Telecom
enterpreneur XAVIER NIEL wants to shake up his home country’s education system.
By: Vivienne
Walt
A tall, middle aged man is propped against a wall inside a building on the
gritty nothern edge of Paris. He’s deep in discussion with a young woman
sporting bright-green hair tied in pigtails; she’s sucking on a neon-blue
lollipop and driving home a point to him with her hands.
The man listening intently to the artsy-looking twentysomething isn’t a talent
agent or even a college professor—though he’s keenly interested in education.
He is Xavier Niel, one of the richest people in France (estimated net worth:
$7.8 billion), who achieved his wealth by disrupting his country’s
tellecommunication industry. Now Niel, 46, wants to upend another French
institution: its notoriously rigid education system.
In September he opened a programming school called 42, a name derived from the
1970s classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which the answer
to life’s mysteries is always 42. The school, in Nothern Paris (where Fortune
found Niel chatting with students), breaks almost every rule of French
matriculation: Tuition is zero. So too, are prerequisites. Of the 70,000 young
French who took 42’s application test, about 40% were high school dropouts. To
underscore the school’s edgy feel, Niel (pronounced “nee-el”) had a pirate flag
hoisted outside the building.
Niel says he was inspired to start his school not only
because French companies report a chronic shortage of high-tech talent to hire,
but also because some 200,000 youths drop out of school each year. Many,
including Niel, believe that is because french education focuses on formalized,
nationaly controled testing that favors workhorses over creative geeks and
maverick innovators. The country that once churned out geniuses such as painter
Pierre-Auguste Renoir and composer Claude Debussy has struggled to create a
Mark Zuckenberg or Steve Jobs.
Niel sees technology skills as a way to even the
playing field in France, not just for diadvantage kids but also for
middle-class and elite students who want to explore different career paths.
“There’s a lack of social mobility,” he says. “If you are the son of a doctor.”
By contrast, his new school is “a little subversive,” he says with a delighted
grin.
Niel knows all about being subversive. He was raised
in the modest suburb of Creteil, a far cry from Paris’s majestic avenues. And
while the great majority of French CEOs come out of the grandes ecoles, the equivalent of the Ivy League, Niel skipped
college altogether and holed up at home with his computer, coding. “I started
literally in a garage alone,” he explains. “I had some luck.”
Niel developed sex-chat software (he was 18, after
all) and other communication tools, which he sold to tech companies that
provided content for France Telecom’s groundbreaking Minitel online service. At
26, he created France’s first ISP, WorldNet, and sold it for about $55 million
in 2000. In 1991 he launched Iliad, the first French company to offer a
“tripple play” TV-phone-Internet service, naming it (in English, no less) Free.
Last year Niel won the bid for France’s fourth mobile service and launched Free
Mobile, offering a floor-smashing 20 Euro (about $28) monthly plan for
unlimited calls, far cheaper than other French services.
His competitors cried foul, but Niel couldn’t have
cared less. Iliad’s market cap has ballooned 11-fold over the decade, to 9.8
billion Euro ($13.5 billion), making Niel, who owns 55.3% of Iliad, immenslyy
rich. Yet despite that (and even though the now owns a sizable chunk of
France’s ultimate establishment newspaper, Le
Monde), Niel retains his outsider image among French execs, having smashed
his way into the elite. Niel is smart enough to know that image works to his
advantage, as he throws his energies into new projects; his other company, Kima
Ventures, invest in 100 startups a year.
“He is very un-French, but maybe that is why he has
succeeded,” says Christophe Roquilly, a professor at EDHEC Business School in
Lille. “He doesn’t accept the establishment’s state of mind.”
An antiestablishment culture pervades Niel’s school.
During a recent boot camp for about 3,000 programers, the floor was littered
with inflatable mattresses and soda cans from students who’d hopped trains to
Paris from the hiterlands and bunked there for weeks. About 1,000 will make the
cut for a three-year programming course that begins in mid-November. Even then
there will be few teachers of classes. Students sit in warehouse-size rooms at
aApple computers, creating whatever program they dream up, in a kind of giant
hackathon.
Not everyone is sold on the idea Government rules
dictate that since 42’s students need no high school diploma, the three-year
courses will not have degree status. Wannabe students seem unconcerened. “ I’ve
been earning the SMIC [minimum wage] in different jobs for years,” says Clement
Aupetit, 26, who did not finish high school. “This might open doors.”
Conservative French corporations could be wary of recruiting Niel’s new army of
coders. “Opening themselves to different profiles will be a big leap for them,”
wrote one blogger on the French site rude Baguette. Niel has not exactly
ingratiated himself with France’s elits. He was once an investor in a chain of
sex-toy shops; he spent a month in jail in 2004 on charges that he brokered
prostitutes from his stores. The charges were later dropped.
But Niel is optimistic. If just a few students make
it, he says, his investment – about 70 million Euro ($96 million) so far – will
be worth it.
And besides, Niel is already at work creating his next
project, 1000 Startups, which he claims will be the world’s biggest incubator
and will open in 2016. “We don’t think we can change everything in France,” he
says. “But we’ll have some impact.” There seems no better person to make that
happen.[]
Taken from FORTUNE Magz.
