Sometimes the adventure of a lifetime begins with an injury. Laurent Chébaut tells it bluntly, what could have destroyed him will push him to build himself: “I had a maths teacher in third grade who told me that I would achieve nothing in life. I think that remained anchored in me for a long time, and it motivated me to prove him that he was wrong. “At the time, in college, computer science, which he adores, was not yet popular, not only with the maths teacher. “We were considered geeks,” he remembers. “Guys who spent their time having fun.” He, on the contrary, sees it as a playground and an opportunity. “I always wanted to do business, ever since I was a kid,” he remembers. The high school student seeks to finance his techno needs on his own. “In second grade, I built computers and resold them. I went to the Fnac outlet and told people that instead of paying that, for the same price, I would make them a better computer.” He was already laying his foundations: detecting a need, proposing a solution, and earning a living.
Caps and bricks
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Today, the high school student has grown up a lot. In Orvault, the forty-something stacks caps like others stack bricks. Multi-entrepreneur, investor, Laurent Chébaut leads a team of five employees, calls on freelancers, and above all manages a constellation of young startups: Club Nec (a financial education and investment network), 4 the Start (support for entrepreneurs and investors, particularly in sport), Kaptia (recording and content production studio with the support of AI), Eva (real estate investment club) and Koudekla (strategic communication and marketing studio performance oriented)… “There are people who say that you have to focus on one thing, one business only. I like managing several fires at the same time,” he says. And he adds a conductor’s argument: “The activities of my start-ups are communicating vessels. When one is a little tight in terms of turnover, the other compensates.” This diversity, this rhythm, he knows, is not made for everyone. Those who accompany him often talk about it with the same smile: it goes quickly, it goes in several directions. He confirms it: “When you are in my wake, you never get bored.”
And when the pressure mounts, when the brain is saturated, the quadra has its method: sit down, open a LEGO box, follow the instructions, and let the outside world be silent. At home or at his desk, passion takes the form of monumental pieces: a five-foot Eiffel Tower, a Ford Mustang, a Mario Kart, and, currently being assembled, a Tudor house. “I don’t like creative LEGOs. I follow the instructions. I don’t want to imagine, I don’t want my brain to overheat,” he confides. This is precisely what he is looking for: a parenthesis where the mind does not have to invent, only to execute, until the final click. “LEGO allows me to enter my world and break away, and I like to share these moments with my two children.” And, as in business, there is a rule that he sets for himself: “When I start, I have to finish.”
From bricks to blockchain blocks
To the LEGO bricks have been added, more recently, the blocks of another construction and another passion: bitcoin. Bitcoin was imagined in 2008 by a developer who remained anonymous under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, before being put into circulation in 2009. It was ten years later that the cryptocurrency seduced him by its principle as much as by its philosophy. “I liked the concept of freedom, of independence from banks and states,” he explains. The existence of this encrypted currency is based on the blockchain. Using this technology, transactions are grouped into “blocks”, validated and then added to each other to form a tamper-proof chain. Each cryptographic block fits into the previous one, like a logical and irreversible construction. A digital architecture where nothing is erased, where everything adds up, fits together like LEGO pieces…
Bitcoin, a rare asset
After this love at first sight, Laurent Chébaut began to pass on this passion. He runs “crypto for dummies” workshops, to popularize a subject that he considers still poorly understood. It also helps footballers to invest in this safe haven, whose price can be volatile, like the beat of a heart. And he found himself at the initiative of a comic strip dedicated to bitcoin, associating Éric Larchevêque, co-founder of Ledger, media jury of the show Who wants to be my associate?, and the author-publisher Clément Grandjean.
Bitcoin? Laurent Chébaut sees many advantages in this. In his eyes, the queen of cryptocurrencies is not a fad, but a more profound change in the value exchange ecosystem. “It’s not just a trend. It’s a new way to store and transfer value through digital assets.” In terms of heritage, he adopts a measured approach. “I am not in the idea of replacing the euro. For me, it is complementary. It is a rare asset, the quantity of which is limited to 21 million, which can have its place in a diversification strategy.” And soon in daily life: “I think one day we will be able to pay for our house in bitcoin”.
Tasty detail: we must believe that this meeting with bitcoin was inevitable in the life of Laurent Chébaut. “My father once worked in the Alcatel factory, in Orvault, not far from my offices. After the closure of this industrial site, a new company was set up, the first mining farm in Europe, the BigBlock DataCenter, led by Sébastien Gouspillou. A digital farm where we created blockchain blocks.” Any new block created or “mined” allows you to recover a little more than 3 bitcoins.
