Henri Seydoux’s Not-Just-a-Toy Hovercraft

By his own admission, Henri Seydoux was a terrible journalist. The French technologist started his career in the late 1970s as a writer for Actuel, a Rolling Stone-like magazine in Paris, but felt underpaid and underqualified. “Then I did something typically French,” he says. “I got my girlfriend pregnant.” In need of money, he learned to program on an Apple II and began writing software for insurance companies.

Thirty years and a number of startups later, Seydoux is chief executive officer of Parrot, which he founded in 1994. The Paris-based company is publicly traded—it’s valued at about $390 million—and specializes in voice-controlled devices, namely hands-free cell phone kits for cars. In recent years he has wanted to branch out. “In the fashion business, every six months you redo everything,” says Seydoux, who in the early 1990s provided seed money for the shoe designer Christian Louboutin. “Most startups do one product. Palm, BlackBerry —a lot of companies never find another product.”