Olivier Protard is a venture-capital investor with more than eighteen years of experience as an active investor in start-up and early stage companies in the ICT industry. After graduating from Sciences-Po in Paris, he started his professional career as a business journalist. He joined Sofinnova in 1989 to invest in ICT start-up companies and was one of the founding partners of Sofinnova Partners when it was created in 1997. Olivier invested in over twenty-five technology start-up companies, both in Europe and in the USA, during his eighteen years with the firm and he has actively participated in the fund raising of four of the five Sofinnova Capital VC funds, totalling over 800 million euro. He has covered all the IT sectors with a strong focus on software and Internet companies. He was one of the early European VCs to fund Internet start-ups back in 1996, including Nomade, Multimania and Freesbee in France. Since 2000, he has actively participated in two successful ventures, VistaPrint and Parrot, which went public respectively in 2005 on Nasdaq and in 2006 on Euronext. These two last successes were co-investments with Seventure Partners. He is as young as he can be and his private passions are not advertised on Facebook (which will tell you something about his age).