International mobility

I spent the spring semester of 2026 in San Francisco and Berkeley, following Learn2Launch, a graduate entrepreneurship program run at UC Berkeley, from 30 January to 30 April: thirteen weeks living there. The programme takes a team from first idea to prototype in a single semester. It mixes lectures and workshops with visits to incubators, accelerators, startups and venture funds, and it is taught entirely in English to a group of students from several countries.

The hard part was not the language itself. I hold a C1 certificate and had no trouble following the classes. The hard part was the register. Customer discovery means holding an unscripted conversation with someone who has no reason to make things easy for you. My target customer English is fast, very direct and full of slangs, and a French speaker trained mostly on written English does not have that automatically. My first interviews were too polite and too structured. I asked closed questions because they felt safer, so I left with confirmations instead of real information.

What fixed it was a different kind of preparation. Instead of learning whole sentences, I prepared my opening lines and the two or three follow-up questions I was most likely to need. That freed enough attention during the conversation to listen properly, instead of building my next sentence. By the end of the semester I was running discovery calls without a script and, more importantly, I had learned to let a silence run rather than fill it. That is usually when the useful part of an interview arrives.

My second year of master's study is the MSc X-HEC Entrepreneurs, run jointly by HEC Paris and École Polytechnique from September 2025 to August 2026. The group has 120 students from 29 nationalities, and the whole programme is taught in English; the Berkeley semester above is one of its own exchange options.

The method is learning by doing, and the year is built around team missions being on the field, not in the classroom. English is therefore not a course requirement to tick off but the working language of everything we deliver: the interviews, the internal discussions, the documents we produce and the final defence all happen in English.

On the first of these missions, an exploration project judged across forty teams, my team won the Public Prize for belOOp. We scoped that venture by interviewing potential users, then dropped our first hypothesis when the interviews did not support it. The exercise was as much about doing research in a second language as about the venture itself: an interview gives you nothing if you cannot hear what people mean between their answers, and hearing that in English took longer to learn than the vocabulary did. On the second, we had to conduct both a legal and economical analysis and a recovery business plan for the real case of a company in judicial recovery. The challenge was at a different level than the precedent mission, with complex business and legal vocabulary. My team was composed of me and 2 international students. Discussing and debating complex matters considering that for none of us English was our native tongue, was particularly challenging. We then had to defend the file in front of court-appointed administrators.

During my year, I founded my own company Radion, where I worked on data infrastructure for prediction markets between 2025 and 2026, the market was American from the start. English was therefore the working language of the company, not an occasional one: the product, its documentation, its users and the communities they met in were all English-speaking.

Being in charge of sales and product, I was particularly close to our customers. In practice this meant sales calls and customer interviews in English with users based mainly in the United States, and a research pipeline built on around four hundred thousand messages from English-language Discord communities, from which I pulled out the recurring problems worth building for. I also organised the first San Francisco and French meetup on prediction markets, which brought together speakers from Kalshi and Hyperliquid and was held in English for an audience of +150 practitioners. Finally, I grew an online community of +130 prediction market traders, fully in english. The growth of our company also led us to conduct several investors meeting with U.S. venture capitalists.

• Learn2Launch certificate
• Proof of the stay in the United States, 30 January to 30 April 2026
• MSc X-HEC Entrepreneurs student certificate
• TOEIC, 975/990 (C1), January 2024