For once, on October 4, 2018, Lafayette Plug and Play (LPNP), the French startup accelerator in the Retail and e-commerce sectors and which has supported our growth at Ownest since 2017, welcomed an exceptional guest.

Indeed, a few days before French President Emmanuel Macron's official visit to Station F, the Paris-based and first innovation platform in Europe, to share his vision of the "Startup Nation", Mounir Mahjoubi, then French Secretary of State for Digital Affairs, came to discover the startups that are reinventing logistics, customer relations and uses. Nicolas Houzé, CEO of Galeries Lafayette, Pieter Lammens, Director of LPNP and Matthieu Caloni, Director of Strategy and Transformation at Galeries Lafayette joined the event.

In addition to the visit of the spacious and bright open space, the meeting with the accelerator partners and a Q&A session, two startups had the honour of pitching their solutions in front of the Secretary of State for Digital Technology and Ownest was one of them.

Through its CEO, Clément Bergé-Lefranc, Ownest played the elevator pitch game. A challenging exercise to sum up the concept of the open blockchain solution and convince an audience in less than 10 minutes.

Fond of new technologies, Mounir Mahjoubi is a French, serial entrepreneur and politician.

He co-founded several start-ups such as the niche food trade e-commerce platform specializing in short circuits, called "La ruche qui dit oui"(the hive which say yes), held the position of Deputy President and CEO at advertising agency BETC Digital and managed the digital strategy of various French presidential candidates: Ségolène Royal in 2007, François Hollande in 2012 and Emmanuel Macron in 2017.

In 2015, he was appointed head of the National Digital Council and made the digital transformation of VSEs and SMEs a top priority.