My journey: from mathematics to artificial intelligence
This story was first published in late 2016 on stileex.xyz, where it reached thousands of readers and gathered more than a hundred testimonials. I am republishing it here, on my own site, in a version edited for readability, faithful to the substance, and extended with the 2018-2026 chapters. Originally written in French.
What a long way I have come since my childhood in a working-class immigrant family, without a penny in my pocket. How did I end up running companies when I was headed for a career as a mathematics researcher? How did I climb back up after hitting rock bottom, failing at my first attempt as a company founder? And how did that long detour finally bring me back to my starting point, mathematics, by the most unexpected road: artificial intelligence?
Before you begin, I would like you to keep this message with you:
Whoever you are: poor, rich, man, woman, unemployed, CEO, student... I will always give you at least ten minutes of my time if you want to talk with me.
An academic training in mathematics
I obtained my French scientific baccalaureate in 1999, with honours, majoring in mathematics. Right after, I was admitted to the classes préparatoires aux grandes écoles at the Janson-de-Sailly high school (Paris 16th), first in maths sup, then in MP*, the class that prepares students for the most selective French schools: ENS, École polytechnique, Centrale, les Mines. My one dream at the time: getting into Polytechnique.
I failed the entrance exam a first time in 2001, repeated a year of MP* at the Condorcet high school (Paris 9th), and failed a second time in 2002. My first home was a 9 m² maid's room in the 16th arrondissement, with a view of the Eiffel Tower.
I then set course for a research career, following the magistère and master's curriculum in pure mathematics at Paris XI University (Orsay), from 2002 to 2005. Life had a very different destiny in store for me. Or so I believed: it would take mathematics twenty years to catch up with me.
My first entrepreneurial steps
I did not wait until the end of my studies to do my first business. In 2001, during my preparatory year at Condorcet, three classmates and I were appointed to organise the school's annual party: the Soirée Condorcet. I was miles away from imagining that this experience would change my destiny as a maths student.
I absolutely loved organising that party: a challenge, a first immersion in the world of business, a great many encounters, several thousand euros earned, and close to 1,200 people attending on the night of the event.
With that money, I bought my first computer. My first Internet connection followed immediately, with the famous 56k dial-up CD-ROMs of the time. I have never disconnected from the web since: I built my first website in 2002, then joined the AdSense advertising programme in 2003. The LeeX Network activity was born.
In parallel, I set up an association with the core group of friends from the Soirée Condorcet, and we organised events in Paris. In 2006, that association gave birth to my first real company, specialised in event marketing: F Entreprise, a French SAS with a share capital of 37,000 euros.
The fall
In 2006, I was 25. Young, inexperienced, but with fire in my belly, I fought alongside a few friends to launch F Entreprise. The business plan I had crafted with so much care turned out to be very far from reality.
Our first parties, which were supposed to get the business off the ground, were failures. That is when I became aware of the fundamental importance of cash flow: we had ideas and potential, but no product generating cash immediately.
In a last breath, we climbed back up by reselling printed products online to event organisers, a world whose needs we knew well. Money finally came in, but I made two fatal mistakes: I immediately increased our fixed costs by renting bigger offices, and the whole business rested on a single supplier, whose quality did not keep up.
Product returns poured in, what remained of the team lost heart, the bank account ran dry. Less than two years after its creation, F Entreprise closed. It was late 2007.
To pay my rent and repay my debts, I took a survival job: fry station and cashier at the McDonald's in Les Ulis. I fell into depression. I felt worthless. I had hit rock bottom.
Discovering sales
After several months spent unable to get out of bed, I told myself: "Simon, it cannot end like this." I turned on my computer and answered the first job offer that required neither a degree nor experience while still paying decently: field sales representative for Securitas Direct (Verisure). In plain terms, selling alarm systems door to door.
On paper, that may sound like a downgrade for someone with a master's-level background in mathematics. It was the most useful experience of my entire life.
It first resocialised me, after months without human contact. Above all, it taught me what I consider the secret to succeeding, in personal life as in business: knowing how to sell.
It was not my first experience as a salesman: as a student, I sold coffee machines on weekends and during holidays, modestly paid but enough to cover my rent, as I have been providing for myself since I was 17. Even then, I loved the contact with customers and the satisfaction of solving a problem with my product.
I will never be able to thank enough the instructors who taught me the art of selling. I understood that knowing how to sell beats having the best product, and that no marketing strategy can replace the effectiveness of a personal approach and a direct sale. I now held the tool that would make me succeed.
After Securitas Direct, I worked for two property developers and then for the Alter Eco brand, as an area manager in the west of France.
Back to entrepreneurship
Some things never change: I was born an entrepreneur. At the end of 2009, I resigned from a comfortable position, company car and perks included, to work for myself again. I took up LeeX Network, which I had never really abandoned: journalists wrote articles that I published on my websites, and the activity brought in a few hundred euros a month.
