Night Session in Bordeaux: impact or performance, should you choose to succeed?

Our fifth Tech For Good by Mouvement Impact France Night Session was held at Héméra, a leading business center in Bordeaux! An evening, brilliantly hosted by Pauline Trequesser, very rich in learning and meeting around our speakers xxx to address the question "Economic performance or positive impact: should we choose to succeed?" 

For a start-up, does accelerating its transformation trajectory mean having to choose between economic performance and ecological and social performance? What are the differences between a tech company and a tech for good company? In the wake of the FT120/Next40 announcement, what criteria should be used to measure a company's success in the context of ecological and social transition?

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Key returns:

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Maryne Cotty-Elsous: "We almost lost Lucine a few weeks ago and for the record, it is "impact" that will save us: we never really thought about developing this axis until now, but now we want to be much more in the "care", in the accompaniment and in the service of people and in reality it is this positive impact dimension in its entirety that is bringing the business aspect. 

Victor Douek: Sellsy is a SaaS solution, which is the most classic thing in scale-up tech, and yet we are asking ourselves more and more questions about the impact. Every day, we are faced with dilemmas in trying to make more virtuous choices without impacting our business model. In particular, we have chosen to work on our responsible purchasing or to keep our servers in France, but I think we have to fight one battle at a time to do our part. 

For Léa Thomassin: The Next40/FT120 indices seem to value, with the two criteria of financial valuation and hypergrowth, an old-world model of companies at a time when we are trying to get out of it. It's interesting to highlight companies, but let's really go for criteria that are representative of job creation and real wealth and social utility of the company. We hope that 2023 will be the last year of these rankings and that next year we will have a Next40impact! 

According to Hakim Baka of Geev: Our daily life is to make concessions to survive because the outside world is not quite calibrated for our box models and there is no ecological and social competitiveness. For example, today we choose to have advertising to finance us, and we hope that one day we will be solid enough not to have to do this, but today, as a pioneer, we cannot be perfect in everything.

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This meeting was also an opportunity to discuss the place of investors in this thorny choice between impact and economic performance. According to our speakers, still too few financiers take the risk of investing in impact projects or in the ecological and social transformation of companies, but we will have to be much more daring, accepting new timeframes to link impact and economic performance.