The main business development stages: the business has first been through the acquisition of the required assets for its development, the technology, and so on. then through the financing, the construction of a technological platform, to carry out the engineering of any genome; and then the transition between the use of that platform to the products which were going to be directly directed to different sectors of application: therapeutics, etc. The six first months of the business have then been dedicated to the negociation with the Institut Pasteur for the exclusive licenses on the princeps patents, the most important in genome engineering; a lot of them have been André Choulika's invention but a number of them came from other inventors who where associated to the business and this strengthened our approach with the Institut, which in turn had positive regards on the implication of researchers in the creation of a spin-off; then start-up within its premises. In june 2000, with the Institut Pasteur, we have thus signed for these licenses, incubation and a number of other additional elements. From then on, the concern was to get the business financed. And so we started to seek for a business angel, a family office who is still stakeholder in the business, his name is Camille Vest, and he knew the Institut Pasteur well, so the connection was rather natural and he started to invest the first funds as early as November. Then, we launched a fundraising for the venture capital. The strategic mistake we might have made then was to think that we could postpone the fundraising a little and we only took off in April 2001 to get enough time to collect scientific, commercial results, sign the licenses, etc. thinking this would mean a better position to go negotiate with the venture capital. We ended up raising funds in a particularly twisted period: from September 2001 on, the venture capital markets became very difficult, we had lots of trouble and it wasn't before May 30th, 2002 that we succeded in arranging our first venture capital round table, with a Danish investor, BankInvest, and French investors: AGF, Odyssée Venture and Edmond de Rothschild, for a total of 16 million euros which had been agreed on part by part. The timing we had calculated was not so fortunate. We had dedicated the six first years of the business, to work from these tiny molecular scissors that are the meganucleases found in nature, to the development of a true custom molecular scissors engineering plateform and be in capacity of, when receiving someone saying: "I want to target this gene in the human genome or in the genome of that other species" to produce a custom molecular scissors for this very gene and this gene only. This ability is the result of the absolutely remarkable work of our scientific Director at that time and all his teams, Frédéric Pâques. This led to 2006 when we were able, by the means of a long work, by way of substantial expenses, but in a few months time we knew how to produce molecular scissors, we had the platform, we had the ability. The question was hence to know how to go from this platform and to the product: were we to finance it with venture capital, again? Or were we to switch to a financing mode such as the stock exchange? This time we reflected backwards from the timing, we made the mistake for the venture capital and we didn't have to replicate the mistake. Instead we thought: is there a window for an initial public offering? Is there an opportunity? If so, let's assess if we can make it or not, rather than saying: let's refine our project and wait for the next window if it ever happens. We made a good decision and it was to hire the new financial manager then, Marc Le Bozec, who had been a biotechnologies entrepreneur before, he thus knew the subject, besides his recognised HEC and financial pedigree. So we managed to list the business very quickly: He joined in October 15th, February 7th we were listed on Alternext, in Paris. It allowed the venture capitalist's exit which was good for them after all, but also to enter a entirely new category and finance the business on the stock exchange, in a much more flexible way. With the stock exchange's hazards too, and we live with it; That's what it's like to marry the stock exchange. From this moment, the businss has rather worked to apply its technology to where it coud make a strategic difference, and where it could create huge value: in which case would the genome engineering of a cell or a species set up a new deal? So there is the therapeutic area, production of very important therapeutic sub-tools. There is the agricultural area: where we realised that being able to remove the genes rather than just adding transgenes to the plants would change things; then were the scopes of application for tools and services more focused on research as well as on material, production, energy, which used to be more ancillary. The business development at that time was about exploring areas in which were going to be able to apply this technology, and how this platform was going to deliver the products or services, and to which clients. We went very far in the exploration: for the tools and services for instance we went as far as purchasing the historical European leader in stem cells, Cellartis in Sweden, then we tried applying this technology in that very area to, well, combine genome engineering with global cell engineering. The company had been distributed, almost even scattered if I may say, over many areas to try to find in which we would stand out and get products with high added value. In 2013, there was a pretty violent turnaround on the tools and services area, which caused our investments to no longer be profitable on a short term, but to fall into a very long term logic. We felt a real shock in this branch of the business and we retired from this area at the end of 2013 to focus on two other areas, which concurrently had begun to work very well and have had true successes: the area of the immune system cells engineering to cure cancer, the cancer immunotherapy; where our Americain competitors had gotten spectacular results over the year because they had a different approach in genome engineering from ours, and were intrinsically a little limited, whereas we were having a much more powerful medication approach, in our viewpoint at least, and which nature was, potentially, to set a new, longer and more difficult deal, but this really did transport us. In the plants area, we have had outstanding