A French Twist in Silicon Valley

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Indeed, he says, "I am taking everything I learned at business school and am doing exactly the opposite." The conventional wisdom in business is to keep your ideas secret, develop new products in stealth mode, and make employees sign nondisclosure agreements, he says. But he contends the Internet has made that approach obsolete. "Sharing is power. The more you share, the more opportunity and help you get," he says.

France's Leading Internet Mogul

It's unconventional, all right—but Le Meur has been living his life online for a long time. Since 2003, he has shared his thoughts and much of what he does on his blog www.loiclemeur.com, which now attracts some 200,000 people a month. During last year's French presidential election he secured a groundbreaking podcast interview with Nicolas Sarkozy (BusinessWeek.com, 12/27/05), who later named him an adviser for Internet strategy. After winning the election, Sarkozy invited Le Meur to a White House meeting with President Bush on Nov. 7.

Indeed, Le Meur is a consummate networker, both online and off. An annual conference on blogging that he started in 2003, now known as LeWeb3, has become one of the premier Internet events in Europe. This year's conference, held on Dec. 11 and 12 in the Paris suburb of La Plaine St. Denis, attracted a raft of Silicon Valley luminaries including Digg founder Kevin Rose, Evan Williams of Twitter, and Robert Scoble, a former Microsoft (MSFT) executive who's now a high-profile blogger. Another attendee was Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, a Silicon Valley blog site, who's also an investor in Seesmic. Le Meur organizes the conferences with help from his wife, Geraldine, who has joined him in relocating to Silicon Valley, where the couple now lives with their three young sons.

Like his Silicon Valley counterparts, Le Meur is a seasoned entrepreneur. He launched his first company, an interactive ad agency, when he was still in business school and later sold it to advertising group BBDO (OMC). He later bought and sold two other Web-based companies. In 2003, he purchased a French blog hosting company, Ublog, from its founder, then grew that business and merged it with Six Apart, a San Francisco-based company that specializes in creating blogging platforms. He served as Six Apart's executive vice-president in charge of European operations before leaving last January to campaign full-time for Sarkozy.

Relocation to Silicon Valley

Le Meur says he moved to the U.S. because it's easier to raise money and build a global company there. "I want to be at the center of the engine," he says. "I want to build a company that will change the world."

That's pretty ambitious—but the technorati seem convinced he's onto something. "Loïc has a great personality both online and in the real world, and he moves fast between the two," says Israeli tech entrepreneur and investor Yossi Vardi, a regular at Le Meur's conferences. But Vardi warns that anyone who talks to Le Meur should not be publicity-shy. "He will always video you and then puts it on the blog."

Schenker is a BusinessWeek correspondent in Paris.