Stanislas Niox-Chateau, co-founder of Doctolib
Audio 03:43
People are working in front of their computers at Doctolib's headquarters in Paris on April 3, 2019 (illustrative image).
ERIC PIERMONT / AFP
By: Anne Verdaguer Follow
4 min
In a few years, Doctolib, the digital platform for making medical appointments, has become essential in the world of health in France.
The "start-up" turned "unicorn" took off during the Covid-19 crisis.
Its dominant position is now disputed, but Stanislas Niox-Chateau is staying on course: the service provided to practitioners and patients.
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In seven years, since the founding of Doctolib, Stanislas Niox-Chateau has come a long way. At 34, he can boast of being at the head of a company which has exceeded one billion stock market valuations, and which has joined the very select club of "unicorns" (
startups
that reach a valuation of at least minus a billion dollars, editor's note). Doctolib not only plays a preponderant role in French vaccine policy (some might say too much) but also democratizes teleconsultation, supports Samu and public hospitals, and is expanding into Germany and Italy.
For
Antoine Freisz, co-founder of the Kerala Ventures
fund and early investor in Doctolib,
the key to Doctolib's success does not however lie only in innovation:
"
Stanislas Niox-Chateau has this great talent of being able to both create a product but also to sell it", he
explains
, "And the greatest innovation is perhaps less the idea and technology itself than having succeeded in explaining it, and having adopted it by thousands of health professionals
”
Stanislas Niox-Chateau, however, did not start with many assets up his sleeve.
After starting his career in sport where he had to give up the idea of being a tennis champion, after injuring his back, he joined HEC and joined an investment fund for which he was going to study the operation of a restaurant reservations platform.
His shyness and what was then his main weakness, his stammering ... he will make an asset.
Concerns about the use of patient data
Doctolib is today, 1,700 employees, "doctolibers", fifty million patient accounts between France and Germany, and eleven million video consultations, the health crisis has passed by.
But also the investors, those that Stanislas Niox-Chateau also succeeded in convincing, like Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet, the co-founder and former CEO of Price Minister but also Bertrand Jelensperger, co-founder and CEO of Lafourchette.
Today, the turnover of the company (not communicated) is estimated between 150 million and 200 million euros for the year 2020.
For Charlotte Krychowski, lecturer at the Mines-Telecom Business School institute
, and author of the book “
Business models in e-health
” at Presses des Mines.
“
It remains very difficult in France to find sources of funding, in particular in the field of e-health, and the digital economy responds to specific laws. The more users there are of the service, the more valuable
it will be
, ”
she adds
,“ this is called the network effect which is only triggered when one reaches a critical mass is where the business can generate value. It is still very difficult in France to wait for this critical mass because of our regulatory framework, which is evolving very slowly.
"
Today, the success of the platform causes a lot of criticism and concerns. On the use of personal data of patients in particular which are hosted on the
cloud
of AWS, the subsidiary of Amazon.
Frédéric Bizard
,
economist
and specialist in social protection and health issues, and author of the book
Autonomie solidaire en santé
believes that if “
a private company manages the logistics of teleconsultation, that's fine, but where it should be. there is absolute control over the use and protection of data. Do we entrust this to a private company that stores this data through another foreign private company
? This indeed raises a number of questions
”.
Stanislas Niox-Chateau defends himself from any desire to control the personal data of patients, which is well protected, he assures us.
He prefers to move forward in his project: to improve the daily lives of caregivers ... while taking advantage of the flaws in the French health system in terms of digitalization.
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