From Scaleway to Saclay, on a mission to distribute data science and common machine learning globally

Less than 6 months ago, following my 3 years stint as?Scaleway’s CEO, I set out to investigate the realm of possibles by publishing?yet another manisfesto, to discover “Future Proof Inc.”

Shortly after publishing the post, I received an avalanche of introductions, suggestions for fields to investigate, actual job offers, invitations to join entrepreneurial ventures…

This resulted in an intensive 7 weeks marathon, packing my agenda with no less than 140 meetings, averaging 5 per day, half of which were in person in and around Paris, the rest by phone or video conference. This period was mindblowing, allowing me to meet incredible entrepreneurs, out of this world projects. Trust me, there is no lack of energy and opportunities out there, right here, right now, in France, and certainly elsewhere…

I was able to identify no less than 50 projects to investigate, covering a variety of topics, including AI, cloud, robotics, quantum computing, future of work, venture capital… The opportunities varied in terms of maturity, ranging from ideation, early stage, late stage, and established/mature.

Out of those 50 projects, a dozen opportunities emerged (actual offers and soft offers), leading to top 3 candidates.

Now, going back to my earlier manifesto, the following themes and concepts were on my radar :

• Technology for good, or technology advancement for mankind
• Entrepreneurship & value creation; seed, growth or hyper growth
• General management, with or without business development
• Corporate Social Responsibility: social, environmental, corporate citizenship
• Computing, cloud computing, tooling, open-source & software ecosystems
• Deeptech & moonshots
• European tech sovereignty & excellence

I am happy and proud to report that what I ended up choosing checks all of the boxes! Before the reveal, here’s how it unfolded :

It all started on January 13th 2023, when? Fran?ois Goupil ?reached out to meet with me. Fran?ois and I knew each other from when he was working for?HUB France AI?(of which I am a cofounding board member), a think-tank created after Cédric Villani ?issued his first?report on AI in 2018. More recently, as VP Tech & Solutions at the Paris?Open-source Experience Summit, I had invited Fran?ois to lead the Machine Learning & analytics track. I had the pleasure to also welcome him on a panel where we discussed “Open source as-a-service : benefits & limits”.

Fran?ois is currently in charge of fostering growth of?Scikit-learn?at? Inria , the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology. Scikit-learn is one if not the most popular machine learning open-source library and framework, possibly used by all data-scientists on the planet. It has been developed over the past decade by researchers, data- and computer-scientists, typically building the tools they needed to conduct their research. Even though the library is now mature, it remains work-in-progress, as with any piece of code, but it is alive and well thanks to a dedicated team of core-developers and maintainers.

It turns out that Inria has been supporting most of the cost to sustain a good chunk of the core team, via the?Scikit-learn consortium, over a good decade. Everyone agrees that this piece of technology is in fact essential to research, to academia and to the industry. It needs to be sustained. Inria should be celebrated for having invested all of these years, for allowing this project to thrive even though it is not actual research, but rather a byproduct of research, a tool to facilitate research. Of course, this could not have happened without the relentless and visionary work from? Gael Varoquaux , Olivier Grisel ?and Alexandre Gramfort , among other core-developers and contributors. This piece of technology is a gift to humanity, allowing seamless data exploration and modeling, getting machine insights beyond the biological limits of direct human possibilities.

The French government is very clued in right now, and it starts with our President Emmanuel Macron who has put the La French Tech high in his agenda. Indeed, France has been working on fostering innovation and industrial digital transformation in general since his first mandate. Rightly so, France and Europe need to be in the race in order to be relevant for the decades to come; afterall, the foundations we are building today will be delegated to our children and the future generations. As part of?France 2030 and the?National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence,?the government has tasked Inria to build up data-science commons with, above and beyond Scikit-learn. Other initiatives seek to finance and bolster the private tech sector, hopefully leading to more unicorns, decacorns and centaurs, with a high risk/return factor, but also with growth benefits for France and Europe at large. Here however, the goal is to level the playing field through open-sourcing by reducing core dependencies on commercial lock-in and extra-territorial technologies and services, and indirectly improve sovereignty.

Fran?ois set-out to convince me to join. He barely had to twist my arm! Indeed, the mission checked all the boxes… I quickly met with Gael Varoquaux, co-founding core-contributor and guardian of the Scikit-learn philosophy all these years, and then the rest of the team. Somehow, Fran?ois and Ga?l managed to convince the Inria management that I was the right person for the job, or rather, for the mission. Time will tell if the casting is the right one, but I already feel humbled, honored and bolstered by the challenge.

But as always, things are never that simple. The mission requires a rocket. Today, I can only reveal the first stage of the rocket since the second stage isn’t built yet!

Without further ado, I am proud to officially announce my new role as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Inria,?which means spending a lot of time with the team in the?Alan Turing building on the école Polytechnique campus.

My immediate goal is to structure a vehicle to accomplish the mission. I actually started nearly 3 months ago, and we’ve made great progress already.

If you’re interested to know more, please?contact me.

Otherwise, rendez-vous in the Fall for the next milestone and announcement ;-)