Raising Money From Eighty Investors and Steering to a Successful Exit: Ludovic Huraux, CEO of Attractive World (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Boredom doesn’t create happiness.

Ludovic Huraux: Yes. I really try to keep it in mind. We think about the future all the time, “In the future, I will be happier because I’ll get something.” It doesn’t work like that. You really need to learn to be in the present and really enjoy what happens in your life and to accept failures. Maybe you lost your confidence or it didn’t work as you wanted, but you have to accept it and be resilient. It’s what I’m trying to do. It’s not easy.

Sramana Mitra: Great. You started another company. How is it doing?

Ludovic Huraux: It’s doing very well.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you based?

Ludovic Huraux: New York. It’s a company called Shapr. It’s a little bit like Tindr. Everyday, you get 10 people to meet. We have a machine learning algorithm to understand what kind of people you want to meet. The idea behind that is to facilitate and make networking more inspiring. We raised $7.5 million. The company is starting to get traction in the US, especially in New York.

Sramana Mitra: You raised $7 million on a concept?

Ludovic Huraux: We raised $3 million before the launch because much of the shareholders at Attractive World are in my next project. We launched this new project at the end of 2015. It worked very well and we got very good traction. We raised $4 million more just before the summer.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about the validation. How long did it take you to launch? I imagine you’re using a subscription business model again?

Ludovic Huraux: We are very open to different ways of doing it. We wanted to work a lot on the algorithm of matching. It’s very important when you facilitate connections. You need lots of data from everywhere. We partnered with a very famous mathematician in France to build this very powerful algorithm. Now we just want to focus on the project experience, the algorithm, and the community. I’m not concerned about the business model because the quality of data and users that we have can be easily monetized. We want to expand very quickly to the biggest cities in the world.

Sramana Mitra: You’re not monetizing at this point?

Ludovic Huraux: Yes. Our vision is probably more than a networking app. I believe that the world is going to change because of the technology. We don’t have the same paradigms as our parents. The millennials want to find inspiration and impact in their lives. They don’t want to just get money just to pay their rent. We really feel that Shapr could be the platform to help you shape your life. We start with networking but we could add more services to help you shape your life. It’s too early to decide what kind of business model we want because we believe that the potential is huge.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Raising Money From Eighty Investors and Steering to a Successful Exit: Ludovic Huraux, CEO of Attractive World
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