How Letting Go of One Dream Sparked a Healthcare Revolution

When Stanislas Niox-Chateau walked back onto the HEC Paris campus on September 15, 2025, it was with a mix of humility and gratitude. Fifteen years after graduation, the founder of Doctolib — today a European healthtech unicorn — returned to speak with students about the decisions and inner shifts behind what he calls “a revolution in tech.”

Stanislas’s initial dream was intense: to become “world number one in tennis,” competing with the same generation as Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray. At 11, he was number one in France. A serious back injury ended competition for good — a “real blow.” For years, that was the public explanation. The deeper truth is more instructive.

With distance, he admitted that saying the injury was the sole reason he stopped “it’s not the reality.” He realized he “was not talented enough” for the very top and even felt “happy when I had injury.” At 17, he decided he did not want to be a professional tennis player and chose instead “to be happy in my day life.”

The loss of one dream created space for another: put rigor and perseverance to work where they could help more people.

He identified two such sectors: education and health, because these are “common goods, sectors of the future, and sectors where the technologies and services used are outdated.”

The healthcare system suffered from endemic problems: endless waiting lines (sometimes six months for an appointment), opacity, and high rates of burnout among staff. He was determined to “contribute to improving healthcare in France,” viewing “Health for all” as essential to societal well-being.

He rerouted his competitive mindset into study at HEC “with the same rigor that made him a good tennis player.” At HEC Paris (Class of 2010), the entrepreneurship program became his proving ground. As he puts it:  “I entered HEC because I wanted to do two things: build things and have a positive social impact.”

Early projects — including Balinéa and co-founding Otium Capital — honed two instincts that would define his next venture: start from user reality, and build with teams that share the mission.

In 2013, with limited capital and almost no healthcare network, he launched Doctolib to “improve the daily lives of healthcare providers and make access to care faster and simpler for everyone.” That mission came with a simple rule of focus: usefulness before noise.

For Stanislas, being a tech builder doesn’t start on a screen; it starts by confronting the reality of the field and the people you aim to serve. In the first years, he spent “80% of his time on the field,” with a personal rule not to “open [his] computer before 6 pm.” The priority was to understand reality before trying to fix it on a screen.

He went door to door to practitioners’ offices for months and years, listening, mapping workflows, and co-designing fixes to daily pain points.

To learn the job from the inside, he even worked as a medical assistant, absorbing the rhythms of appointments, calls, and paperwork. That immersion shaped his leadership identity: even as CEO of a multi-billion-euro company, he says he sees himself “as a nurse, as a secretary, as an assistant.” The point wasn’t status; it was service,  becoming super content, super expert about the real work of care.

HEC Talks: Innovation begins where it benefits everyone with Stanislas Niox-Chateau

Healthcare is famously fragmented; many told him professionals “will never ever change.” Trust had to be earned, practice by practice, with tools that saved minutes, reduced pressure, and respected clinical reality.

There were inner hurdles, too. Stanislas transformed vulnerability into strength. He revealed the difficulty of overcoming a severe stutter 15 years ago, which meant he “wasn't able to speak at all.” This obstacle drove him to believe he had to “work twice more than everyone to achieve my dream.” The result: he enrolled at HEC with one of the highest scores after the oral exam.

That disability also persuaded him to embark on entrepreneurship: “I knew I wouldn't be able to work in a normal company, so I started my own.”

For Niox-Chateau, success in a complex sector like healthcare requires more than vision, it requires depth. He often says that to build meaningful technology, you must become “super expert on content,” developing a precise understanding of the profession you aim to serve.

He illustrates this with his own practice: he has spent years reading “a lot of books on how to become a practitioner” to understand the daily work and pressures faced by clinicians.

He believes the future belongs to those who are “builders of technology”, people capable of defining scalable, modular systems rather than simply managing existing ones. His advice to young graduates is direct: aim to become “expert expert techy,” someone who can go deep, not just wide.

This expertise is not acquired overnight. It is built through the daily grind, showing up, learning, and improving “every day, piece by piece.” This habit of rigor, perseverance, and hard work — a principle he associates with the Greek physician Hippocrates — is the foundation that allowed him to turn his initial idea into a revolution.

Relentless focus on the mission led first to adoption, then to responsibility. In March 2019, Doctolib became a European unicorn, valued at more than €1 billion. Today, it serves 50 million people and over 400,000 practitioners, proof that proximity to users can compound into systemic impact.

As scale grew, so did public duty. During COVID-19, when the French government called, Doctolib helped organize the national vaccination campaign, and technology built for convenience became critical infrastructure.

The next leap goes deeper than features.

AI represents one of Doctolib’s defining stakes. Stanislas believes AI “will be a revolution for health professional,” adding: “We are at day one of our journey.” His vision is firmly rooted in augmentation, not substitution, emphasizing that his goal is “not to replace health professional.”

He describes AI as “liberation and augmentation,” designed to “automate all the task, administrative task, financial task, repetitive task” and “free completely health professionals and patient.”

His aspiration is clear:  “My dream for health professionals: better work life, less workload, less pressure, less burnout, provide better care, provide care differently.”

The push is partly a duty of care in the digital era. He notes the vulnerability of people seeking information online: 10% of Google searches and 15% of ChatGPT queries focus on medical knowledge. Amid this scale — and the risk of medical fake news — Doctolib is developing AI within one of the largest care-AI labs in the world, dedicated to “verified medical knowledge” and “medical accuracy.”

The goal, in his words, is to “give super health professional and patient,” ensuring that technology strengthens — rather than weakens — the bond between clinician and patient.

For founders, intrapreneurs, and students, his lessons are simple, and repeatable:

1. Work on what matters. “To create a great project you need first to work on things which matter.” Meaning fuels long-term stamina.
2. Act fast, then scale. If a solution works, grow it so the good reaches millions, not thousands.
3. Be a builder, not just a manager. “If you want to change the world, you need to build systemic technology, not just a layer on top.” Define the architecture; understand the work; iterate with users.
4. Lead with humility and rigor. Progress compounds through habits: show up, listen, improve, repeat.
5. Hold a human line on AI. Build augmentation that restores time to care and reduces pressure.

His transformation, from seeking personal excellence in tennis to building systemic excellence in healthcare, is guided by one conviction: make a systemic difference through disciplined work and honest purpose.