About
Jean-Michel Planche
“The difference comes from software, from intelligence, and from doing it another way.” I have been saying the same thing for thirty years, and I have spent my life trying to prove it.
A way of working
I started more than forty years ago, with fifty lines of Basic on a TRS-80. I have not changed my method since: start from what people actually want to do, and build from there. Not from the network. Not from the technology. Not from what we already know how to make.
It is an uncomfortable position. It means creating categories that do not exist yet, and therefore explaining yourself for a long time, often alone, about something nobody asked for. It is also the only one I know how to hold.
What I built
In the nineties, when telecom companies were selling networks, I built Oléane out of what people actually wanted to do online: France’s first professional internet service provider. France Telecom bought it in 1998. I stayed two years, until Oléane was fully absorbed — and I was offered the role of Internet director for the group’s enterprise division.
In 2000, Witbe. Another category to create: measuring not what a network claims to deliver, but what a human being actually receives. “For twenty-two years I have been arguing for QoE,” I wrote in 2022. It has been twenty-five now.
In between, and for twenty-four years, Tancred Venture: investing in builders and standing beside them. Capital in the service of the same method.
Today
Witbe goes on, and I feel at home there. And something else is beginning: photography, with Just a Moment and Cull Me uP — rebuilding the gesture from the moment rather than from the tool. The same obsession, on different ground.
In between, I write. This Journal holds two hundred and sixty-three posts, from 2009 to today: anger, enthusiasm, thoughts of the day, a few tributes. They are in French — twenty-five years of writing, in the language they were thought in. Someone once told me I had “the outlook of a Frenchman from the United States, or of an American from France”. That is fair enough.
The record
1965 — born. “That is when the trouble starts.”
1989 — 1991 · Apysoft — the first software, where he learns that a program is only worth the person it serves.
1991 — 1993 · Wimsea — one of the first NeXT Centers in France, built around Steve Jobs’ NeXT Computer.
1991 — 1998 · Oléane — founder of France’s first professional internet service provider.
1998 — 2000 · France Telecom — after Oléane was acquired, until it was fully absorbed.
2000 — 2024 · Tancred Venture — twenty-four years investing and standing alongside.
since 2000 · Witbe — creator of a category: measuring the quality actually delivered to a human being.
since 2026 · Just a Moment · Cull Me uP — photography, rebuilt from the moment.
Writing here
Every post can be commented on. You will get a link to confirm your address, I read everything before it is published, and your address is never made public — what becomes of what you write.