Le Groupe YESS est une alliance des clubs d'Alumni de grandes écoles et d'universités intéressés par l'entrepreneuriat social et par l'innovation sociale.

MakeSense empowers people to engage in projects and challenges that help social entrepreneurs.

MakeSense makes it possible for anyone in the world to get involved at any level to solve social and environmental issues.

"Le dialogue est un travail sur soi, celui d'écouter l'autre."
"Pour les Allemands les banalités sont considérées comme l'honorable substance de la conversation ~ Emil Cioran."

"Contrairement à la Start-Up, la Start-Out ne repose pas sur une mode, un usage ou une culture prédéterminée."

"La Start-Out crée son propre usage : elle développe un usage dans le temps pour que le présent rejoigne son future."

"Son plus grand intérêt, son raison d’être est d’élargir les possibilités futures, nos possibilités, nos perceptions."

"On n’organise pas une audition de chant dans la tête avec des micros."

"One of the big trends that we saw during the past 5 years was the convergence and an increased collaboration between social entrepreneurs and traditional private sectors"

"We see basically two trends. The first one is the increasing penetration of this collaboration with the social entrepreneurs in the company. And the second one is the diversification of the different impacts on the company - different trends that will hit the company."

"Interestingly enough, in most forms of transformation (...) we see that the change comes from the top. In this collaboration that we're talking about - so the collaboration with the social entrepreneurs - we're starting to see that the change also comes from the bottom meaning that the employees, the individuals are bringing this change. (...) This is one of the first people-led transformation that we see in a company."

 

"Finalement à plusieurs, tout est plus facile, et c'est comme l'engagement citoyen"

Le mot solidaire il n'est pas binaire, il n'y a pas deux types de personnes, ceux qui s'engagent, et ceux qui s'engagent pas, ce serait très réducteur. Il y a aussi tous ceux qui voudraient passer ce premier pas, mais qui ne le font pas".

"Si on est tout seul à donner son temps, eh bien il e se passe pas grand chose, par contre si on est 500 à donner 2h de son temps, alors là il se passe quelque chose, et c'est ça le Crowdtiming".

"Pour créer le Crowdtiming, on s'est forcément inspiré du crowdfunding. D'abord par sa philosophie : c'est à dire au lieu de demander beaucoup à peu de monde, on demande un peu à beaucoup de monde, sauf que là , notre unité n'est pas l'argent, mais le temps".



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"Qu'est ce qu'un Business Angels ? C'est une plateforme où des gens peuvent soulever des fonds, sans que ce soit pour autant une dette ; donc des personnes à titre privé peuvent mettre de l'argent en échange d'une participation dans la compagnie".

"Il y a quelques points qui font qu'un entrepreneur est préférable"

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Help us caption & translate this video!

http://amara.org/v/HYKa/

How many of you have given something last year? In term of time, in term of money, in term of whatever to social causes. Can you raise your hand?

That's the thing, that's pretty cool. So almost everyone.

Second question is trickier for you: How many of you have given enough to social causes?

So, how many of you believe that you have given enough? Can you still raise your hands?
One. That's the thing.

So as an entrepreneur, when I start understanding this industry I realised that you have a huge gap between those 2 numbers. And as entrepreneur, I realised that something as to be done there.

The philanthropic industry is broken. We know this. The question is: How can we fix this?
And for me, when I realised this huge gap, I said: "that's for sure something to do there". And I do believe we have the solution at Epic Foundation.

And before I give you the solution, at least our solution, I'll introduce myself. I'm a serial entrepreneur, as you've said. I started my first venture when I was 17 years old and since then, I think I am pretty good at just watching the big wave coming and riding the wave. So I also brag on this coming from the South West of France, so it's easy for me to ride waves. But even if I'm really bad at this, but I love it. At least just the real waves in Biarritz. Those are way easier for me.

So I started, now running different start-ups in all kind of tech industries. So that's  5 different start-ups. The last 2, I sold one to Publicis Group one earlier in Europe, or now in the world for sure. And the last one very last one to BlackBerry.

So, it was mobile, social media, Internet.

And at the end this journey, was 2 years ago, I realised... I asked myself this big question I'm sure you all are asking at some point of your life, this big question: " What's next?"

For me it was pretty clear what's next. I knew that my 6 start-ups, my new start-up should be in this social world. The goal for me was to have a positive impact on the world, and the thing is it didn't come over a night.

The real story is it comes thanks to my mum. My mum, I believe, was passionate about social missions or missions doing work. That inspired me to just pursue his path in my life. So I said fine, I want to do something social, I want to have an impact. It's great to have money but maybe I can do something with this. But I knew very little. Well I would say I knew nothing about the philanthropic industry.

