For me it is not about the people

Stina Haglund in an interview with Elliot Boucher guest @ilfornello coliving the summer of 2023 

Elliot Boucher is 24 years old and from France. We are doing the interview on his last day @ilfornello and he has been here for a month, the first three weeks with his girlfriend who he soon will be  meeting up with at an other Coliving space in Palermo.

Elliot grew up in the French alps with his mother and sister. His mother loved traveling and even if they didn't have a lot of money growing up she prioritised seeing the world. This made Elliot see traveling as a way of always getting new experiences. I asked Elliot what motivated him to keep on traveling. He responded that he was not afraid of change and that if you stay in one place for your entire life, you don't have any stories to tell when you're 85 years old. In Elliots view traveling gives you a ton of stories. Elliot and his girlfriend have been traveling to Portugal, Bali, different places in France, Amsterdam and now Italy. He thinks that he might want to settle down one day, but he's not so sure that his girlfriend will be up for it – she loves the nomad life style.

Elliot makes a reflection about the people you meet when you travel, for a lot of digital nomads, they are the reason to keep on traveling. But Elliott argues that you hardly make any long lasting relationships when you only stay for a month or so at the same place. He still has his best friends in France and he meets them digitally to play games and just to talk. You need more then just a month or so to build a close relationship he continues .

When Elliott was a student, he studied digital marketing and innovation at a French university. He realized that the teachers took attendance by students signing a physical piece of paper and understood this to be a huge administrative task. He and a friend found a solution and wrote a software to help make it easier and more efficient. This idea has since then grown into a company that now employs 20 people. The company is called EduSign and has clients in all of France, but also in other countries. Elliot tells me about his first client. The client (to be) contacted him wanting to buy their software. The problem was that the product was not nearly finished but he decided to take the chance and say that everything was in place. After that call he had to make sure that it became ready and they worked 24/7 to make it happen. 

For some entrepreneurs, it is the idea that drives them, but this is not the case for Elliot.

“For me, the thrill is to make things grow. I see it as a game. If it goes wrong I will just start over again and do something different. This is my first company, but it's not the last. I see money as coins in a game. They're not important to me, but that's how you know if your company is growing. I don't need much to live on, I keep most of the earnings in the company Since the goal is to grow it as fast as possible. Money doesn't change things, and I wouldn't change anything even if I had all the money in the world.”

I asked Elliot how they found, Coliving Italy And he tells me that they were looking for something countryside that had a pool. He Googled around and found us on coliving.com. Being here for a month, they've had some great experiences, and his favourite thing, the story he will tell people when he is 85, is how we made pizza in the pizza oven. For us it was when Elliot made us French crepes for dessert.