Another offer of funding / Une autre offre de financement

We had a friend's family over the other day for dinner. He's a French lawyer and I had previously approached him for advice about setting up the business here in France as a foreigner. He had done some legal work on fiber networks in the past and seemed excited about the project when I initially told him about them. Then, while we were talking at the house he mentioned he'd be interested in investing in the project - even though he doesn't live in the area.

I've been a bit surprised at the two offers I've received because I've never solicited any funds. I figure I'm not to that stage yet since I'll be paying myself to have the conduit installed. The next stage is likely when I'd need to look for funding to run a trunk line out from our residence to the exchange.

I will certainly approach both friends as soon as I am farther along in the project if I decide to fund it this way. However, the fact that both of them approached me about participating gives me hope that I could raise the money necessary for our local project using small investments from a number of people. What I think is even more promising though is the possibility of getting the neighbors to invest themselves.

Attracting investors / Attirer les investisseurs

I had an interesting discussion with one of my friends from our old neighborhood the other day. He had heard me mention that I wanted to roll out fiber-to-the-home in St Nom. We talked for about an hour and a half and I explained why the transition to fiber is so important and how I think a small scale project could work in our particular case. I also explained that I thought this could be a good test case for whether the model really will work or not, or if the project could expand at some point.

After we were done speaking he said that he'd be interested in investing in the project. I thought that was really great news, not because I'm looking for investors at the moment, but because he could see the value of the project without being someone involved directly in telecom.

I'm moving forward in steps to put this together. First, I'll work on putting the conduit in the ground in our residence. I won't need investors for that portion. The conduit would likely be a risky part of the investment because there is no guarantee that I will be able to convince an operator to connect with us. Obviously having a conduit for fiber in the ground would pay off one day (at least in terms of connectivity). The big question is how to recover that initial investment. I can take the risk because I'm more interested in learning everything about this than recovering this part of the investment.

However, outside money will likely play a part in the second stage of the project. I may need to raise some money to run fiber between our residence and the exchange in St Nom (where we could potentially interconnect with a number of operators). The numbers here wouldn't be huge - probably in the EUR 40,000 range, but this is where I'd start looking at financing options. Given the willingness of my friend to participate I may consider approaching the people in the residence in becoming co-owners of the fiber between the exchange and our residence. That could be a win-win situation because it would increase their incentive to actually use the line themselves.