Sophia Early Stages: the start-ups and business-angels adviser

A strong idea: business-angels need as many pieces of advice as projects holders

Sophia Early Stages was created by Yvan Delcourt last December. After a career of manager for big groups in the United States and in Europe, he has founded several start-ups in France and in the United States. He arrived on the French Riviera by creating De Viris in Sophia Antipolis, in January 1999. With seven co-entrepreneurs-workers - each one manages his own firm - and a pool composed by experts and chargés d'affaires, he has suggested a new type of management in the region: part-time management.React upstreamThanks to his experience as a businessman, he found an available place for a company specialised in the incubation of start-ups. 'With three co-workers, we created Sophia Early Stages, settled at the CICA. What pushed us to create our company is that we became aware of the poor number in France of venture capital firms capable to react upstream: most of them focus on projects that should generate a 100 million francs turnover within three years. And we note that there is a need from start-ups and business-angels to be supported, because they often come from traditional sectors and they do not know very well the net economy world. We have already created a 90 business-angels club ready to invest in sophipolitan start-ups. We are starting with about ten promising start-ups that are dealing with the technopole most prestigious fields: NTIC (new technologies of information and communication), biotechnologies. Our selection among start-ups is reassuring for investors: some of them that were not enough informed about new economy, lost a lot of money in non-profitable investments, and that would be a pity if they lost interest in taking risks in start-ups. Our goal is to inform them to well choose their start-ups. This is the topic of a conference we will make soon in Sophia Antipolis: 'Business-angels' role in the new economy.'Sophia Early Stages operates according to an equity participation into the start-up and a percentage taken from the levy of capital.Yvan Delcourt has got a very favourable perspective about start-ups development in the region: 'According to our investigation, 260 files will emerge until the end of the year 2000, among which about thirty will be very interesting. Within three years 700 projects will emerge.'Contact: yvan.delcourt@wanadoo.fr