The safe thing to do would have been to wait for a few years, build more savings… I'm also a bit impatient by nature and I felt, I know how I want to do this and I want to do it my way. I left, I was young, I had a bit of money but not so much as well. That was my Cowboy moment because I knew it wasn't what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, that instead I wanted to do what I love. It just felt so good when I got there, I wanted to do it all over again. This for me was helping entrepreneurs and starting my own company working in this environment where you go from chaos and ideas to building actual products and businesses. You have a chance to start doing what you love. When you get to an age where you start losing your grandparents, people you cared for, you realize life has a time limit. I really wanted to do something I was passionate about. You're going to get so much more money over the next few years…' But I said no because money was not the first thing I was after. Everyone was super surprised, 'Why would you quit now? You're on a great trajectory. After a few years, everything was going really well for me there but I decided to quit. When in your life did you most feel like a Cowboy? I started my career in investment banking. The new generation of Parisians love iconic products, new ways to move around the city in style, and they don't just want a commodity product going from point A to B. Over the past few years, pollution has been the number one cause of death in the Paris region. The city of Paris is trying to reduce the number of cars in the city. There are a lot of bike lanes, a lot of people concerned about pollution. There are a lot of bikes in Paris, but not so many e-bikes yet.
So there are a lot of people using scooters and I used to have one as well. There's a good metro system, but at peak times it's super crowded and you're going to feel trapped. If you have a car it's going to take twice as much time. What's the bike culture like? Paris is a city where most people don't own cars. I generally spend one or two days traveling across Europe, but Paris is home.Ĭowboy will soon be in Paris. I've left for short periods of time and I've always traveled a lot. How long have you lived in Paris? I've been in Paris for almost 20 years now. I'd never had this experience riding a bike." "The first time I jumped onto the bike, I had this wow effect. You can't see it's an e-bike, right? You have this feeling you're the coolest guy on the road. He looked at me and he was so surprised but I just looked at him and smiled. So you most remember the power aspect? Or saving time? There was one part of the ride with a steep road and there was this guy on a race bike going very fast and I remember going past him. The identity of Cowboy, they feel very close to it. It doesn't look like any other bike which I think is really attractive to a lot of people. I think that's what you see when you see Cowboy on the street today. Even if that means having this naive look at the product, but you build it with more personality. I think it's actually quite unique to look at this and say, 'Okay, we can reinvent this.' It takes a lot of imagination and ability to remove all the assumptions of what an e-bike should be and build a product that doesn't look like any others. When you refer to the team's drive, how would you describe it? If you asked everyone what they thought an e-bike is, they would describe this old bike that looks like what your grandparents would buy, with a large battery and all that. I would be lying if I were to say we were desperate to fund an e-bike company. They realized e-bikes were the fastest vehicle in the city, but were not so popular yet. They had this drive, you could feel they had studied the market and thought about how people could move fast through the city. So what was it then? More than Cowboy, it was the team. Much less than the companies we usually meet with a prototype to show so we're able to evaluate something. I met them, they told me they wanted to build an e-bike, but they had very little assets to show me. He said 'You should talk to those guys, they're doing something exciting.' Honestly at first, I had low expectations. What attracted you to Cowboy, and why did you invest in the company? I met them through a friend from school.
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