
Dan Serfaty
Reactivity
"We have a multi-locale vision:
we believe that networking cannot be the same
in every country in the world."
He calls himself a "serial entrepreneur". Every business that Serfaty touches gains a surprising tendency to grow, grow, grow... He has been active in both the old and new economies. He has worked with yogurt, tourism, textiles, finance, networking and social networking. His latest achievement, viadeo.com, an online platform for professional networking, has a mere 30 million members! His recipe? To synchronize with the surrounding environment by continually sending and receiving impulses. Like bats.
ABOUT DAN SERFATY
Dan Serfaty was born in 1966 in Strasbourg. In 1987, he graduated from the prestigious HEC École des Hautes Études Commerciales in Paris, whose motto is Apprendre à oser (Learn to Dare). He started working for Danone Italia, spending two years as a marketing product manager. Dan Serfaty has fond memories of that time when he was based on Lake Garda, although he does not consider it the real start to his career as a "serial entrepreneur". That began in 1989, when at just the age of 23, he acquired DIMO, a French tourist company that was in financial trouble. Serfaty successfully re-launched it and then sold it two years later to a German group. In 1991, he co-founded GEN, an import-export company that specialized in the distribution of Asian produced garments in France, Spain, Italy and Germany. In the space of 10 years, GEN - born thanks to private equity capital – through organic growth managed to undertake a series of acquisitions becoming a European leader. In 2000, Serfaty sold the company and launched Agregator, a new financial concept that created a bridge between private equity and entrepreneurs. This lead to the idea of a club where the members are offered an exchange fund for their shares; an excellent method of increasing personal liquidity and capital diversification. In practice, the members of this club are all shareholders and have a space for exchanging ideas, contacts, projects and experiences, in addition, of course, to investments. It was in this context that the notion of a social network for business matures. In 2004, along with Thierry Lunati, Dan Serfaty founded viaduc.com (now viadeo.com) in Paris, with an initial investment of 5 million collected through Agregator. In 2006, viaduc.com became video.com and soon established itself as a worldwide leading social network. Today, Viadeo has at least 30 million members, with a least a third located in Asia, making it the second biggest business network behind Linkedin. Compared to other business social networks, its platform has more confidential features and functions and there is a strong emphasis on local networks. Today, it has over 200 employees with offices in London, Milan, Barcelona, Beijing, New Delhi, Mexico City and Montreal.