Entrepreneurship are sometimes dazzling successes. But it is more often a story of luck, encounters and above all a lot (a lot) of work, and passion. It is to this love of technology that Sylvain Ardiet, who has just sold his company Alphaserve Technologies, attributes his career and this great success as a tech entrepreneur. It was not won: after a difficult high school, he finally blossomed in IUT marketing and commercialization, which encouraged him to consider a business school. It will be HEC Montreal. ” A great competition of circumstance: a friend invited me to go see him on a bad day at the Salon de l’Etudiant and I came across the school stand. I said to my parents ‘if I’m caught, you come with me to Montreal’. A few months later we were on the plane “.

A student, he continues to let himself be guided by his intuitions. After a visit to a friend in Los Angeles, he decides to spend a year on the West Coast to improve his English. In mid-1999, he applied for tech jobs in New York, but didn’t think of going to San Francisco, the epicenter of a sector at its peak. “ This is something I learned later: to think about the meaning of one’s actions at the strategic level, not just at the tactical level. “. He then entered active life in New York at the pace of the city: 300 hours per month, a meager salary, but a real passion and a “first family of work”. And above all a decisive meeting: the VP of the company left to launch his own business, and Sylvain Ardiet quickly followed him, in 2003.

This is not his first professional adventure, however: at 16, he had his first jobs in the hotel industry, a notion of service that he appreciates and will find again as a consultant. Then on his own, to repair computers and do various computer jobs. This time, Sylvain Ardiet must empty his bank accounts to join forces and found COMGroup. The company offers infrastructure services, for which it must make large investments for servers and other equipment, but also IT services and application development: ” we did not have a precise strategic vision, but a pbottomless assion, a great work force and above all employees who believed in our mission “, Says the one who worked until recently 18 hours a day. It was a success: the company was sold in 2006 to Exenet.

Sylvain Ardiet nevertheless remains a minority shareholder, and continues the adventure. The company is pivoted to services with law firms and financial companies, and it is renamed Alphaserve Technologies. A successful bet: ten years later, the company has doubled its workforce to 700 employees, tripled its revenues and has just sold to Eze Castle Integration, despite the headwinds of the Covid-19 crisis. For Sylvain Ardiet, who has remained very invested at the operational level, this outing is also an opportunity to reflect on past years, and to draw lessons from them. Stories of leadership and human relationships: “ I try to recruit people who know more than me, technical experts because the team grows organically from all these exchanges. But I also make my teams feel listened to, supported, heard and intelligent while keeping our strategic objectives in mind“.

Anne-Laure Peytavin

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