Loïc Le Meur
LeWeb
Co-Founder
Prolific serial entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur is based in San Francisco. He has co-founded the #1 European tech event LeWeb and is an active business angel. He was an early investor in LinkedIn, Evernote and Lending Club, among many others. He was named one of “Europe’s Tech25″ by the Wall Street Journal as well as one of the “25 most influential people” on the web by Business Week. He is featured in The Economist as one of “Europe’s Blooming Entrepreneurs”, and is a “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum where he helps select the next Tech Pioneers and is a regular speaker.
Loïc founded his first company B2L, a web agency, in 1996 while he was enrolled in business school at HEC in Paris. He used money from a student loan to fund it and the car manufacturer he interned with became his first client for whom he built one of the first car dealership websites. Loïc sold B2L 2 years after he graduated from HEC to BBDO. He then launched and sold a web hosting company RapidSite and the same with Tekora.
At the World Economic Forum in 2003, Loïc met entrepreneur Joi Ito who introduced him to blogging and he also met Linkedin founder Reid Hoffman to which he became an early angel investor. With his new found love for social media networking, that same year, Loïc acquired one of the first blogging services in Europe, Ublog, with the goal of building it into a global business and in order to achieve that goal, he merged with Six Apart (Now Say Media) where he became Executive Vice President EMEA.
In 2004, Loïc and his ex-wife Geraldine founded LeWeb as LeBlog, a meetup for bloggers which rapidly evolved into a tool to inspire entrepreneurs and not only bloggers. Today LeWeb in Paris brings together 3,500 entrepreneurs, brands, geeks, investors and press from 76 countries.
After moving to San Francisco in 2007, Loïc founded Seesmic, a powerful suite of social media management and collaboration tools that provide businesses and individuals with everything they need to build and manage their brands online. Hootsuite acquired Seesmic in 2012.
Today Loïc still works on LeWeb and continues to angel invest in startups around the world. He will be speaking at BDL Accelerate 2015 on December 10-11.
