Jérôme Lecat and the value of staying in the room

On 23 July 2014, Jérôme Lecat appeared before a French parliamentary commission investigating the departure of the country’s talent. He took the required oath, then raised an objection to the premise. He did not consider himself an exile. For a committee with exile in its name, this was an inconvenient beginning. For a founder building a company across an ocean, it was a distinction worth making.

Scality employed 90 people at the time, he explained: 30 in the United States and 60 in Paris. Going to California had helped him pursue international partnerships. Keeping engineering in France had helped him build the product. In his account, the two decisions supported each other. A plane ticket was a business tool; it did not constitute a farewell to France.

Lecat’s career has repeatedly returned to questions that sit underneath the things people see on their screens. How do companies get online? How does their email work? Where does the accumulating data go? He co-founded Internet-Way, then Bizanga, then Scality. The internet kept acquiring new attractions. He kept finding work in the foundations.

The next problem was already in the inbox

His route into that world included an encounter with venture capital during a 1989 internship at Partech Ventures. He trained as an engineer at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées and also studied cognitive science. That combination offers a useful introduction to the career that followed: technical systems, human decisions, and the money needed to turn one into the other.

In 1994, Lecat founded Internet-Way with Olivier Dauchot and Olivier Lemarié. The company supplied internet access to businesses in France, when selling access itself was an opening for a startup. It reached profitability before being sold to UUNET in 1997. Lecat then worked there as vice president of products for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. A French company had taken him into a wider operating world.

Bizanga followed in 2003. Its territory was email infrastructure for service providers, including the unromantic problem of keeping unwanted messages under control. Lecat founded it with Olivier Lemarié, Marc Sheldon and Giorgio Regni. Customers included Comcast, Cox Communications, Telefónica and United Internet. These were organizations with large networks and little appetite for email that failed to arrive.

Working with telecom operators exposed another need: affordable storage that could grow with the data. During the search for Bizanga’s next source of growth, the team began exploring software running on ordinary servers. The storage work developed into the business that became Scality, founded in 2009. Bizanga itself was sold to Cloudmark in February 2010. One set of customer conversations had opened the door to another company.

The continuity matters. Lecat’s ventures were connected by people, customers and accumulated knowledge. Regni, a Bizanga co-founder, became Scality’s co-founder and chief technology officer. The new undertaking had a different problem to solve, but its founders already knew something about the organizations they hoped would buy it. They had earned the opportunity to ask a more expensive question.

Two cities, one working argument

Scality’s central proposition was software for storing data across multiple machines, allowing capacity to grow without making the business depend on a single specialized box. RING, its distributed storage product, was released in 2010. ARTESCA arrived in 2021. Behind those product names lay a continuing commitment to storage software and to customers that needed to keep data available over time.

The geography of selling that software occupied Lecat as much as the geography of storing data. He argued that a company seeking worldwide partnerships needed proximity to the people who could make them happen. France offered engineering talent. The San Francisco Bay Area offered access to global technology businesses. Building in both places was an operating choice with consequences for recruiting, selling and the founder’s own calendar.

In 2016, he pushed back against gloomy descriptions of French entrepreneurship. His advice to founders with a viable product was to expose themselves early to the American market and its competitors. He spoke about ideas circulating through an ecosystem, experienced investors and prospective partners. The point was to enter a demanding conversation while there was still time to learn from it.

He also resisted the easy explanation that entrepreneurs went to California simply to escape France. That argument had already animated his parliamentary appearance. National pride and commercial calculation could occupy the same spreadsheet, though spreadsheets are rarely invited to debates about national identity. His insistence was practical: a company could seek customers abroad and continue creating work at home.

Make room on the stage

There is a smaller scene that helps explain how Lecat wanted the company to work. When he received recognition from the French-American Chamber of Commerce in 2015, he brought colleagues onto the stage. Marie Ekeland, the investor and Daphni co-founder, recalled the gesture. An award intended to focus attention on an entrepreneur became a group appearance.

That year, Scality raised $46 million and was recruiting into its Paris offices. Lecat described looking for competence, motivation and cultural fit. He favored sitting among employees in open spaces to encounter people directly, alongside weekly meetings for the whole company. The arrangement made conversation part of his working routine rather than something reserved for an appointment.

He has also been willing to describe a failure of his own judgment. In a 2017 essay, he recalled recruiting a general manager to run one of his American businesses. Looking back, he wished he had assembled and trained the team himself. The lost opportunity, as he saw it, involved direct communication. Delegation had put distance between the founder and relationships he should have developed.

“How am I going to change the world I live in?”

Jérôme Lecat, on the question a founder should ask first, 2017

His advice in that essay made room for an awkward combination: persistence and openness to being corrected. A founder has to withstand disbelief while continuing to listen. Changing direction continually confuses the team; refusing to learn wastes its effort. Lecat presented that tension as part of the job. There was no tidy personality test that could resolve it on the founder’s behalf.

A different kind of independence

Outside Scality, Lecat and his wife Anna, also an entrepreneur, created the Sugar Foundation in 2010. Established under the aegis of Fondation de France, it supports work across education, culture and social opportunity. Its interests include helping young people access higher education, developing children’s creativity and supporting artists presenting their early work.

The foundation gives his interest in autonomy another setting. Its stated purpose includes helping people become active participants in their own lives. The scale changes from organizations managing data to individuals trying to pursue a project or an education. In both settings, the room to act matters. The foundation’s work puts resources behind that concern outside the company.

His leisure interests sound less stationary than enterprise storage. In 2020, he listed kitesurfing, windsurfing, hiking and travel, and described taking his children canoe camping. He also counted entrepreneurship among his hobbies. This may complicate the distinction between work and time off, but it does make his answer unusually consistent.

An earlier questionnaire supplied a few less corporate details. His favorite word was “Audacious.” His dessert counterpart was chocolate profiteroles. Asked what remained French in his daily life, he chose a morning chocolate croissant. Ambition, it seems, can accommodate pastry. After a decade living in Mill Valley with his family, he returned to Paris, continuing to connect the French technology community with Silicon Valley.

The question underneath AI

By 2026, the storage conversation had acquired new urgency around artificial intelligence, cyber resilience and control of infrastructure. Lecat discussed those subjects in a March interview and on SMART TECH in April. The applications attracting attention had changed since Internet-Way. The need to decide how the underlying systems should work remained familiar.

On 12 May, Scality introduced Autonomous Data Infrastructure, or ADI. The platform combines its distributed storage foundation with an AI-assisted operations engine called Guardian. It spans storage media from fast flash to hard drives, tape and cloud services. The purpose is to let organizations manage different workloads and stages of the data lifecycle within a common environment.

At the launch briefing, Lecat emphasized that operational actions still required human validation. That is a consequential qualification for a product carrying autonomy in its name. Software can surface a recommendation; somebody still has to accept responsibility for acting on it. In a field crowded with promises about agents, the approval step is worth examining as closely as the promise.

He has pursued the question of control through public argument too. In a July 2025 essay, he called for public procurement and major buyers to give European technology businesses more opportunity. His case concerned the demand needed to build an industry: companies require customers willing to commit, alongside capital and capable engineers. Independence has to survive a purchasing decision.

The founder who objected to being called an exile now makes that argument from Paris. His experience of American markets remains part of it. Across his career, the recurring task has been to get close enough to understand the problem, stay involved in the relationships, and preserve the ability to decide what happens next. That work can take place in a server room, a team meeting or a parliamentary hearing. Lecat has found reasons to remain in all three conversations.