Sylvain Géron / CTO, Canal+, co-funder and former manager, Polyconseil

Last updated on profile page : March 10th, 2016

BIO

A graduate from Ecole Polytechnique, Sylvain Géron began his career at ARCEP, the French telecom regulator, before realizing that it would be much more interesting to create a company instead. Between 1996 and 2000, 150 new telecom operators were created in France and naturally he wanted to try his luck. He jointly founded the first French ADSL operator, two years before Free, and at this time they had 10,000 clients, twice as many as Orange! In 2001, financial backers started having doubts about the future viability of ADSL, and stopped funding the industry. The company went out of business.

With Marc Taieb, Sylvain started two companies: Polyconseil, providing local authorities with expertise on mobile networks, and Wifirst, which provides high-speed WiFi Internet access to clients such as universities, hotels. Both companies are now part of the Bolloré group.

Between 2003 and 2005, Sylvain worked with the government minister Renaud Dutreil to draw up a law regarding business creation.

In 2011, Polyconseil started to work on Bolloré group’s Autolib’ project.

In January 2016, Sylvain become CTO of Canal+, a premium cable television network owned by Vivendi.

By Sylvain Géron on ParisTech Review

L’aventure Autolib’

Industries on March 3rd, 2016

Autolib', c'est une aventure un peu folle d'entrepreneurs. Une aventure initiée par Vincent Bolloré, qui a lancé son projet de batterie électrique il y a une quinzaine d'années et qui a vu dans l'appel d'offres lancé par le Syndicat Mixte Autolib', association de communes de la région parisienne, l'opportunité de démontrer la performance de sa batterie à grande échelle. Une fois gagné cet appel d'offres, il fallait relever le défi de la réalisation informatique de ce projet, et cela dans un délai extrêmement court: l'engagement était une réalisation en moins de 12 mois. Ce défi impossible, c'est une petite société nommée Polyconseil qui l'a relevé.

A brief history of Autolib’

Industries on March 3rd, 2016

Autolib' is a technical, operational and commercial success. This electric car-sharing service which started in Paris and operates in several French cities is now going global: the latest city where the scheme has been adopted is Indianapolis. This rather risky venture was made possible by the alliance between a giant and a startup. Here is its story.

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