Arthur Querou closes his MacBook, gets up from his chair and walks over to Franck Tetzlaff, his co-founder. “It’s signed,” he whispers in his ear. One of their employees is in a meeting on the terrace of the Cannes apartment they’ve rented for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2026. He looks up and sees Arthur watching him, arms raised.

Arthur sits back down at his screen, opens Slack, and fires off a message to his teams: “@channel Special Refresh at 9am ET/3pm CET for a HUGE announcement. Mandatory attendance. Cancel any meeting you have if needed.” The message is quickly met with flame and rocket emojis, along with a capital C. He then explains to the four employees in the apartment what the meeting is about. Cheers erupt. In Paris and New York, the teams gather in front of a big screen, all impatient to find out what’s coming.

When the meeting starts, Arthur plays a three-minute video shot ten days earlier in New York. It is a humorous staged scene around a table, with Arthur, Franck, and Ryan Mayward, Walmart Connect’s General Manager, addressing the employees. A minute in, Ryan Mayward looks into the camera and announces: “I’m excited to announce that Walmart has agreed to acquire Vibe.” Surprise gives way to joy across the room. After the announcement, a press release goes out and Arthur breaks the news on social media. The price isn’t disclosed, but the media frenzy is instant.

An hour later, Arthur and Franck head down from the apartment toward the festival. The sun is out and Arthur adjusts his black Vibe cap. They walk ten meters before someone stops them to offer congratulations. The same thing happens ten meters later, and ten meters after that. All afternoon, it takes them twice as long as planned to get anywhere.

Around the same time, the Wall Street Journal runs a piece headlined “Walmart, in Biggest Deal in Two Years, Buys Advertising Tech Firm.” It opens with “Walmart is paying $1.4 billion to purchase a French advertising-technology firm, according to people familiar with the matter.”

*

At just sixteen, Arthur’s mother hands him a letter from Twitter. The American social network is asking him to stop his little scheme immediately. For several weeks, he has been flooding the platform with comments sent by bots and charging people to access a poll about Justin Bieber through a premium-rate number. Naively, he has not used a VPN.

Since his grades at school began to drop because of his consuming passion for video games, his mother, a doctor, and his father, a journalist, refuse to buy him any new ones. He sets out to find a way to earn his own spending money so he can keep growing his collection. An avid Counter-Strike player, he realizes that many teams have websites. He learns to code and decides to sell websites to them.

As he explores the new world opening up to him, he discovers Flash games. He embeds the game Free Rider on a web page and sets the goal of increasing traffic to the site so he can place advertising on it. To do that, he needs to rank first on Google. The SEO optimizations he puts in place work, and his site quickly reaches the first page. But after a few weeks, he stalls in third place. He figures that if he can no longer move up, his competitors can at least move down. He then spams links on his competitors’ sites, adding anchor text with penalizing keywords which causes them to drop in the rankings within two weeks. The advertising on his Flash games site allows him to buy far more video games than he had ever imagined.

This is how Arthur’s passion for advertising begins. He launches a blog called Blogmastering, where he explains how to monetize a blog and place ads. He also tries his hand at acting, taking part in contests organized by Blogbang, a subsidiary of the Publicis Group, in which participants create advertisements for brands. There is no guarantee of payment, but he can earn a few hundred euros if his ad is selected. He writes ebooks, creates mini-games for the iPhone, and tries dropshipping. Many of these projects go nowhere. He takes away from them that he needs to be passionate about whatever he undertakes if he wants to stick with a project. He also learns that being unconventional helps him succeed.

At eighteen, Arthur leaves Aix-en-Provence and his native south for the French capital. He moves there with his girlfriend, Valentine, whom he met in middle school, and enrolls at the engineering school EPITA in 2011, where he begins studying computer science. In his very first year, he launches Appinest with Louis Bur, one of his classmates. The meme site 9GAG is popular at the school, and the two young students create a free 9GAG meme app for iOS—at the time, the only apps available on the App Store were paid. The app is downloaded 15,000 times on its launch day and quickly reaches one million daily users. Arthur and Louis make money by placing ads for Clash of Clans and Candy Crush in the app, before selling it for €300,000. He decides to reinvest all this money in a new project he launches with Louis and another classmate: MotionLead.

