Rodolphe Ardant, CEO of French unicorn Spendesk, is this week’s guest on the Searching for Mana podcast.  

Rodolphe enjoyed a peripatetic childhood moving around the world every three years due to his father’s career, and says this instilled in him a ‘sense of curiosity’.  

Combined with the ‘autistic boredom’ he felt growing up, Rodolphe had a desire to create and build things from an early age, skills he honed at engineering school.

It's clear in this episode that Rodolphe maintains the restlessness that characterized his younger years.  After founding and selling his first company (and learning from the mistakes), he joined the car-sharing platform Drivy as Chief Operating Officer before realising he was best suited to the agile, fast-paced start-up environment.  Spendesk was born and was built on two key values: freedom and trust.

This is a great episode with insights into how Rodolphe used his highly technical, entrepreneurial mindset to build one of France’s tech start-up success stories.

Watch & Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3sSnmMa

1:10 Spendesk’s mission

4:00 Lessons learned while COO at Drivy

5:55 Understanding the problem to create the solution

8:30 Money is about emotion and having control

11:17 Thinking deeply about becoming an entrepreneur again

15:50 Spendesk is built on two key values

19:25 – Rodolphe’s childhood and how it influenced his career

20:22 The joy of solving problems, and autistic boredom

23:09 What makes an entrepreneur mindset?

24’56 Getting over mistakes

27:04 What motivates him in the face of continued success