Jean-Marc Bally moved from auditing Schneider Electric's operations across 36 countries into venture investing in 2000, making him one of the few European VCs still active today who experienced the dot-com crash firsthand, and he later helped grow Schneider Electric Ventures into the independent firm Aster. He has also argued, including in his book Junk Tech, that European companies need strong storytelling alongside good technology to compete globally, a view that lines up with his long history of backing industrial and energy companies such as Sunfire, tado°, and Neural Concept.