I didn’t start off wanting to be an entrepreneur – or an academic. When I was a kid growing up in the Parisian suburbs, my dream was to be a pâtissier – a pastry chef.
What changed everything for me was hearing about the terrible drought and famine in Ethiopia in 2003, when I was a teenager. Rather than creating desserts in Paris, where we had more food than we could eat, I decided to try to help people suffering from food insecurity, which for me, meant studying agronomy and plant science.
While an undergraduate in France, I read a lot of research articles about drought resistance and how the roots of crops could be improved to obtain more water and nutrient from the soil. Many of the articles cited the work of Professor Liam Dolan at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, so I wrote to ask if I could join his research group. I was astonished he said yes to a young stranger from France but even more surprised to learn I would actually be working in Oxford, where Liam had since moved. Up until that point, I mainly knew of Oxford as a brand of French notebooks.
My first job in Oxford was supporting Dr Helene Proust, then a postdoc in Liam’s group, and learning about research techniques and ethics. I then worked as a research technician in the Plant Sciences department to build a solid technical foundation before I eventually returned to Liam’s group to start my doctorate on the genetics of rooting systems.
Working with Liam, both as a mentor and later as a colleague, was a formative experience. I was given a lot of autonomy to design my own research project, which allowed me to think for myself and to become more creative, resilient and self-driven. But I was always held to the high standards that have made Liam a successful research director, which helped me learn to welcome contradiction, to communicate clearly and to use other people’s time wisely.
I also discovered that Liam and I shared a strong sense of social responsibility and desire to serve our communities: whether at home in Ireland and France, or in our academic department and student body, or in the wider world. That made working with Liam an uplifting human adventure as well as a formative one professionally.
The idea for Moa came from Liam. He’d heard about the increasingly serious problem of weed resistance to herbicides from people in the industry, and he realised that the methodologies that I had been developing might be able to solve it. When he explained the idea and asked me to co-found Moa and later become its first Chief Scientific Officer, I didn’t need too much persuading. It made sense scientifically and it also matched my personal ambition to play a part in improving global food security. I also saw an opportunity to help shape an organisation from the ground up where performance would go hand in hand with employee wellbeing. But I was still a bit nervous – particularly about the resources we would need to develop our ideas and achieve this impact.
I asked, “What are we starting with?” And Liam took me to a small storage room, packed with abandoned desks and bits of old computers, and said “We start here.”
Amazingly, that did not put me off. We rolled up our sleeves and turned the storage room into a lab where later our wonderful team of Moa scientists set up the original version of the GALAXY screening platform. If anything, the challenge of setting up the new lab operation and turning our vision into practice kept me grounded during the whirlwind of our first year. And that first year was incredibly important, because we produced evidence that we were on solid ground scientifically and in a position to deliver even more impact than we’d expected.
So what advice would I give to young scientists and academics thinking about entrepreneurship?
Not every scientist wants to start a business and that’s OK, because we need scientists to keep producing fundamental knowledge on which to base innovations. But for those who are considering making an impact with their research in the “real world”, the biggest obstacle is often self-doubt. Nearly everyone has self-doubt, and in my case I overcame it (and a lot of other challenges along the way) by remembering why I was doing this in the first place: the impact I wanted to make. Anything is possible if you set your mind to it with the right people and money to support the work. Also, be patient and generous with your collaborators, because it takes more courage for them to follow than for you to lead.
For early career scientists in general, we are told that a successful career is a linear, or even exponential, list of accomplishments. For some young researchers, focusing on that “ideal” pathway often deters them following their deepest interests. So my advice would be to advance towards your professional goals step by step, with humility and integrity. Success will come eventually, and it will be all the more satisfying that when it comes it will be on your own terms.
As for my own story? By 2021 we had made huge progress with our science, developing our GALAXY and TARGET platforms, and I knew it was time to hand Moa on to people with different skills and experience to take the business side to the next level. Back in France, I’ve built on my experience at Moa to help others to develop innovations that solve problems for farmers: as an advisor to companies, tech transfer offices, start-up incubators, experimental farms, and industry on a whole range of areas, from biocontrol and gene editing to precision ag, air quality and even greenhouse humidity control. And of course, I am still a Moa shareholder, serve on our Science Advisory Board, and take a great interest in how the company is doing!