first results, with on fields results on soya, potatoes and other species. Late 2013, we retired from the sector of tools and services and the company had finally found its path. It has found the way to apply this technology on a short term, its main focus; naturally there may numerous other applications, but we chose to start up on this one. And today it's a company which applies its technology to immune system engineering to cure cancers and which maintains its activities in the plants area as we developed it. And all through the second phase fundings are made from the stock exchange through secondary offers or offers from private equity. In 2014, this acceleration has materialised in an outstanding way: we have signed two agreemets with pharma industrials which, again have taken us to the next level; in February, we signed up with a French business with which we had longstanding relationship the Servier laboratories, to develop cancer immunotherapy products, approximately on their targets; and in June, we signed with Pfizer, is a global giant, to develop products with them and this is historically the second biggest pre-clinical deal of all times ever signed between a pharma and a biotech. They invested a 80 millions dollars funds, additionally they purchased a stake, they finance our R&D and development. There lies a real drive to apply technology. If we want to anticipate further and try to envisage what this will look like in ten years, we must be able to develop our products portofolio in a clinic, and even onto the market. Will this be achieved via our partners who have the required finances to support the most costly up front developments, or will it come from our own choices and fundings, either in raising additional funds or using the money our partners will pay us to do it on our own for one, two, or three products? I could not tell, but in any case there is one sure thing: in 10 years, we will have gathered a true, shelved, cellular products portofolio capable, in our viewpoint, of changing the future of tumors particularly leuckaemias, lymphomas, very dangerous things, or especially agressive cancers, and which will go through clinical development but will also already have marketed products. This is our vision in 10 years. Tips for the creators of a technological business: I will refrain from advising or lecturing because I believe every story and each entrepreneur follow an individual path, which can be collective, yet be a different path. What I may do is share my experience on some points, some elements which were important to me or to us in our particuliar case. You are all welcome to choose, get inspired, criticise or to not feel reflected in what we achieved. To us, what was really important in the end was the timing management: we lacked it and have then progressed through it. The venture capital fundraiser we initiated had started too late: the assumption that taking time to make the opportunity, present as early as 2000, more acceptable in the future was a mistake; indeed, when the opportunity is there, it's there. You'd better seize it while it's there, even if it's not perfect. Because the opportunity doesn't necessarily comes from the content, creation and assets you produced. A large part of the opportunity comes from the general weather, global appetence for technology, for biotechnology which is a part of technology. In this respect, you must be humble and know to watch the greater elements, the cosmic elements which surround us, and seize the opportunity. This is what we did for for the stock exchange list, where we thought backwards thinking: is there a window? Is there appetence for biotechnologies? Yes, let's grab it and we will see... if our format, our maturity can still integrate the progression of a stock investor; and it did. The timing is essential, in my opinion. And finally understand that the environment plays a great role in the opportunity. So seize the chance while it's there. A second thing, a lot more personnal: the lesson I drew from this is: that the technologies we develop are risky; the products we design may always fail. They are a lot of failures in the clinical phase: you need five products in the clinic to market one; in certain medical specialities it's much more than this. So you need to be humble and think: maybe it shouldn't work, or maybe the first technology will fail, but the second, or the third product will, you never know. The project must not solely depend on that. I believe that my personal project, is to think the aim lies in the path. The aim is to have fun, to heal people for sure, to earn money, yes, but in the end having fun is very important; because these years spent, and it has been 15 years for me in the company, are years that are spent not doing anything else in the meantime. So it must be fun, we need to experience things, not always simple things but experience intense things and with people with whom we like to work. We are there to like one another, and I think that people are absolutely central in this adventure: whom we create with and what we create. Now have we succeeded or not? Did we have the right cards? We don't know, we will see. But what matters is to have tried the best we could and to have managed to push our own limits, with the people, and to have experienced it. So the aim lies in the path. The third thing which I find utterly essential is, that you must maintain your vision: we have a vision, we plan on the long term, with the idea that one day the course of events will follow this direction, the living, engineers' objects and we will make these big entities which will apply the living to its various compartments: therapeutics, agriculture, et cetera. So I believe, you must always refer to your vision and be capable of sticking to it while being an opportunist: we can't be in love with the technology. today we are working on a new technology which has been designed by the scientific Director of our plants branch, the same since 2010; the ancestral technology André Choulika had invented, is much less used, but it doesn't matter, it was not the goal. The goal is the vision you have, and where this industry, this area will head; in this projection. So you need to stick to this vision and be humble, while being able to seize the opportunities as they come. It's not exactly what was planned, the envisaged progression; not a problem. And maybe the last insight I could share is: that no matter what happens you must make you dream live.
