Sandra Budimir
Sandra Budimir. Photo credit: Loran Dherines
Sandra’s unusual childhood holidays in the midst of the Balkan war in Croatia left her leaning sharply towards the military. “When I was little I wanted to be a soldier and with hindsight I wish I’d gone to St Cyr [France’s army officer training institution],” she says. Co-founder of Starburst Accelerator, the world’s leading business accelerator dedicated entirely to start-ups in the defence and aerospace sectors, and mother of a little girl, she regrets that “my schedule leaves me no time to be in the reserve force.”
Because her family was unfamiliar with the armed forces’ officers’ training schools, she instead prepared the competitive exams to get into France’s leading business schools after doing a literary baccalaureate with a maths option. She got a place at KEDGE in Marseilles. “I’m Parisienne but I wanted to move and this school is in the Calanques [cliffs and small fjords between Marseilles and Cassis]. I spent all my time there; it was really cool,” she laughs. All her time except for a 14-month break between her second and third years during which she racked up one internship after the other. “I did everything from working in the French Embassy in Croatia to being a salesperson for Nike so that I’d have the widest experience in as many different sectors as possible,” she tells me over a delicious take-out lunch in Starburst’s modern white office block which also hosts the French Ministry for the Armed Force’s Defence Innovation Agency.
““I have the impression that I’m helping to promote the spirit of defence””
Sandra always wanted to be an entrepreneur and her own boss. “But I’m not a rebel,” she adds quickly. “It’s just that working takes up a big chunk of one’s life and I want my days to be fulfilling.” We discuss the utility of business schools for somebody who has an entrepreneurial spirit. “Things such as accounting are essential and one learns those things, but otherwise a business school is most useful for creating a network,” she believes.
After graduating she was hired by consultants Capgemini Engineering, “a sort of luxury temp agency,” she smiles. “I’ll never forget that when I started I was told ‘You’re a woman and thus only half as credible so you’ll have to work twice as hard.’ I laughed that in that case they’d have to pay me twice as much!” Sandra is not very keen on “hard feminism” but uses humour as a weapon to deal with issues that she came across within the company “but never with my clients.”
The latter were in the aerospace and defence sectors, “a world full of fantastic, passionate people,” she says, adding that having seen the Balkan crisis from close-up when she was small “working in these sectors made sense.”
Her Croatian parents are the only ones of their respective families to live in France and so are keen to return to their native country every year. “They opened every door for me,” she stresses “from scouts to piano lessons and ski holidays.” But she is saddened that today there is such a lack of understanding between them. “As far as they’re concerned I’ve made a mess of my life; they would have preferred it if I’d had a 9-to-5 job and a house in the suburbs where I’d live with my family.” Which is clearly not the case!
Sandra resigned four times from Capgemini. And four times the company found her a new job in Germany and then in Brazil. But in 2012 she quit definitively in order to found Starburt Accelerator with François Chopard whom she’d met in 2004. “It was a blank page upon which to reveal tomorrow’s champions,” she explains.
Sandra in her offices with Starburst’s new logo. Photo credit: Christina Mackenzie
Today Starburst has offices in Los Angeles, Madrid, Munich, Montreal, Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore and Tel-Aviv. It has 10,000 start-ups referenced of which 10% have pitched major companies i.e. they’ve been able to present their products/technologies/ideas. “Following the pitch the majors vote and the one or two best start-ups enter our programme. We take a share in their capital and in exchange they enter our acceleration programme and we accompany them for a year to allow them to integrate the major military and aerospace programmes.”
In 2017 Sandra was extremely proud to be selected for the “Defence Policies” stream of the IHEDN [Institut des Hautes Études Nationales, France’s senior war college]. “It was a fantastic year,” she enthuses, adding that she’s surprised that “this course is not better known.”
And what about time for a personal life? “I’ve aligned my professional and personal lives. It’s a balance one strives to find all the time but I think I’ve achieved it. And I have the impression that I’m helping to promote the spirit of defence.”
