He came from the east poor suburb of Paris and got suddendly rich by making 'minitel web pages'.
Later he reinvested all its money to build one of the biggest internet provider : free. It made it a billionaire.
And later again ( 7 years ago) France biggest startup investor with kima venture https://www.kimaventures.com
So yes, Minitel was in a way the start of France starupnNation
It's a very project-oriented cursus, where the students have total freedom to decide how they work as long as they pass the very strict requirements of each project. To keep costs down, students have to grade each other and use mostly automated resources.
I'm not sure if the school is sustainable (I think it's supposed to be funded by alumni donations), but it's a really cool venture.
They recently opened a chapter in California.
I heard instead recently that they are closing the California chapter that they opened 3/4 years ago.
> In 1987 at 19, while dropping out from school, he successfully created then sold his first company, a Minitel (a French forerunner of the internet) service company. This minitel-site provided sex oriented chat services.
I suppose some backup of these services still exists today, I'd really like to see them published some day on https://archive.org/