So as an entrepreneur, you know this pretty well, and that is something I can tell you, before launching anything you have to do your market research.

And my market research started 5 years ago: I took my bio and I started knocking on doors. I did it in the US, with the Gates Foundation, with the Rotary network people with great knowledge and I said: "Guys, I hope I will do this, and can you help me out?"

And the good thing is they did.

They spent time with me, they introduced me to other people, they gave me advice. And, I started meeting a lot of people, hundreds of people, asking questions. 

But it was not enough. It was great to understand how it works in the US or in Western Europe. I said: "We should go deeper, we should go wider".

And my lovely wife said: "We can maybe take the kids out of school and we should travel the world."

I said: " Well, that's cool. I like this." So we took the kids out of school, you can see 3 kids. We only have 3, hopefully more soon : Louis, Alice and Blanche. And we traveled the world.

The goal was for sure to be all together but the other goal was to meet local people. Everywhere we went we spent time with social entrepreneurs, philanthropists, millionaires, billionaires, or just policy-makers.

And always with the same question : "How did it work? How can we do it differently? Do you think there is something to be fixed? How can we do this?".

So that's what I've done for the last 5 years of my life: trying to understand, I was still running businesses on the side. Well, I should say: I was running businesses and I was doing this on the side.

But, what are the findings of those 4 years of market research ?

What we have realised is that so many people wanted to give more but they don't, and not because they are bad people, let's be very clear, people are good. I'm maybe a bit naive and optimistic, but that's important. But they don't trust social organisations.

Two, they don't have the time. So that's pretty obvious for you.

And the third thing is that they don't have the knowledge.

So maybe you can come here, at the chair, and maybe as soon as they have, or you students, a bigger and deeper knowledge, but most people don't have this knowledge because they don't have time, they don't trust organisations.

On the other side, that's also interesting, all of us, you, me, you before making any decisions in our lives, personal decisions or business decisions, we want 3 things.
One, we want to have inner choices. It's very hard when someone comes and says: "You need to do this." When you go through the exam, and pass an exam here, you have maybe different choices from different corporations, they will choose the one they prefer. It should be the same in this non-profit world.

You should be able to choose where you give and to understand why you give to those organisations. So the first thing is : the selection.

The second thing is: the tracking. You want to track, whatever you do. If you want to check your bank account, you are able to go online, on your mobile phone and you can know how much money you have on your bank account. So you should be able to track this.

And the third one is: the experience. It's very hard for so many people to understand poverty, to understand all of this when you stay here, when you don't go seeing things.

So we are pushing people to go and visit. And that really is what we have realised at Epic Foundation: "How can we change the world in building tools that we're all using for whatever we do in our lives ?".

So if we go deeper and if I give you a bear understanding or deeper understanding of what we do at the Epic Foundation.

I selected a piece. We have received, so it's every year the same process, we have received this year, at the beginning of the year, 14 000 applications coming from 85 countries. So many social organisation, NGO's, doing great work about just one thing: youth.

So what we are doing ?

We're trying to fight inequalities touching youth around 6 regions in the world. That's in Europe, Brazil, Africa, the US, India and South-East Asia.

So we are receiving hundreds and hundreds of applications, and we've spent 6 months to vet only 20 of them. For those here who knows the venture world, it works exactly the same.

Sebastian does know this pretty well.

You can just meet a lot of venture people and some would just, or very few will be just selected at the very end. And we're doing exactly the same.We're spending a lot of time to vet very few of them.That's the first thing.

And by September 1st, we have 20 organisations, then we spend 4 months to go and talk to potential donors, this new generation of donors, people who should give more, who want to give more.

But maybe because they don't have the tools, they don't have the access, they are not giving. We're talking about entrepreneurs, us, tech industry, finance, food, real estate, you've named them.

Private banks, families, offices, corporations, artists, singers, athletes. All those people, who really are good people, who whould give more, and they're new at this. We bring them, for free, that's also very important, we're not charging anyone, neither the beneficiaries or the NGOs or the donors, everything is free.

So a hundred percent of what they give mainly goes directly to the organisation they are selecting. That's very important. So, the answer or the reason why we're doing this is because we're self-owning and I'm self-owning everything.

The goal is to have a real and pure organisation where we're not asking money for this work. The second one is the tracking. I mentioned this earlier. Well we all, we are, you are, talking about big data those days. You can mesure everything, you can track everything. That's what we're using now. We're saying: "You should be able and we are able to provide information to all donors about what is going on there". So we're tracking information : it could be from those -slamming- mobiles, we're able to track this information, process this information, and to deliver this information the way that you have on your mobile phone and your PCs.

