From VC to startup

BERTHIER Rémi
5 min readApr 21, 2021

--

Moving from VC to startup remains quite an unusual move. I wanted to write this small article to share my thoughts on why I decided to jump on the other side of the table. I hope you find it useful (and not too self-centered)! 😇

From VC …

I gratuated in 2008 from a master degree in IT. I was shaped to become a developer. At the time, I declined a job opportunity in a prestigious bank, to do an extra year in business school instead, because I was eager to learn more on how to build new business around tech. Just after that, I jumped into entrepreneurship, launching some casual games on iPhone (back in 2009). It was an exciting experience, but unfortunately it was already a crowded space… Since then, I’ve been working to support great entrepreneurs building tech startups. I was a mentor for 5 years in a tech incubator, before turning VC for 6 years to bake early-stage startups.

I’ve always loved to work alongside entrepreneurs to help them achieve their dreams. I know how hard it is and what it requires to build a new business, so I really admire anyone embracing entrepreneurship, with or without success. During these years, I’ve always tried hard to behave with a positive and value-added attitude while being a VC, either during first meetings or boards.

But I believe it’s always more difficult when you haven’t really been part of a startup journey yourself. That’s for sure why more and more great VC firms are onboarding entrepreneurs in their investment teams. Entrepreneurs don’t always make good VCs of course, because it’s a really different job and they can be tempted sometimes to extrapolate their own experiences as golden rules, while each stratup journey is unique. However, I strongly believe that having been an entrepreneur can be a powerful experience for any VC, as it can help having the right balanced attitude between being helpful, empathic and demanding with entrepreneurs both in good and bad times.

NB : During all these years, I met many incredible people. I find myself really lucky to have worked closely with some entrepreneurs like Pierre Lapree (CEO, Per Angusta), Pascale Vicat-Blanc (former-CEO of Cloudweaver and now CEO of Stackeo), Aurélien Charrier (CEO of Nukeygara), Yoann Nussbaumer (CEO of Chargemap), Anne-Laure Plessier (former-CEO of Cocoom), Laurent Py (former-CEO of Hiptest), David Heriban (CEO of Percipio Robotics), Sébastien et Lazhar (co-CEOs of DataGalaxy) … and so many more. Also, special wink to Sébastien Beyet (CEO of Agicap)! 😉👏

Transition

I’m been thinking to turn back to entrepreneurship for a while now, as I love to work on building things, and also because I’m eager to learn and experience new challenges. I really love being a VC, but I felt it would be exciting and fulfilling to get back on the other side of the table … and eventually it could make me a better VC in another future!

2020 was really a thing. For everyone I guess. I had more time to step back and think. By the end of the year, I finally felt that it could be the right time to move on to a new venture. I really wanted to come back to building! 😅

I had already been thinking about a startup idea by then… So I dedicated some of my time to give this idea a try. I built an MVP with Bubble (a great no code tool by the way) and get close to market doing customer interviews. I quickly realised unfortunately that the Product-Market-Fit was really not obvious… I quickly decided to move on to someting else.

So I started to help some great entrepreneurs during these last few months. Eventually, that’s how I connected with Georges Gomes in the first place…

… to startup, joining <Div>Riots

From day one, I’ve been really impressed by Georges. First, he had an exceptional background as former CTO and cofounder of Ullink (from 2 to 1000 people, exited to Itiviti in 2018 for 650M$). But mostly, I liked the person, with a great positive energy and an impressive learning curve. And I was also impressed by the high-level of technical expertise from all the 3 co-founders, including François and Gregory.

I hadn’t any specific expertise myself on the design tools space, but I quickly figured out the huge opportunity they were adressing with <Div>Riots. Design Systems is still a pretty new hot topic coming from designers tools, with Figma leading the pack. The idea behind “Design Systems” is to stop reinventing the wheel. Basically, a Design System is a collection of reusable components, that can be assembled together to build any number of applications. Design Systems are now a best-in-class methodology for designers, to gain productivity and build consistent UX/UI.

The vision of <Div>Riots is that Design Systems shouldn’t be limited to designers. The whole front-end team, with developers in the forefront, deserves to have a global Design System.

<Div>Riots team has been building since 2020 a SaaS to make it easy to manage a Design System for front-end teams. Developers can build their components in it, centralize documentation, run tests, deploy packages for production, and collaborate with designers.

I’ve been really excited by the vision and ambition of <Div>Riots team. I think they are tackling something quite huge. So when Georges came back to me to propose me to jump in as Head of Operations to help them build the venture, I didn’t hesitate very long! That was a great opportunity for me to get back in startup mode.

So from now on, I’ll help Georges and the team to secure fundings and structure the company as we grow. We have high ambitions, so I guess that’s going to be really exciting and intensive along the way ! We are expecting to grow fast, so if you are interested to join in, you can have a look here, or if you want to have more information don’t hesitate to reach me out! 😊🙏

More info : https://divriots.com/

--

--

BERTHIER Rémi

Seed Investor — Startup advisor — Entrepreneur — Author of FISY — Interests : Digital, Startups, Innovation, Growth, Marketing, Finance & Wine!