[Success story] - The testimony of Mathias FLATTIN

Can you tell us about your academic background and your professional career?
Hello my name is Mathias Flattin, I am 33 years old and I work at Axeleo Capital.
After a bac S, I started with a degree in economics and management at the University of Saint-Etienne which allowed me to acquire a fairly good theoretical background, but not enough professionalization. So I took the business school exams and joined Rennes School of Business in 2009, where I specialized in finance. I had the opportunity to take a gap of almost 16 months in the group that is now called BPI France, first as a debt analyst, where I learned to lend to companies. Then I worked as a private equity analyst, where I learned to invest in companies, to become a shareholder. In the last year of school I went on an exchange to Canada, and when I came back I joined the team that remained my team for 8 years, XAnge Siparex, a Franco-German fund in which I did venture capital. I stayed there for 8 years and I left this team a year ago to join forces with Axeleo Capital, and set up a 35 million euros venture capital fund specializing in start-ups that address the property business.

Can you start a sentence with "I achieved my goals today because..."?
I reached my goals today, at least for these first 10 years of my career, for 2 reasons: first because I had a faster start, using this tool that is the internship. It's a way to test things, and it's also a way for the employer to test you, without taking too many risks compared to looking for a permanent contract. It is a way to climb the ladder, to go further and further in what we want to do, in the contribution we will have for the company. We have the possibility to do one internship after another during the gap. Finally, by combining my longest gap internships, plus the end-of-studies internship, that's more than 21 months of internship. It represents almost 2 years of experience even though you have never had a CDI before, that you are starting your career. And of course, that encourages the employer to offer you a "real" job, as opposed to an internship, taking a little less risk than if you came from "nowhere".

Secondly, I tried to call people, to have coffee with them to understand how they had come to this job, which was pleasant, unpleasant, difficult… How they saw my profile, was it suitable for this job. I think these 2 levers, which are empiricism, are essential in addition to our studies to achieve what we want. It's important to go and test things, to meet people.

What advice would you give to an ambitious student ?
The advice I would give to a student who is ambitious is first not to stop at the etiquette of their school career. That's not necessarily what matters, and the label will fade over the years anyway, with the accumulation of experience. However, it is important to prepare for your "Day 1", your first day of internship or employment in the field that interests us. It is important to arrive knowing the trade already. We have to know our job : there are blogs, people who write and inform us, there are organized events, we can meet people with LinkedIn… If we arrive on the first day while waiting for someone to give us everything cooked, we will not have the internship because the competition is already being played at this level.

Then, here's a tip about the network: don't network for the network. There's no point in a big network, it's only made up of people who don't care about you and to whom you can't contribute enough anyway. It's better to favor a small but reliable, trusted network in which there is real mutual help. And never forget that in order to network, you start by giving first before asking to receive.