So the same way you are tracking whatever you do in your life, you should be able to do the same with social organisations. And the last one is the experience. I mentioned this earlier. Experience for us is also very very important.

The experience is: you give, you go. That's what we do, we're saying to donors: " You invest somewhere, you should go and visit, you should bring your wife, you should bring your cousin, your partners, your kids, you should go and see this. And that's very very important. If people can't do this, don't want to do this, if they are scared to do this, we are sending film directors shooting everything.

Power of videos, that's why I'm just talking in front of those, hi guys, is because it is very important you know. It will be twittered after, it will be reposted. t is very very important. We need to show this to potential donors. They should see if they cannot go.

So that is the structure of what we do. But if we go beyond this, and we should go beyond this when I'm talking to students.

Last week I was in Rwanda talking to, same, same people, same age at least, to the university of Rwanda. There is a business college over there, and I was giving the same kind of speech over there, talking about social entrepreneurship, tech entrepreneurship, and how can we just do something and have a bigger impact on the world ? And that what we are trying to do here.

All of us, sometimes when you're younger it's different than when you're older, but at some point we have skills, all of us, we have resources at some point, and we have a network. The question is : "How can you use this?" All of us we can do more with 1, 2 or 3 of those elements.

For me, personally, I've decided and it's very clear to stop almost everything else and to spend all my life, to devote my life, to change the world positively, to use my resources : my money, my skills as entrepreneur, and my network to try to do this.

So I want just to share with you 3 amazing stories. The first one is about skills. Remember skills, resources and network. The first one, this picture has been taken in a favela in Brazil. I was talking to a social entrepreneur from a drug dealer and after this he went to jail. And after jail, he found a job and now he's a wonderful amazing social entrepreneur. And when I started engaging with him, we were talking he said : " Stop talking, you know Alexandre, we are similar". A Drug dealer and me? Ok. "I'm a entrepreneur too. You know what ? When I was runnning --- my network, I was able to find great partners to buy at a very low price to sell at a very high price. You know it's exactly what an entrepreneur should do."

But this guy, with all his skills, have bearly changed everything, and now he's using his amazing skills to change life of those kids in the favelas who went to jail and who want to change and find a job after being in jail.

Second one is: the resources. It is mostly the money. This guy, unknown guy, is maybe one of the largest donors in New York City. But everything he does is anonymous. So no-one knows him, but no-one knows him because he doesn't want to be seen.

And that's also interesting to see. And whatever you know, you can be seen, you can have your name on the door, it's great, but give, do, act !

And the third thing is the networks. Networks is an interesting history. A dentist from Sao Paulo, Brazil. One of the dentist there, few years ago, started to just help some young kids from favelas to have a better dental conditions. He started with one kid, then 2, 5, 10. And he started spending 5% of his time just dealing with these poor kids who were not able to get access to dental care.

And that's maybe not, you know, clear to you. But in this country, because of the health insurance, or lack of health insurance, so many kids are not having those kind of treatments. A few years after, you have 13 000 dentists, who are doing exactly the same. Because it started with one, then he talked to a friend, the friend of his friend, and now you have so many dentists that are doing this every single day trying to help and give for free, that's the good thing : It's totally sustainable, because it's not a question of money, they don't have to raise money, they are giving their network to change life of those poor kids.

And now what they're doing, they're extending, expanding this to Colombia, Venezuela, so other countries. Same way, I can use your network to do good.

So, and that's will be my single last slide. It's about a picture taken in Chiang Mai, in Thailand. And that's exactly what we are trying to do. We're trying to fight inequalities, for sure, bridging the gap between this new generation of donors wherever they are around the world, and the most amazing, inspiring social organisations tackling youth issues.

If we can give a bear access to health, to those kids, bear access to a proper education, that what we're trying to achieve at Epic Foundation.

And last slide, that is what I want to challenge you. The kids here are not the kid who have --- the expression : they are young. Students here. What can you do guys ? What can you give ? And I'm not talking about your money, most of you don't have enough resources, but your time, your skills, some of you will become social entrepreneurs, I hope so.

And that is very interesting also, that's why the very first slide was... You know, tech entrepreneurs to social entrepreneurs.

The question here is: we are entrepreneurs or we are not ?

Social or tech, that's not important. But that's what we need to understand, and that's what we need. We all need to do more. You know what you can give : skills, resources, and network.

Thank you for your time.

Entrepreneurship, social issues, adventure, the environment and space travel are on the agenda at a Q&A session with Sir Richard Branson, Founder and Chairman of the Virgin Group.