan Serfaty: It was totally free, but that did not last. Thierry had seen too many companies die because they did not care about revenues. I hate giving things away free because they can become useless. We started monetization with recruiters within a year. That was an easy sell for us because it did not hurt the viral growth of the company.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Rolling Up Professional Networks: Dan Serfaty, CEO of Viadeo
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