Planète Grandes Écoles met Alexandre Duran, co-founder of Start In Blockchain and currently financial operations analyst at Silvr. Passionate about all things Blockchain technology, Alexandre and his associates decided to do it create a Web3 outreach media to share their passion with everyone.
Find out about his background and how Start In Blockchain can help you land the best jobs in the Web3 universe!
Hi Alexandre, can you introduce yourself and tell us about your background?
Hi, my name is Alexander and I am the co-founder of Start in Blockchain. I started my higher education with an ECE preparatory class at the Jeanne d’Arc high school in Caen. I’ve known for a long time I wanted to work in finance or entrepreneurship. So I naturally turned to preparatory studies, the high road, to integrate a school. Later I joined the ICN Business School.
Still unable to decide between these two career choices, I used my internships to hone my desires. These experiences quickly convinced me that I needed a more agile and stimulating structure and environment, So I gave up consulting firms. I started working life with a smaller startup: Silvr. Silvr is a European FinTech leader in revenue-based financing. My position has also evolved, I wanted to have a greater operational impact and I am now a financial operations analyst (and therefore no longer working in financial management). In parallel, I co-founded Start in Blockchain.
Read more: Silvr, the fintech that offers an alternative to fundraising
You co-founded Start in Blockchain, a popular Web3 media. Can you tell us about this project?
Start in Blockchain was born from a simple postulate: France is already behind the United States on this issue, but is very well positioned to be one of tomorrow’s leaders. Our vision is to accelerate the adoption of this technology in France and for this our strategy is simple: highlight French actors. To be more precise, we want to give visibility to these actors (presenting companies, use cases, research works, etc.) and in parallel train young people (and older) so that they understand the challenges of this ecosystem and can interact with it.
How did you come up with the idea of founding Start in Blockchain?
It all started when Mélissa (our CEO) and Dorian were at UC Berkeley. Mélissa had only chosen courses on blockchain, NFT, etc. And being very studious, she took a lot of notes and did a lot of networking the Silicon Valley ecosystem. Quickly, our discussions led to a desire to do so share this knowledge with France as actors from San Francisco showed up ahead. Discussing with Dorian our desire to create a format (blogs or simple posts on social networks), Dorian presented us with the idea of starting faster, stronger, directly creating a media (whose codes he mastered). This is how Start in Blockchain was born.
Can you quickly introduce the metaverse, Web3, and NFTs to people who aren’t familiar with these concepts?
Metaverse and NFT are use cases of blockchain technology. It’s like saying that email is a use case of the technology behind the internet. NFTs are a technology feat because, for the first time, can we really own something digital. An NFT is a true digital document of ownership.
The metaverse is an even bigger topic why even as billions are invested each year, we are still a long way from the mainstream metaverse of tomorrow. But to put it simply, the metaverse will be a digital universe, governed by rules and which will allow the development of social and commercial relationships. In the end, Web3 is a fairly recent term that brings this whole ecosystem togetherall these use cases and actors using blockchain technology.
Read more: NFT: what is it? What is it for?
Precisely, blockchain technologies are still pretty vague for most people. How does Start in Blockchain fit into this context?
Blockchain technology is quite young. The technology is quite complex (like any great innovation) but the potential for disruption is enormous. It is therefore essential that companies (and therefore the executives of these companies) understand this, grasp the possibilities and measure the stakes. Not every business needs to add Web3 in their offerings (for many it was a bad marketing idea) but for others, the risk of losing the turn is significant. At Start In Blockchain, we want to help by popularizing technical terms. For instance, our “Getting Started” section empowers anyone who doesn’t have any nobody knowledge to learn the basics of this technology and its use cases.
Then, to learn more, the “Blockchain 101” section allows you to dig deeper based on the level of the reader (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced). Finally, the rest of our content aims at promote French companies (industrial players or start-ups) and decode the news through interviews, news or the presentation of the strategies of companies such as Nike or LVMH for example.