Together, they join EPITA’s brand-new incubator, Startup 42, launched and run by Daniel Jarjoura. Daniel has drawn inspiration from the way Y Combinator supports its startups through mentoring and meetings with experienced entrepreneurs. For one of the first sessions, Daniel invites Franck Tetzlaff, an alumnus of the school who had found great success launching a social gaming company. All the participants sit around him and take turns presenting their projects in a single sentence. Franck is expected to react to each one in a few words. When Arthur introduces MotionLead, a mobile animated advertising project, Franck tells him never to start a company in advertising—he knows the industry well, having made money from ads on the games he created. But Arthur does not take it to heart. In his head, he thinks, “Cool, I’m going to do it anyway.”

*

Arthur walks out of the room head down. His participation in the competition organized by Bouygues to promote 4G ends in the semi-finals. But in the course of a conversation, he learns that Bouygues’s marketing director will be attending the final, and gets back in touch with the company’s head of startup relations, whom he already knows.

“Could we present outside the competition during the final, between two of the finalists?” Arthur asks him.

“That’s impossible.”

For a week, Arthur pesters his contact every day, hoping he will give him five minutes between two groups. His request is accepted forty-eight hours before the final.

When Arthur presents his project to the jury between two groups, they are immediately interested. When one of the jury members asks how much it would cost, Arthur throws out €90,000 off the top of his head. They agree immediately, and Arthur realizes he should have asked for much more. He later sends them all the pricing details, along with those of advertising agencies. Someone from the media agency working with Bouygues calls him to tell him that this is nonsense and that this is not how things work.

During a conversation with Daniel Jarjoura, he suggests that Arthur and his co-founders apply to Y Combinator. Although no French company has yet been accepted into the California accelerator since only U.S. companies were eligible, it would be a good exercise. To their surprise, they are invited a few weeks later to California for an interview.

Arthur and his co-founders arrive in a Mustang in Mountain View, where Y Combinator is based. The entrepreneurs around them look stressed. The three Frenchmen are not prepared, but they know their pitch by heart for the simple reason that they are obsessed with their business. When they walk into the room, Garry Tan, Kirsty Nathoo and Geoff Ralston, the creator of Yahoo! Mail, are waiting for them. The interview goes well, and when the panel asks whether they would be available to spend three months in Silicon Valley, they reply that they will try to arrange to come every other week. The panel asks them to leave but to stay outside the door. A few moments later, Geoff Ralston opens the door.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he tells them, before continuing. “That’s not how this works. We’re not supposed to tell you this, you’ve been accepted, but you have to be here.”

Arthur steps aside to call Valentine.

“I have good news, but I’m not quite sure what to do. We got in, but we’re going to have to stay for a few months,” he says.

“That’s amazing. There’s no question about it. Of course you’re going,” she answers.

The three students worry about telling their parents that they will have to put their studies on hold. Daniel reassures them and finds a way to rearrange their school year with the school’s director, who, although initially reluctant, agrees to let his students pursue their American dream.

MotionLead joins the YC W14 batch and becomes the first French company to be accepted into Y Combinator alongside Algolia. Arthur thrives among these young entrepreneurs who are willing to take enormous risks. He and his co-founders are mentored by Sam Altman, now co-founder and CEO of OpenAI. He is the smartest person Arthur has ever met. What particularly impresses him is his ability to understand a subject and then explain it back in an even clearer way.

Three months later, Arthur and his co-founders do not participate in Demo Day—the culmination of their time in California, whose goal is to raise funds—because they are on the verge of being acquired. But once back in France, they stop hearing from the company that is supposed to acquire them. Arthur’s phone rings: “The deal is off.”

*

Arthur lies on his back in bed, staring at the ceiling. He cannot sleep. He has been given no explanation for the withdrawal. It is only the next day that he understands what happened. The stock price of the company that was supposed to acquire them has collapsed.

MotionLead carries on for another year before being acquired in 2015 by Adikteev, an advertising startup looking to expand into mobile. As a car and karting enthusiast, Arthur decides to buy himself a Tesla Model 3 with the money he made. Following the acquisition, he is required to stay on at Adikteev for two years, but he is already thinking about what comes next.

