With her UTC engi­neer­ing diplo­ma (major­ing in Biotech­nol­o­gy) and a PhD from Uni­ver­si­ty Paris 6 (Pierre & Marie Curie) in genet­ics, Vir­ginie Simon co-found­ed the com­pa­ny MyScience­Work in 2010. This dig­i­tal plat­form – with offices in France and the Lux­em­burg ini­tial­ly – designed to share and analyse sci­en­tif­ic and tech­no­log­i­cal pub­li­ca­tions – opened a busi­ness sub-office in San Fran­cis­co as of 2014. Vir­ginie was sin­gled out by the Fran­co-Amer­i­can Cham­ber of Com­merce in San Fran­cis­co and award­ed a prize for her suc­cess­ful instal­la­tion on the US West Coast. She answered some ques­tions from Interactions: 

Do you see this award as a major step in your business career ?

This year, for the first time, a new cat­e­go­ry was cre­at­ed, exclu­sive­ly for busi­ness-women, among the French Amer­i­can Busi­ness Awards. I was award­ed the Gold­en Globe in this first edi­tion. It is the sort of event that points, I feel, in the right direc­tion. In the Sil­i­con Val­ley, there are very few women hold­ing man­age­r­i­al, exec­u­tive posi­tions, notably among the Net Giants. And the sit­u­a­tion is even less favourable in France. How­ev­er, let me just add that things are chang­ing — var­i­ous polls car­ried out by invest­ment funds show that ini­tia­tives launched by mixed teams car­ry less finan­cial risks. 

What key evolutions has MyScienceWork undergone since it was created?

The con­tents of MyScience­Work have been exten­sive­ly enriched with a free access offered to some 70M sci­en­tif­ic papers in a wide vari­ety of spe­cial­ties, rang­ing from nan­otech­nolo­gies to sci­en­tif­ic soft­ware pro­gram­ming. Over the past few months we have also put 12M patent claims on line, from the EPO (Euro­pean Patent Office) and from the US Patent and Trade­mark Office. In Jan­u­ary 2017, we launched Sir­ius, a Big Data ser­vice offer. Thanks to the size and qual­i­ty of our own data base, we can now pro­pose stud­ies to analyse on request the ‘state of pub­li­ca­tions’ in a giv­en spe­cial­ty area. Sta­tis­ti­cal tools and graph­ics also allow us to dis­play num­bers, authors, evo­lu­tion­ary trends and types of doc­u­ments relat­ed to a giv­en sub­ject mat­ter. Our prod­uct is espe­cial­ly well adapt­ed to pub­lic insti­tu­tions and pri­vate com­pa­nies who wish to define their business/research strat­e­gy in a sci­en­tif­ic indus­tri­al area. Cur­rent­ly, to illus­trate this, we can note that a French engi­neer­ing has entrust­ed us with a mis­sion to study Blockchain 

How did your installation in the USA go?

Well, before we decid­ed to set up shop in Cal­i­for­nia, we had a sort of 3 month immer­sion peri­od in Sil­i­con Val­ley. That allowed us to get a bet­ter insight into poten­tial mar­kets for our prod­ucts and also to learn ‘hands-on’ anoth­er way to oper­ate a busi­ness, viz., in Cal­i­for­nia, Here the work­ing hours and the places to work are very flex­i­ble. Amer­i­cans are high­ly orga­nized and talk straight. Meet­ings must be short, to the point and the allot­ted sched­ule must be com­plied with to the minute! In the Sil­i­con Val­ley, it is not dif­fi­cult at all to meet the top exec­u­tives of the major com­pa­nies but you feel sort of over­whelmed by their sheer size and the dis­tances involved. Final­ly, we chose to locate our­selves in San Fran­cis­co which is a human-scaled city with an impor­tant finan­cial cen­tre. This is a set­ting con­ducive to start-ups and entre­pre­neurs reg­is­tered from all round the world. For a cer­tain time, my start up MyScience­Work was housed in an open-space office with15 oth­er nationalities! 

What advice would you give to French start-ups if they wanted to follow in your footsteps? 

The deci­sion to “set up shop “in the USA must be tak­en seri­ous­ly. There are numer­ous admin­is­tra­tive for­mal­i­ties (both in respect to the com­pa­ny and the founder(s) indi­vid­u­al­ly: dri­ving license, work visa …). It takes sev­er­al years before you are in order on all these ques­tions. It is bet­ter to do a fund-rais­ing oper­a­tion before you go rather than attempt this in the US. At MyScience­Work, we have no remorse at all for accept­ing the chal­lenge – the US has become our pri­ma­ry mar­ket, fol­lowed by Chi­na and France. 

www.mysciencework.com