Denis

Payre’s biography – March 2018

Denis Payre is a French serial entrepreneur specializing in building innovative, international and fast growing
companies. Denis Payre is currently the founder and CEO of Nature & People First, a company working at re-
inventing Pumped Hydroelectric Storage (PHS), the well known and well proven energy storage technology. His
company has designed a new way to deploy these projects with minimum impact with a model called Community
Scale Micro PHS. Thanks to its innovative approach, the company has obtained patents in 35 countries. He has
worked with EDF, the largest electricity company in the world, to design his first project in the French Caribbean.
The company intends to have at least 25% of the workers involved in the construction of its projects come from
difficult backgrounds. He has been in that role on a full time basis since January 2015. Denis Payre is currently based
in Boston, MA in order to qualify the US market for his new venture and in order to follow up his emerging activities
in the French Caribbean. Denis Payre is also an activist defending free enterprise and promoting responsible public
policies.

Denis Payre is also a member of the Supervisory Board of ELS, the leading publisher of legal and tax regulations in
Europe and the 4th largest in the world. He is an observer on the Board of Rocket Lawyer based in San Francisco, he
is a Board Member of GB & Smith based in Paris and Boston, and of Tiny Clues based in Paris and New York City.

From September 2013 until September 2014, Denis Payre was founding President of French political party Nous
Citoyens in order to promote the need for significant structural reforms in France in order to regain growth, fight
deficits and high debts, modernize labor laws, and ultimately come back to full employment and most importantly
marginalize French populism on the far right and the far left. Denis Payre lead a “neither right, nor left” initiative
outside of mainstream political parties viewed as out of touch. He promoted in particular several measures to end
the domination of French politics by professional politicians and civil servants. Starting with just 100 activists, the
movement got significant media exposure and in just 9 months gathered 12.000 paying activists and 25.000
followers. The two mainstream political parties, PS and Les Républicains, had 100,000 paying activists, each the
Front National (National Front) had 60,000. It became the 9th largest French party among 400 in France, based on
the votes it collected at the European Election of 2014. Denis Payre made several significant media appearances
including a fierce televised debate with Marine Le Pen. Since September 2014, Denis Payre has handed over the
presidency and has been advising the leadership team of the organization. He felt that the impact of Nous Citoyens
on French politics was sufficient to trigger significant enough changes, he did not want to start a political career and
wanted to have time to work on his new innovative project. Emmanuel Macron with his party En Marche, was largely
inspired by Nous Citoyens. A large part of the Conservative party Les Républicains and François Fillon, in particular,
were also inspired by Nous Citoyens.

From 2001 until mid 2013, Denis Payre was the President and co-founder with engineer Marc Fourrier, of Kiala
NV, an innovative Brussels based logistic company servicing the e-commerce industry. Kiala specialized in setting up
networks of collection points, local stores where parcels are delivered as an alternative to a home delivery for active
consumers who are not at home when the postman or the home deliveryman comes. Kiala has not invented the
concept but has professionalized and modernized it substantially and has become by far the largest independent
player on this segment in Europe starting with only 100 collection points in Belgium and deploying a network of
7.000 collection points in 5 countries from Rotterdam to Malaga in just over 10 years. Its compounded annual
revenue growth rate has been 50% over that period. Kiala has built in particular an innovative technology platform
in order to manage its network of collection points and has designed highly innovative processes. Kiala has obtained
patents on some of its processes and has received several awards recognizing its unique ability to innovate. The
company was elected in particular most innovative supplier of the Dutch e-commerce industry in 2010. It has
received similar awards over the years in Belgium, France and Spain as well. In 2011, the company was listed as one
of the 100 most promising innovative companies by silicon valley based magazine Red Herring. Kiala’s customers
included some of the fastest growing e-commerce companies such as Amazon, Cdiscount, Oscaro, Sarenza, Vente
Privée or Zalando. It also included some of the most active retailers on the internet such as Darty, De Bijenkorf,
Esprit, Free, Galerie Lafayette, Lacoste, H&M, Nespresso, Toys’r Us, Puma or Sony. UPS, the world leader in logistic
services, approached the company in 2012 and offered to turn Kiala into its competence center world-wide in the
area of expertise of the company. Kiala was acquired for an undisclosed amount of money and Denis Payre spent 18
months helping integrate Kiala into UPS and supporting the deployment in several additional countries including
Germany, the UK and Canada. Kiala is now UPS Access Point and has been deployed in several additional countries
including Italy, Poland and the USA. It is the world’s leading offering on this segment.

Denis Payre has been a member of the board of the French Competition Authority from 2009 until 2013.

