MBS Alumni 2016, François and Boris, co-found Rocambole, the Netflix of reading
The Entrepreneurship Center nurtures the link between entrepreneurs, students and alumni at MBS to combat self-censorship and promote new business start-ups. The Incubator has been able to share its experience with François Delporte and Boris Duda, 2016 alumni of the Grande Ecole Program, co-founders of Rocambole with literature experts, the Netflix of reading.
From school benches to Station F: the adventure of liberation
Incubated within the famous Station F in Paris, the start-up Rocambole offers a catalog of about fifty series to be read in the form of 5-minute episodes. The young entrepreneurs were not at their entrepreneurial trial run. “After several years in big companies, as a web marketing manager, I wanted to leave my job, in which I felt I had too many limits in my ability to act. I then started as a freelancer and I decided to help entrepreneurs to develop human marketing. Then I met François during a start-up weekend during which we presented Rocambole to the Ministry of Culture. The adventure was launched,” Boris explained.
Addressing students who might be reluctant to try the entrepreneurial experience, Boris recommends the first experimental field of MBS associations. “Testing, failing, and trying again: this is the daily life of an entrepreneur and it is actually much easier to start an entrepreneurial venture once you have experienced these initial formative failures. Student associations are perfect for learning how to manage a project as a young start-up would. With François, we were very involved in the Larsen and Iris Live associations, and this allowed us to be confronted with the reality on the field for the first time”. The young entrepreneur adds: “It’s a great way to learn how to manage a project like a young start-up.
Offer stories embodying social, societal and environmental issues
The purpose of MBS, “train to transform”, meets the ambition of this new generation of students, who aim to have a positive impact on their ecosystem in order to respond to the main challenges of the contemporary world. François and Boris illustrate this desire to provoke change by offering a new system of reading consumption and opening up new avenues for reflection.
“We are driven by two objectives. The first is to restore reading time and space in our daily lives. That’s where we came up with the soap opera novel 2.0, which allows you to escape into a novel for a five-minute episode rather than spending it on the time-consuming applications on your smartphone. Our second ambition is to offer stories with contemporary subjects. Feminism, ecology, gender identity, migration, pandemics, these themes are the challenges of our society. By providing literary fictions, we can find the answers to build a more responsible world,” Boris concludes.
After a first successful fundraising campaign of €350,000, Rocambole now aims to develop its catalog and community. A great story to follow.
