Laurent was born in 1976 in Reims, Champagne. After an uneventful first 18 years he moved to Switzerland to study at the HEC school of the University of Lausanne. He quickly got hooked on the PCs of the computers center and began surfing the web with Mosaic and Netscape 1.0, using webcrawler, yahoo.stanford.edu and the other early resources.
In 1996, Laurent joined a startup company called Netface as head of Web. During his two years tenure, the company was given large-scale projects by high profile clients including the EPFL, Bernard Nicod (largest real estate company of the region) and Frequence Laser (formerly the biggest music retailer of Switzerland and the first large scale e-commerce site of the country). After leaving Netface, Laurent moved to Frequence Laser for one year to finish the online store project and then signed with Arthur Andersen Business Consulting in Geneva to work in the new technologies team.
For more than two years he served various organizations as a consultant and then senior consultant. Among others he worked on projects for the United Nations in both Geneva and New York, using the web to facilitate information exchange and communication at OCHA, the agency responsible for humanitarian action co-ordination.
After the Enron scandal dismantled Andersen Laurent opted out of the new structure that later became Bearing Point. After a year of travel and independent consulting, he then joined the team of Stefano Mastrogiacomo at the most renowned Swiss private bank: Pictet. There he worked on the bank’s technological projects, including the website, intranet and extranets.
On May 2005, Laurent founded ballpark, a small consulting practice whose mission is to design effective Internet strategies for its clients. He is a contributor to Le Temps (the reference french speaking daily newspaper), launched the LIFT project and is also the founder of the Swiss Internet Professionals Index.