I also fulfilled a dream: leaving France for Central Europe. I arrived in Prague at the very beginning of January 2010. I lived two wonderful years there: encounters from all walks of life, learning Czech, a beautiful flat in the city centre, and two to three hours of work a day on my websites.
After two years, though, I grew tired of that life. I was making money with a few websites, more through technique than through genuine value creation, and I felt useless. I wanted to build a real company, and I sensed that this income would not last forever. What followed proved me right. In November 2011, I flew to Madagascar.
Madagascar
The shock was immense: a dense, noisy, unpredictable capital, where resourcefulness is everywhere and extreme poverty lives side by side with an extraordinary entrepreneurial energy. But I did not lose heart. I only had a three-month visa to create and launch a company.
In January 2012, I created Euclide Premier, recruited and trained three employees, then went back to Prague. I thought I could manage the team remotely, coming over only three or four times a year. I was wrong: without a presence on the ground, the company stood no chance. I had to choose. Staying in Prague meant another entrepreneurial failure, and that was out of the question. In May 2012, I settled in Antananarivo.
Another difficult period began: the company was not taking off, my websites no longer brought in money, my first employees left me, one of them even tried to extort money from me. I counted every expense and wondered how I would make it to the end of the month. It was mid-2013.
The breakthrough: the all-inclusive subscription
I did not give up. I had sold several websites in France and in Madagascar, and made a simple observation: a website sold brings money only once, whereas the hosting provider collects an annual rent on every site online. Yet very few hosting providers were established in Madagascar, and the most serious one was overpriced. So I launched my web hosting business.
I spent more than a month working day and night, in the literal sense: shared server, billing system, website, commercial offers. The first clients arrived, but not fast enough: to buy hosting, you first need a website.
So I invented the concept that would change everything: instead of paying a substantial sum once to buy their website, clients pay an annual subscription that includes creation, hosting, domain name and support. It was 2013, and this model, the all-inclusive subscription website, would become my signature.
Sales took off. The subscription model brought me into contact with many business owners who, one thing leading to another, bought other services from me.
2016: the tide has turned
In November 2016, as I write the first version of this story, the hosting company, renamed Simafri, passes 1,000 active subscription clients, including prestigious Malagasy companies. LeeX Network employs several dozen collaborators working on fine online media, including Annuaire.mg. I have created another company, specialised in information systems, with around twenty employees and major accounts in its portfolio. I have even hosted a web-focused show on Malagasy national television.
I have just turned 35. I know the future still holds hard blows for me, and I stand ready for them.
Passing it on: the sales training events
The publication of this story had an impact I had not imagined: comments, messages, encounters. Many readers told me my story inspired them, and asked me for training sessions and conferences.
In April 2017, I gave my first training conference, "Become a better salesperson", in Antananarivo. Close to 350 people filled the room; some agreed to stand, as there were no seats left. Sales professionals, entrepreneurs, executives, students, civil servants, teachers: the audience exceeded everything I had hoped for. A second training conference followed, devoted to perseverance. I keep a deep gratitude towards the Malagasy people, who welcomed me and placed their trust in me.
In December 2017, I created a company in Mauritius to carry my model beyond Madagascar, across the Indian Ocean and Africa.
2018-2022: consolidating
The following years were years of consolidation. Simafri grew stronger year after year: managed websites, business management software, web and email hosting. The all-inclusive subscription model proved its strength, and the portfolio grew far beyond Madagascar: our clients are now spread across 42 countries.
Those same years also matured a commitment of a different nature. My faith took a central place in my life, and would give birth to JesusBYS, a multilingual online Christian community that I carry as a volunteer: to serve Jesus, quite simply.
Artificial intelligence, or the return of mathematics
Meanwhile, a groundswell was building. As early as 2015, when Google released its TensorFlow library, I was among the first to seize on it to explore machine learning. The subject fascinated me all the more because it speaks my intellectual mother tongue: linear algebra, probability, optimisation. The mathematics I had left behind was coming back through the front door.
That head start led me to act early: back in 2021, I launched Epovest, before the general public had even discovered generative AI. In late 2022, the release of ChatGPT confirmed my intuition: we are living through a major technological revolution, on a par with the printing press, the industrial revolution or electricity. I decided to devote most of my time to it: studying the models in depth, experimenting every day, building, measuring.
This dual position, studying AI systems on one side, entrepreneurship on the other, reshaped my whole portfolio. Serenity by Simafri industrialises with AI the model I invented in 2013, and Simafri now helps its clients better control what AIs say about them. Epovest measures how visible businesses are in AI answers, and gives them the levers to shape it. I rebuilt Stileex as a data house: verified prices and indicators, published as continuous series and served to AI systems. Measuring and shaping AI answers, feeding it data, putting it to work: three angles on one same subject.
Twenty years after giving up a career as a mathematics researcher, the circle is complete. The destiny I thought I had left behind caught up with me, in a form no one could have predicted. The next chapter is being written right now.