Gregory Talon
Hi I'm Gregory Talon
I grew up in France. I felt fascinated about Internet in 1994. Later, bored at University, I started to develop websites. Confident about Internet future, I entered the first French Web Entrepreneur School in 2002 and started to work for international web companies such as Convera or Yahoo!. For 7 years, I've been focused on understanding how technologies can change and improve people’s life.
I moved to London 3 years ago to increase my taste for risk and take my own challenge to the next level. I believe things are going to work out well, I like challenge. I hope you'll enjoy reading more about my profile. Here you are.
Digital strategist with strong culture of execution
I realized that most companies struggle to find a valid cause (a value proposition they are proud of) and to respect it over time. Often they loose their focus and progressively blur they purpose. Why? They miss strategic rigor and creativity to innovate within a scope so they end-up copying their trendiest competitor. Respecting what you stand for is restrictive but it's core, especially if it's the reason why you get customers and revenues.
Leaders I admire seem to be closer to “Renaissance mens” than specialists. They define all experience's details inline with a solid strategic vision. Their diversified interests in life allow them to innovate again and again. Don’t get me wrong, specialists are highly valuable but they often see only one side of challenges.
My belief is the following and you may disagree: a product leader needs to be good enough at each expertise involved in order to get the right specialists on board and activate them to deliver what's relevant. Not an easy thing to achieve, so I try to develop my taste and skills in different areas such as Marketing Strategy, Product Development, User Experience Design, Project Management and more geeky stuffs like SEO or understanding Applications' Architecture. I can deal with specialists by passion, taking the best out of them inline with a single strategic vision.
Graduated from HEC Paris in Digital Business Strategy
I followed HEC Paris’ Master Program in Digital Business Strategy, getting a strong strategic way of thinking, learning from one of the most brilliant marketers I’ve met : Julien Levy (Mercator’s author), our director and others great professionals. I’m also graduated from Paris Tech engineering school (ex- Telecom Paris).
A professional thesis : The future of Social Networks
I delivered a A rated professional thesis about the future of Social Networking in 2007. This thesis helped us to predict market's direction: monopoly or rise of vertical social networks
Trying to build things...
I had several attempts to become an entrepreneur to date. 2 real attempts and one extra Business Plan. The business plan of SoMe, aiming to become the European Myspace back in 2005 has never turned into a real product. The first real attempt was actually a smaller project who was successfully launched and generated enough money to pay my study in the first 3 months (TMA, a gaming site). The latest one is a vertical social network called Warpzoner. It offers Gamers & Game industry artists the opportunity to meet each others in real life, breaking up with their so called “nolife” lifestyle. This time I failed with making sure I can finance my development team to deliver against our planning in a economic crisis context.
I’ll try harder again for sure.
inspired by more arty activities...
My dad is a musician, so my childhood was surrounded by instruments. I lately felt into drumming in 2001. I now collaborate on various musical projects as a drummer being more and more interested in the production side of things. I currently concentrate my effort drumming for the Dead Pirates but I sometimes also publish Drums covers & improvisations videos on my Youtube channel.
Here is a Spotify playlist of 30 tracks that heavily contributed to my current music culture.
This passion for music also led me to become an editor for Lazylistening.com, a blog delivering qualitative reviews and news of European Electro / Rock music scene for lazy listeners. It gaves me the opportunity to interview artists I admire and build my relationships with them. But I though the content wasn't exclusive enough so I decided to found larecorderie.com, a site where you can find out what your favourite artists are into.
While traveling around japan in 2006, I got interested in photography. I publish mine on my Flickr account but it's nothing like the work of my favourite photographers (E. Olaf, G. Crewdson, W. Eggleston...)
Before that, I led a Film makers team during two years and got awarded at a French Web Movie Festival in 2002 with our short movie "Time And Tarte".
I like movies like Blade Runner (R. Scott definition of a Director's role inspires me as Product Manager), The departed (brilliant remake of Infernal Affairs), Breathless ("A bout de souffle" in French), The devil’s advocate (this movie is social reminder for me), The darjeeling limited (for the spirit of travelling without plan)...
