“I grew up in Brittany Region, France, by the Ocean, thus I have a profound attachment to the sea or the ocean, which I need to see as much as I can, as part of my quality of life,” says Helene Baron.
Helene studied Political Sciences, International & European Relations in France and Spain. She started working for a French University on Public Policy projects, then for a French local government on cooperation between France and Spain and on a European project.
She says, “I started specializing in Research & Innovation and Aerospace sector, and went to Brussels, at the heart of European institutions, where I represented for 7 years a French regional government and its economic actors. That’s when I really realized I loved working with startups and small businesses, helping and advising them. I was fascinated by their dynamism, their energy and their willingness to move forward, find solutions.”
“That’s when I felt it was time for a new adventure and together with my partner Francois Paul Lambert, we decided to leave Belgium in 2015 and to settle in Dublin, Ireland, where I worked in Business Development for a while. It was a big change, but I felt like I needed to learn new skills to not stay stuck in a certain path. I needed to create something.”
“We are very fond of American podcasts we’ve been listening for a long time. We have been following John Lee Dumas and Kate Erickson, from Entrepreneurs on Fire, and we had this sort of Aha moment when we realized there was not really equivalent in the French-speaking world. We asked the author their support, followed their model, and decided to adapt it to the French-speaking community, and not only to native speakers: it represents indeed around 275 million people all over the world. French as a language is growing, and we believe it has the potential to link and join people together.
“That’s when we decided to finally launch Revolution Digitale, a project that mattered to us and create a community of like-minded people.”
Revolution Digitale is a bi-weekly podcast where we interview amazing French-speaking entrepreneurs all over the world, in order to inspire them, and encourage them to test and share their ideas, start their projects or their own business.
Challenges
Talking about challenges, Helene says,
“I am still new to entrepreneurship, but I think that one of the toughest challenges I faced was just at the beginning: the idea of leaving the comfort and security of a classical job and accept my own decision of taking a risk, even calculated. To throw myself into the unknown and lose what had participated so far to my identity: “I work for…I have a position in this company as…” It took months, to really jump into it completely. The opinions of people around me, being family, or friends, mattered a lot. If people care about you, they want you to be happy, but they also very often prevent you from taking the risk, leave a career or start an uncertain project.
“I had to build my self-confidence, or reinforce it, trust myself, take ownership and be proud of what I decided. I was also afraid of taking a few steps back. After a few years building my professional path in public policy, I had to start from scratch in a lot of areas, learn new skills and take courses. I felt like a total beginner, dropped behind, and thought sometimes I would never make it.”
“I looked for female role-models, I also talked with other entrepreneurs, especially women entrepreneurs, and the fact of being every day in contact with inspiring entrepreneurs for the podcast, or wannabe entrepreneurs in our community, helped me believe in myself and find the strength to go on, because I could relate to others’ experience, success, and failure.”
On Failure
Helene says she is still a baby in entrepreneurship, learning every day, building stone by stone, little by little my project, thinking about the next steps.
“But I would say that my greatest failure so far was to not believe in myself, not understand that I was not stuck in a bow because of my background and that I could start something new. I lost a lot of time pondering risks and thinking about others’ judgment, while I could have decided I was the only one making my decision.”
Life Lesson
You have never stuck anywhere, you can always change and start something new, create, that’s a super-power we all have. Don’t put yourself in a box, let others define you, you can be so much more.
Women are – more often than men – suffering from a lack of confidence, and they put more pressure on themselves. We have to empower them, highlighting female role models.
Vision
We want to build a strong community of dreamers, visionaries, and creators, who want to change their life, be free, happy, and push Humanity forward along the way.
Entrepreneurship is the vehicle that is our bond, and we hope to connect veteran entrepreneurs with rookie entrepreneurs and offer the tools that will help our Tribe to find their passion, start and build their own projects, and finally achieve their lifelong dreams!
