The roots of Gianni Guitteaud’s career, as an entrepreneur, went down long before he was born. They were planted in the ashes of war, flourished with the generations and were toughened by the experience of family business wrangling in New York.
New venture in AI
At the age of 36, Guitteaud has just launched a new company called Offset that is taking AI into the boardrooms. He speaks to us as the sun rises over Martinique, the French-speaking Caribbean Island of his birth, where the entrepreneur story begins.
Guitteaud’s grandfather, Robert, planted the family entrepreneur seed more than 80 years ago. Robert was an infantryman who fought in the French Army during World War Two.
A business that began by helping war veterans.
When Robert returned home to Martinique, after the war, there were many of his comrades who had lost a limb in the fighting and they came to him for help.
So, he started making artificial limbs and it blossomed into a family business.
“My father came into the business and went to college to learn mechanical engineering and how to make articulated knees,arms and hands and prosthetic hands that can move by themselves. That is what my dad does,” says Guitteaud.
Computers caught the eye.
Yet, it was computers and AI that caught the imagination of the young Guitteaud as he left Martinique for London in search of his fortune. He worked a couple of corporate jobs, but that was not enough, he wanted to do his own thing .
Becoming an entrepreneur is hard.
His first venture as an entrepreneur was helping people build websites and apps.
“It is very difficult, especially when you know there are other people who do this every day. It was really tough at the beginning and I didn’t make much money. You don’t have a big name behind you; right, so, becoming an entrepreneur is hard,” he says.
Guitteaud graduated to bigger jobs – like a $90,000-per-milestone deal with ACSA Insurance – then left for Chile in South America to manage a portfolio of companies for a wealthy family.
A job with a family of millionaires.
In 2019, he had another offer from a family in New York that had just inherited half a billion dollars and wanted to hold onto it. The problem was the family owned a bunch of businesses, from hotels to cryptocurrency, that were losing money.
How can a business lose a million dollars a month?
The biggest loser was a Hyundai car dealership in Long Island City. It appeared to be selling cars all day long, but wasn’t making any money; no one could seem to work it out. Guitteaud and his computer got to work analysing data in a job that he says changed his life.
“One of the main issues was a car dealership that was losing about a million dollars a month when I got there and I was trying to understand what happened,” he says.
“With everything that I had learned in Chile with, the handling of staff and negotiation, I started to hold meetings and being very ballsy; just to tell people, excuse my French, to fuck off.”
It took a while to get to the bottom of the problem.
They were just hiding numbers.
“The family had this business going for years and it was making so much money the dad gave it to his friends to run…His friends were trimming the numbers to say we are making money. But the reality was they weren’t making money because of the bonuses and commissions they were taking; there was so much money being taken out of the business behind his back.They were just hiding numbers left and right.”
It led to many late nights poring over the books and it taught Guitteaud more than a few lessons.
Amid the untangling – an idea.
“It took a while to untangle all these numbers and starting removing the middleman. This is when I developed a phobia of people controlling numbers. You need to control the data that
is going in and the data that is going out.”
During the untangling, Guitteaud used to record all of the business meetings at the car dealership. This gave him the idea of bringing AI into the boardroom with his current business Offset and its product OKPI that – among other functions – records board meetings and interprets their data.
As Einstein said…
“Are the points that you need to push being talked about ? You need to know this and this software interprets recordings so you can establish that,” he says.
OKPI can also work out KPIs – key performance indicators – for your key management workers.
“Einstein said the best way to keep your balance on a bike is to keep moving,” he says.
“With technologies keep advancing, if you do not keep moving with technology then you are going to fall off the bike…I am a person who can grasp these concepts, put them into an idea, put them into execution; there is a difference between an entrepreneur and a wantreprenuer!”
