Laurent Le Moal

I mean, I remember the day I had to go to the shop and buy, you know, my first, you know, compact pizza rack.

It was 97, 97.

I was 25.

25.

Yeah, that was cool because I had just an ISDN connection.

The thing is, it was really easy to

really would find you out so you know the cpa the click model etc not much existed but anyway um the reality of that is we did the classic you know boom and bust of this year so really raising money with um how much with some good vcs at the time it was the equivalent now of five million euro for our first round okay

The thing is, we never went past the first round because at one point, you know, this 5 billion euro in that time, by the way, it was billions of lira at that time.

It was pre-euro.

You know, we started to spend it in classical marketing, advertising, and so on.

So basically, the boom and then the bust.

You have to, you know, fire the people you've hired, etc.

And you grew it big, right?

Oh yeah, that was just in Italy, but then, you know, we opened subsidiary in France, in Spain, we did a joint venture with Portugal Telecom.

I mean, it was growing pretty fast, but, you know, first lesson for me is the P&L of a company does not change at all, new economy or not.

The second thing is cash is still essential if you can't raise.

And this is what happened basically when we did our second round in the year 2000.

People are still recovering from that.

You couldn't raise money.

So, you know, when I am today in India and I see companies with a very, very high burn rate.