Success story - Meeting with Damien Pigasse, Sales Director at Dailymotion in Palo Alto

"Despite my age, 40, I consider myself to be a 'digital native', because I've always worked for start-ups or in digital marketing. My first contact with Dailymotion was a bit by chance. In 2007, I'd taken a few months off to explore Asia and Australia, and was a regular visitor to Internet cafés. While browsing, I came across this video-sharing platform, a brand new concept. I found it fascinating, but at the time I didn't know it was a French company. What's amazing is that when I got back to France, I was contacted by a recruitment agency... from Dailymotion! It was still a very small company of around fifteen people, located in the Halles district. Today there are 200 of us around the world, with offices in Palo Alto, Berlin, New York and London, and a turnover that's growing all the time. Whereas two years ago Paris was home to 90 % of the company's employees, today it accounts for only half.

And in the last two years, the United States has become Dailymotion's biggest user in terms of revenue. Palo Alto has really become a strategic centre, because a web company that wants to be global absolutely has to assert its presence alongside leaders like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Personally, after several years of moving regularly between France and Silicon Valley, I decided to move to California with my family. It was becoming impossible to make so many return trips. But the pace of work here is more intense and it seems to me that we 'live to work', not the other way round!