From 1997 until 2001, Denis Payre was an independent venture capitalist. He invested in several innovative
ventures and supported them as an independent board member. He was involved in particular in Compex NV from
Brussels later acquired by Siemens, in ComsmosBay SA from Paris later acquired by Solucom, in Netonomy Inc from
Boston later acquired by Comverse and in Prolin NV from Amsterdam later acquired by Hewlett Packard.

From March 1997 to December 1998, Denis Payre was the founding President of not-for profit organization
Croissance Plus in Paris. The goal was to foster the creation of a more competitive environment for high growth
innovative companies in France. Croissance Plus quickly became a highly visible and influential force and obtained
the vote of several favorable laws. Denis Payre convinced the French government to create a unique stock options
scheme with very light taxation for start-up companies called BSPCE, in order to enable employees to become co-
entrepreneurs. This scheme has been used by most French start-up companies for the past 20 years. He co-founded
Entrepreneurs for Growth in Brussels in 1999 with a similar goal as Croissance Plus at a European level together
with successful entrepreneurs from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Holland and Spain. He remained Vice
President from 1999 until 2004 and has driven, during that period, a joint survey with a leading international audit
firm, benchmarking the quality of the environments for growth companies in Europe and triggering the creation of a
similar benchmark by the European Commission. Denis Payre also co-founded the Fondation Croissance
Responsable (Foundation for Responsible Growth) with his friends of Croissance Plus in order to encourage a more
sustainable growth.

Between mid-1990 and December 1996, Denis Payre co-founded a software company called Business Objects with
Bernard Liautaud, in Paris, France. Business Objects was the first company to build a simple enough, yet powerful tool,
to allow non technical users to extract data easily from large corporate data bases without having to rely upon the IT
department. The company pioneered the business intelligence, big data spaces and analytics space. The company
obtained a US patent for this innovation and has collected several Million Dollars in royalty fees from competitors.
During all of his tenure, Denis Payre was the Chief Operating Officer of the company in charge of world-wide operations
and corporate marketing, thus managing at all times 80% of the company’s head-count and generating 100% of the
revenue. Bernard Liautaud was in charge of research and development; and finance. Under Denis Payre’s almost 7
year-long leadership, the company went from no revenue to close to $100 Million and revenues doubled every year,
for 6 years in a row. The company became significantly profitable the fourth year-on. The valuation reached $ 1 Billion
in 1996. He retired to spend more time with his young family and to stop traveling most of the time. He remained a
board member for over a year following his resignation to help his partner manage the transition with his successor.
He then left Business Objects’ Board of Directors in order to have the freedom to gradually liquidate his equity position.

Under his management, Business Objects started successful direct operations in the following 14 countries: Australia,
Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, the United Kingdom,
the USA, Japan. The company set up a network of focused and committed distributors in an additional 40 countries. In
1996, the company was the 50th largest software company in the world according to Software Magazine and was the
market leader world-wide of the Business Intelligence segment according to IDC and the Meta Group. At the end of his
tenure, the company had 600 employees in the world and 4,000 customers in 60 countries, including significant ones
such as British Telecom, Compaq, Deutsche Bahn, Dow, Disney, Eli Lilly, The Federal Trade Commission, Glaxo,
Harvard University, JP Morgan, Mittal, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Nasa, Peugeot, Royal Bank of Scotland, Shell, Texas
Instrument.

The company raised only $8 million in three rounds of financing over three years from various venture capital funds.
In September 1994, the company went public on the Nasdaq stock market and raised an additional $30 Million.
Business Objects was the first European software company ever to go public on Nasdaq. Its public offering was over-
subscribed 20 times and was managed by Alex Brown and Goldman Sachs. With a valuation of $ 230 Million at the
close of market the first day of trading, it was the most successful public offering of all companies listed in 1994
according to the Wall Street Journal and a survey by Venture One. Venture investors have enjoyed over 100-time
return on their investment. At the end of Denis Payre’s tenure, the company had $40 Million in cash and no debt.
Because of the unique nature of his entrepreneurial success, building one of the very few globally successful Europe-
based technology company, Denis Payre was featured together with his partner in the international press several
times. In January 1996 in particular, Denis Payre and his partner were named “Best Entrepreneurs of the year” by the
US edition of Business Week, together with entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Steven Spielberg. After leaving
Business Objects, the company remained very successful and was acquired by SAP AG for 4.5 Billion Euro in 2007. It
had over 6.000 employees world-wide and over a 1 Billion Euro in revenues. The company was one of the top 15
software companies in the world.

Prior to founding Business Objects, Denis Payre spent two years as a sales executive with Oracle France. He also spent
16 months with French electronic giant Thomson in the USA, working for a division now part of ST Micro Electronics.
He is 55 years old and holds an MBA from ESSEC in Paris, a leading French business school. He is married and has four
children. He likes sailing, swimming and snow skiing. He crossed the Atlantic on a sail boat in 1999.