Fidji Simo to students: “No seat at the table? Bring your own chair”

She could not be there in person, but even from a distance, Fidji Simo captivated the audience. Speaking from a screen, the former CEO of Instacart, now an executive at OpenAI, addressed HEC Paris’s class of 2025, not to recount her professional success, but to demystify what it means to succeed when you fit none of the expected moulds.

Her entire speech rested on a simple idea: it is possible to build a career without pedigree or connections. Sometimes, you simply have to bring your own chair to a table where no one is expecting you.

She set the tone from the opening lines. Simo recalled arriving at HEC as a fisherman’s daughter, with an accent from the south of France, and finding herself in a lecture hall where students discussed their parents’ professions. She did not understand those social codes, and others made sure she noticed. But rather than resigning herself to them, she decided to write her own story.

This idea ran consistently through her speech: do not settle for the doors already open to you or ask permission to exist. Build your own path and, when necessary, rebuild it from who you are.

At the beginning of her career, Facebook rejected her. She was considered too focused on “strategy” and not enough of a “builder”. Undeterred, she found another way in. She applied for a marketing position, invented a fictional product and created the presentation, launch plan and visual prototype herself. No one had asked her to do any of it. That was precisely what made her application stand out. Do more than is expected, because a degree alone guarantees nothing.

A chronic illness that sometimes prevented her from walking or standing? She refused to treat it as an inevitability and instead made it the starting point for a medical research project. A market sceptical about grocery delivery after Covid? She turned Instacart around within two years, proving the analysts wrong. A technology industry doubtful of a CEO considered too feminine, too French and too far outside the usual mould? She confronted it directly and prevailed.

Throughout her address, she spoke about creation in its deepest sense: creating a career, creating tools, building connections and, above all, creating opportunities for others. Her guiding principle is to give back, offering others the opportunities she was once given. It means recognising potential before it becomes visible, as Mark Zuckerberg did with her. Power only has meaning when it is redistributed.

Then came the moment when she spoke about AI, without bravado or panic, only a simple truth: the tools are here, and they are powerful. But they do not think in our place, nor do they decide what kind of world we want to build. What we make of this intelligence will be determined by our choices, our projects and our courage.

In an unstable world, where established models are faltering and old certainties are collapsing, the one thing we can still truly possess is our ability to create. It was a particularly inspiring address, and one whose message extends far beyond the students in the room.