On Monday April 4^th, Dan Serfaty, co-founder of the Viadeo Network was the guest of DBF. It was a pleasure to welcome members of the FACCSF and guests. Mr. Serfaty shared with the audience the many stages of his career that lead to his accomplishments as the successful entrepreneur he is.

After graduating from HEC, Mr. Serfaty began working as a Marketing product manager at Danone, and, at 23, he made his first steps as an entrepreneur with the re-launching and the selling of DIMO (tourism industry).  At the same time, he co-founded an import-export company named GEN, specialized in the distribution (in France, Spain, Italy and Germany) of imported garments from Asia.  After growing GEN to a successful company, and finally selling it in 2000, he launched a new financial concept creating bridges between Private Equity Entrepreneurship: Agregator.  Agregator was intended to be a club where members were offered a dedicated exchange fund for their shares.  From this club, a new concept to facilitate the discussions between the members grew, and blossomed into Viadeo, a professional social network. Founded in September 2004 in France with Thierry Lunati, Viadeo became international quickly, but at the same time, it stayed local by attracting a large number of French users. To remain competitive with other competing professional networks, such as Linkedin, Viadeo has currently chosen to enter new markets by acquiring local companies. This strategy positions Viadeo as a multi-local player in a global environment, and allows it to gain local market share relatively quickly.

Mr. Serfaty concluded with a brief teaser about Viadeo’s upcoming products, which will be released in the coming months!

Thank you again to all of our organizers, guests, Sofitel, and Mr. Dan Serfaty for joining us for our April DBF.