Meet The EMBA Class Of Entrepreneurs: Executives Today, Founders Tomorrow 

Sally Lora
ESSEC Business School

Venture Name: Big Bang Food & Human Intelligence
Date of Founding: 2025
Program: ESSEC Executive MBA (Weekend track)

Tell us about your career background: My career began in Latin America, where I trained as a Telecommunications Engineer in Venezuela before building a technical foundation at Nokia and Telefónica in 2011. That early stage defined my ability to operate large-scale infrastructure under pressure. After moving to Europe, I spent over a decade leading digital transformation programs at CAC 40 companies. My role went beyond technical delivery; I acted as a facilitator, translating complex technological initiatives into executable executive roadmaps. Today, I run my own AI strategy consulting practice ”Human Intelligence’‘, a specialized advisory practice helping leaders navigate the operational complexities of AI adoption, and I am simultaneously architecting ”Big Bang Food”, a data infrastructure venture designed to solve systemic information gaps in the European food sector. Colombian by origin and Parisian by choice, I am trilingual and work fundamentally at the convergence of AI-driven intelligence and complex human systems, leveraging my consulting practice as a lens to build robust, evidence-based market systems from the ground up.  

What is your business/venture? Big Bang Food (BBF) is a market intelligence platform I am building for the European free-from food sector. The sector grows at 10% annually, yet brands, distributors, and retailers navigate it largely blind. The disconnect is striking: retailers claim these products don’t sell, while consumers are actively waiting for healthier alternatives at accessible prices. That gap exists precisely because existing panels don’t cover this category adequately, industry players are making decisions without reliable data on their own market. BBF aggregates product and retail distribution data into a B2B intelligence layer, dashboards, sector reports, and AI-native tools so the industry can finally close that gap and make data driven decisions.

What inspired you to found this business? The inspiration arose from a dissonance: my personal reality as a mother of a child with celiac disease clashed with the inefficiency of a massive market. However, my approach is structural. After interviewing dozens of industry stakeholders, I identified that the core failure was not on the shelf, it was in the data architecture behind it. The EMBA was the catalyst; it trained me to diagnose a visceral consumer frustration and translate it into a scalable business model. The result is BBF: a venture designed to solve a structural market failure, not just a product gap.

Why did you enrol on the EMBA? After more than 12 years of enterprise delivery experience, I had deep operational expertise but I wanted something different: a 360-degree view of how businesses are truly built and run, and a genuinely global perspective on strategy and market design that execution alone never gives you. I was looking for rigorous frameworks for financial modelling, governance, and commercial strategy, and I wanted to be surrounded by peers operating at the same level of ambition. What I didn’t fully anticipate was that the Program would catalyse my entrepreneurial move entirely. Within the first months, I founded Big Bang Food, now incubated by the ESSEC Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and formalised Human Intelligence as an independent AI strategy practice. I joined the program to expand my strategic vision, but quickly transitioned that vision into an actionable business build . 

How was the EMBA helped you/your business? It systematically elevated my thinking regarding market structure and competitive positioning. More concretely, it sharpened how I think about market structure and competitive positioning: the decision to build my venture as a B2B data intelligence platform rather than a consumer product was directly shaped by frameworks I worked through during the Program. It also gave me a peer network that is genuinely operational: conversations within the cohort have opened doors that would otherwise have taken years to access.  

What’s the one thing about the EMBA that you think is undervalued? The quality of peer learning and the exposure to entirely different industries are vastly undervalued. That cross-sector friction is exactly where the most interesting ideas come from. Coupling that classroom dynamic with site visits to companies across diverse, non-tech industries provides a powerful global perspective. Stepping completely outside your own sector forces you to think bigger and see broader structural patterns. You can read business case studies anywhere but you simply cannot replicate the cognitive diversity of that room or the strategic clarity gained by seeing how other industries operate.

International residencies take you inside companies operating at the frontier from top business schools in California to site visits in Singapore and beyond at a scale that genuinely resets your reference points. Masterclasses and afterworks become real professional relationships. A cohort that spans industries, geographies, and career stages means the network you build is not a bubble, it is a genuine cross-section of how the world operates. 

What’s next for your business? For Big Bang Food, the immediate focus is product-market fit. I am currently in deep-dive conversations with French food retailers to co-develop and solidify the core intelligence model. The broader arc I am investing in is a new kind of executive capability: the ability to architect data-driven market systems at the intersection of AI and industry domain knowledge. That expertise compounds regardless of what specific form each venture takes, and it is what I am building for the long term.   

Would you recommend the EMBA to other entrepreneurs? If yes, why? Absolutely and I recommend it beyond entrepreneurs. The EMBA delivers something distinct depending on where you are. For corporate executives, it provides the strategic elevation that operational seniority alone doesn’t build. For entrepreneurs at any stage, it sharpens the rigour and financial frameworks that separate a good idea from a scalable, investable business architecture. For those seeking a new direction, it is one of the few environments that genuinely expands your perspective in ways your own industry never could. 

NEXT PAGE: Jyoti Pandey, Kellogg School of Management 

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