Mathieu Laine is a French entrepreneur and intellectual. He is the founder and head of Altermind, a consultancy firm based in Paris and London. He also created with Emile Servan-Schreiber, the predictive markets company Hypermind. He is an affiliate professor at Sciences Po Paris. He is the author of many essays on liberalism and works as an editorialist for the French weekly political magazines Le Point and Le Figaro.
Life and career
Laine is the son and grandson of doctors. He developed a great interest for Economics in high school. In 1993, he was admitted to the prestigious Sciences Po Paris. However, he dropped out the very first year in order to work with the liberal politician, Alain Madelin. In 1995, he was actively engaged in Jacques Chirac’s campaign to French presidency. After three years devoted to politics, he went back to university at the elite French law school Assas from which he graduated in business law. He also graduated in Finance at Sciences Po Paris and is registered at the Paris Bar. From 2001 to 2007, Laine worked as corporate lawyer for Bredin Prat and then for Brandford-Griffith. In 2005, after having been deputy-director of the Institut Turgot, he joined the board of the Association pour la liberté économique et le progrès social. In 2007, he founded the consultancy firm Altermind. Altermind offers academic expertises advocating for liberalisation of markets, produces studies of behavioral and experimental economy to competition authorities and delivers strategy consulting to heads of major companies. In 2009, he became an advisor for the Fondation pour l’innovation politique in charge of a taskforce on economic growth. In 2011, he worked as an advisor for Marc Simoncini on the launch of his website dedicated to the online sale of glasses and low-priced lenses, which eventually led to the opening up of the optics market. He also advised numerous heads major companies and entrepreneurs such as Vincent Bolloré, Alexandre Bompard, David Dayan, Thierry Petit, Stéphane Courbit, Giovanni Castellucci and Jean-Charles Decaux. In 2014, he created Altermind UK in London. In 2015, he created Hypermind with Emile Servan-Scheiber, a company specialised in prediction markets. He teaches Economics and Political Philosophy at Sciences Po. In 2019, he was appointed affiliate professor at Sciences Po where he created a lecture class course named "Freedom in the 21st century".
Other positions
Member of the editorial committee of the Revue Commentaire
Director of Showroomprivé since October 2015, in charge of the nominations and remunerations committee
Political and intellectual views
Apart from his works as an essayist, Laine works as editorialist for the French magazines Le Point and Challenges. He regularly publishes articles voicing a liberal agenda in French newspapers such as Le Figaro, Le Monde,L’Express or Les Echos. From 2007 to 2010, he was a weekly columnist for Le Figaro-Magazine. He also worked as columnist for the magazine L’Opinion the year of its launch.
Political views
In 2002, Laine published an open letter to the then French Prime MinisterJean-Pierre Raffarin about his « cent jours » as head of the cabinet. He met Emmanuel Macron in 2008, then banker at Rothschild. Laine was one of the firsts to encourage Emmanuel Macron to run for the French presidency. In December 2015, a year before his candidacy, he publicly invited him to do it in an article published in Le Point. In 2016, he explained he was advising both Emmanuel Macron and François Fillon in the presidency race due to their liberal sensibility. He even considered an alliance between Macron and Fillon. In April 2017, he publicly supported Emmanuel Macron for the first round of the presidential election. He is an active advisor of Emmanuel Macron since his election. He convinced him during the summer 2017 to implement tax reforms in 2018 and not 2019, contrarily to the Prime Minister’s 2017 Policy Address.
Intellectual views
s are the very core of Laine’s thought. He criticised government interventionism as well as modern socialism, which are, according to him, common to both the left and right wings. He asserts that only ‘the power and the primacy of freedom’ can be salutary for France. In his first essay, La Grande nurserie in 2006, he argues that the actions of the « Etat Nounou » are breaking ‘the individual energies, the growth and the sense of responsibility’ by implementing preventive and prohibitive regulations. He considers those regulations to be freedom destroying and demonstrates their inefficiency due to their ‘suffocating’ effects on individuals. He proposes an alternate liberal approach based on individual responsibility and on lesser governmental activities. In Post Politique he depicts an archaic political power and advocates for a post-politics society where the individuals abandon the idea of an omnipresent and almighty political power. In 2012, he conducted the publication of the works of 65 worldwide authors in the Dictionnaire du libéralisme.
Musical tale
Mathieu Laine wrote Le Roi qui n'aimait pas la musique, a children musical tale published by Antoine Gallimard. Several of his friends contributed to his project, Karol Beffa, Patrick Bruel, Renaud Capuçon, Paul Meyer and Edgar Moreau.
Laine was married to Eleonore Salin, daughter of Pascal Salin with whom he has two children. After his divorce, he wed Alix Foriel-Destezet daughter of Philippe Foriel-Destezet in 2015 with whom he has a daughter.
