My god (small ‘g’, because I’m not sure if you’re actually reading this), everything seems so far away at the moment. 15 months have passed since the very beginning of this adventure and nevertheless it feels more like 15 years… this must be the magical effect of the “Internet“ dimension.

Normally, we are at the end of the year 2004. Thanks in advance for not being upset by any errors concerning dates or any imprecision in my story. I have two extenuating circumstances: I’m from Nice (IE, High speed connection), and what’s more, it's friday :).

 I’m alone. In any case, after the impossibility of setting up the project with the two people in "the family", financially nice and morally healthy (or the opposite, I can’t tell anymore), it all seems terribly difficult: make the presentation (which must include the sacrosanct business plan, the description of the team!, the project, and especially clarify my financial needs), find the people to set it up with, etc…

I leave my office, I speak (a little) about it to the people of my closest trusty team, and right from the beginning they all found it was…. ambitious. But I spot that small smile on their faces, that I interpret to be a "you sly Devil, you" encouragement. After 5 years of both physical and mental stress, it was the right moment to take a good look at my professional situation, to see if I was ready for it or not (i.e., to work from 8 AM-11 PM every day, assuming the workload of the strategy, the product, the financing, the marketing, management, reporting, etc…) and especially to identify the things that I knew how to do, but where others associates would be valuable.

The decision was quickly made to find associates who naturally had to share my values, but also had to be complementary, so as to distribute the load among several people. My wife was expecting our second child, and in view of the shock of the first one, it was impossible to start again on the same basis if I wanted to have a family life. And you’re going to laugh, but that’s the most important thing for me in this tough world...

The choice was quick, as Eirik and Joe, together, were just what I was looking for: honest (we had worked together on a project with Lycos and Moonfruit for two years), hard working, intelligent, with each one having his special talent but with a capacity to understand the others’ "world".

In addition, they were also both English (Gandi had a lot of clients outside of France), founders and directors of a company developing an excellent product within the framework of a long-term project… and not to wreck it, we got on very well.

Plus, I had told them that we would set up a project for a company together and as the last time when I had had this sort of “Revelation," I ended up getting married, it looked like it was going to be good....

The discussion was short and they didn’t take long to say yes: the project – constructing an alternative independent group around the values of Gandi – thrilled them. We were now three to attack the next step, knowing that time was going by, that the news about Gandi being up for sale would quickly spread among the "milieu of those in-the-know."

Each of them participated in the presentation of the project, a group effort where we had to, right from the beginning, explain the uniqueness of Gandi (for those who didn’t know it), the real backbone of our project.  From there ensues our next big issue: identify the way to find the money, what we lacked to complete our budget, while at the same time respecting all these issues…

 [To Be Continued] …