French Tech Podcast

Jesse Lee is a creative entrepreneur, building his company Waemee (www.waemee.com) from Bangkok, Thailand. Before coming to Asia, Jesse - almost accidentally - became a successful influencer. Today we discuss how in 18 months he went from looking for someone to share his passion with to being almost overwhelmingly successful on a very niche market.

Philippe Beaudoin is co-founder and head of applied research at Element AI, a company founded on the belief that humans and machines can work smarter together and that this synergy can help humans focus on the tasks that they find most meaningful. An essential challenge on that path, says Philippe, is working towards transitive trust in Artificial Intelligence - by helping humans understand how AI systems work and how these systems actually use the data we feed them to make decisions.

We pick up last week's conversation about attention saturation and ask ourselves: what makes for good content marketing? Recorded on location in Singapore.

For this episode we flew to HongKong and sat down with Elvie Lahournère, Director of Digital and Innovation APAC at Natixis Bank. We discuss the many contrasts between Asia and the West when it comes to customer expectations, entrepreneurial mindset and the way startups and big corporations work together.

In his second part of our conversation with Frédéric Nouel, we discuss the evolving attitudes towards entrepreneurship in Japan and the difficulties of starting and growing a company there.
Like in many other countries, entrepreneurship in Japan is on the rise. But the push of traditional Japanese society towards stability and corporate careers is still strong and the change is taking time. A lot of time.
Because of that, the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Japan still isn’t very easy to navigate, especially for a foreigner. In our conversation, Frédéric shares how he managed to find his way on the Japanese market and brings us valuable insights into the common pitfalls, and how to avoid them, when starting a company there.

This week’s guest is Frédéric Nouel, a long-time game-developer and co-founder of "3rd Kind", a mobile game publishing company based in Tokyo, Japan. Frederic has lived in Japan for almost a decade and shared with us many interesting insights into the Japanese mobile gaming market, as well as on Japanese entrepreneurship.
In this first part of our conversation, we take a deep dive into the gaming preferences of Japanese consumers, what it takes to be successful as a game publisher and the importance of content and micro-transactions on the Japanese market.

Gilles Langourieux is the CEO and founder of Virtuos - one of the worlds leading game development companies.
Virtuos employs over 1,500 staff worldwide and as a part of their global growth, they have recently moved their headquarter from Chine to Singapore - and that’s where we met with Gilles, not long after Virtuous closed a funding round to finance its next phase of growth and international expansion.
If you like video games, or movies for that matter, you’ve probably seen some of Virtuos work. They’ve contributed to game titles such as Dark Souls, Farcry and COD: black-ops - but also to movies, such as Rango or Star Wars : The Force Awakens.
We talk to Gilles about how he grew his company, which he founded in 2004 in China, we explore the difficulties of being a foreign entrepreneur on the mainland Chinese market and learn how the Chinese market has changed over the last 15 years.
Gilles generously taps into his own experience to give advice to us, his fellow entrepreneurs, that are perhaps considering expanding into China and tells about the two major challenges that await there : unprecedented competitive pressure and massive scale.

Cécile Israel is the founder of EasyBachus, a startup based in Shenzhen China, that makes wine easy and fun for everyone. She's also the head of the new French Tech community for the Hongkong-Shenzhen area, as well as president of the "Entrepreneurs Group of South China" with the French Chamber of Commerce.
Who better than Cécile to tell us more about the major efforts currently underway to unite the megalopolis formerly known as Pearl River Delta, consisting of 9 cities and 2 special administrative regions in South China - a region that houses no less than 5% of the Chinese population and represents a GDP of 1.4 trillion USD?