I help people build, and move forward when the future is unknown.
Julien Salanave. Professor of practice in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at ESSEC Business School in Singapore.
Former VC and serial tech company founder.
Source: worlduncertaintyindex.com — monthly, GDP-weighted, to July 2026.
What is yours to do, once the machine can do the rest?
Every module I facilitate now opens on that question.
AI is a teammate. Design the work around it.
Students who work this way pick what's worth building, build it in a week, and put it in front of a customer by Friday. That's what I'm putting into the Bpifrance Accélérateur Asie with ESSEC, and into ESSEC Spark APAC — a sixteen-week validation-to-launch track for alumni.
Teaching
Three subjects. One argument.
Ownership, courage, self-discipline, resourcefulness. The vocabulary changes with the course. The demand on the student holds.
01 / Zero to one
Entrepreneurship & innovation
- Finding the wedge narrow enough to win
- Testing your idea while it is still cheap to change
- Talking to the customers who can actually buy
- Shipping something real inside the course
UndergraduateMiMMBAEMBAExecutive
02 / The money
Venture capital
- Outcomes arrive as a distribution
- Where the asymmetry actually lives
- What would have to be true
- Reading a term sheet like an operator
MiFMBAEMBA
03 / The room
Adaptive leadership + AI
- Leading out past the edge of the map
- Deciding while the facts are still moving
- Designing a team around its machines
- Staying calm and grounded in public
EMBAExecutive
What I run
Where the teaching gets tested.
01 / 04
Bpifrance × ESSEC · Directeur pédagogique
Accélérateur Asie
A Bpifrance accelerator built for French companies scaling into Asia. I own the pedagogy: what gets taught, in what order, and how a founder is expected to have changed by the end of it.
ESSEC alumni, Asia-Pacific
ESSEC Spark APAC
A validation sprint that earns you a place in a build-and-launch phase, open to ESSEC alumni across the region. Phase one kills the ideas that cannot survive contact with a customer. Phase two takes the survivors to market.
16
weeks, validation to launch
2
phases, the second one selective
ESSEC Business School · Director
Entrepreneurship & Innovation Institute
Strategy, faculty, partnerships and research output for the institute. The place where what works in one classroom becomes something the school can run at scale.
Student incubator · Director
ESSEC Ventures APAC
The incubator for students building in the Asia-Pacific region. Selection, mentoring, and the unglamorous work of keeping a company alive between one milestone and the next.
Up next: ESSEC Spark APAC
Track record
I funded it. I built it. Now I teach it.
1
Venture capital
Apax Partners, then Newbury Partners. Where I learned that the upside is a distribution, and that most of the work is deciding what would have to be true.
2
Serial founder and CEO
Upnext Research, then Orée. Where I learned what that distribution feels like from the inside, on payroll day.
3
Professor, and still building
ESSEC Business School, Singapore. Director of the Entrepreneurship & Innovation Institute, of ESSEC Ventures APAC and of the ESSEC & Mannheim Executive MBA APAC track.
Office hours
Thirty minutes. Bring the actual problem.
The messier the problem, the better this works.
- Who
- Students, alumni, founders.
- What
- One problem you are working on.
- How long
- Thirty minutes sharp.
- Where
- Zoom. The link comes with the booking.
- Before
- Send the deck, the model, the code.
For schools, accelerators and companies
Working together
Talks and keynotes
Entrepreneurship, venture capital, and what AI actually changes about the work. Built for the room you put me in.
Program design
From a two-day sprint to a sixteen-week build-and-launch track. I've designed and run both, and I stay through delivery.
Juries and advisory
Selection committees, incubator mentoring, institute partnerships. Direct feedback, given in front of the founder.
Tell me the cohort, the constraint and the date: hello@profjulien.ai, or find me on LinkedIn.
Founder wisdom
What I send people, and why.
35 entries · 12 themes
Essays and talks worth the hour, kept because I keep sending them. Each carries the line I would actually say about it.
How to get startup ideas
Paul Graham · essay
ConsideringThe way to get good startup ideas is to look for a problem , preferably that you have yourself, and that is not obvious to people who don’t have it
How to do great work
Paul Graham · essay
CareerPaul Graham’s essay argues that “great work” is neither accidental nor the result of step-by-step career planning. It emerges when you combine aptitude with deep personal fascination and chase the intriguing gaps at the frontiers of knowledge. Curiosity is the engine, hard focused effort is the fuel, and a readiness to ignore fashion, break implicit rules, and keep iterating small versions is the method. The sooner you treat learning as your own project—not a syllabus handed down—the faster you’ll reach those frontiers and notice questions no one else has asked
How to legally own another person
Nassim Nicholas Taleb · essay
Life“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.” — Taleb’s line, and the whole argument in one sentence.
You’re not a lottery ticket
Peter Thiel · talk
Skill vs. luckThe role of luck in entrepreneurial and life success is overrated. We can build a startup/ life where we construct the future and good/bad luck is something we deal with along the way (i.e. a determinate future) rather than a world where luck stops all thinking and action before we even start
Wartime vs. peacetime CEO
Ben Horowitz · talk
ScalingPeacetime grows the opportunity, wartime survives the threat. The same person has to be able to switch, and most cannot.