One day, Arthur is sitting on the jury of a competition organized by Startup 42. When Kevin Louzoun pitches his project, Arthur’s response is blunt: “I think your user acquisition cost is too high. You’re not approaching the problem the right way. Instagram will kill your business in a few years.” Arthur then tells him, “We can stay in touch if you want. I don’t think you’re a tech guy. I think you’re a sales guy, and our paths will cross again.”

In 2017, Arthur’s earn-out comes to an end, and he identifies an opportunity to improve targeting in programmatic advertising. The new project quickly attracts attention and several investors express an interest in backing it. He spends a few hours putting together a deck and presents it to an investment fund, which immediately agrees to invest the €600,000 he asks for. Thinking the response has come too quickly, he decides to raise €1.2 million instead.

A few weeks later, he meets Franck Tetzlaff at a Starbucks in Paris’s Opéra district. Arthur’s eloquence and confidence had caught Franck’s attention when they first met at Startup 42, and they had stayed in touch, promising each other that they would start a company together one day. Since then, Franck has co-founded the unicorn Doctolib, worked as CTO of Frichti, and moved on to innovation projects at Accor, where he works alongside CEO Sébastien Bazin.

“It’s moving forward. I have a commitment for €1.2 million. Let me show you the presentation,” Arthur tells him.

He flips through the slides and, when he reaches the team section, Franck spots his own picture.

“So you’re a co-founder, then. It would help me if you came on board, because otherwise I’m going to look like an idiot,” Arthur jokes.

They shake hands.

The fundraise goes smoothly. When the money lands in the company’s bank account, Arthur is overcome by a wave of dizziness. For ten days, he feels sick. It is the first time he has raised such a large amount, and the weight of the responsibility bears down on him. It unlocks something deep inside him. Death was a subject he often thought about. Without knowing why, the dark thoughts leave him and are replaced by a much more carefree mindset: “fuck it, do it.”

Franck now has to tell his director and Sébastien Bazin that he is leaving Accor. When he messages his boss to ask if they can talk, he is available immediately. He is at the Ritz with Sébastien Bazin and some investors. Once there, Franck tells them he has decided to leave. Sébastien Bazin is excited about the project and asks to meet Franck and Arthur a few days later in his office.

When the two new business partners arrive at Sébastien Bazin’s office, high at the top of Accor’s glass tower in Issy-les-Moulineaux, they are greeted by Franck’s former boss. A few minutes later, the door opens.

“So, you’re the one stealing Franck from me,” Sébastien Bazin says to Arthur as he closes the door behind him. During their conversation, he offers to invest in Keymantix through Accor, but the round is already closed. They decline.

Arthur and Franck spend a year and a half developing their technology and hiring their first employees. Kevin Louzoun, who has just graduated and has been following Franck’s projects, sends him a message on LinkedIn to say that he would like to work with him. When he arrives for his interview, he finds himself face-to-face with Arthur, who had predicted two years earlier that their paths would cross again. Kevin becomes one of the startup’s first employees.

In June 2018, after more than a year spent building their platform, Arthur and Franck realize that the convictions they have developed about their market over the past year are no longer reflected in their product. Despite having their first campaign with Toyota lined up for two months later, they decide to rebuild their platform from scratch.

*

On August 31, Arthur and Franck are walking along Boulevard des Italiens in Paris, heading toward the metro station.

“How confident are you about the tech?” Arthur asks him.

“Fifty-fifty,” answers Franck.

The first campaign with Toyota goes off without a hitch, and Keymantix makes an impressive breakthrough in the automotive industry. Until Covid hits. The startup’s revenue collapses by 90% in March 2020. With their backs against the wall, the team diversifies into other markets and manages to turn things around. But Arthur does not like what he is building. Keymantix, which becomes KMTX, is a services company that spends most of its time manually managing advertising campaigns. What drives him is the product.

In 2021, Arthur and Franck travel to New York to pitch KMTX at the Programmatic I/O conference. They have established a strong foothold in France and are considering expanding to the United States. One evening, Arthur sits next to Dentsu’s head of data, a global advertising agency and an ideal customer. When he tells her about KMTX, she shows no enthusiasm. He encounters the same kind of reaction throughout the week, and during a long walk through the streets of New York with Franck, they acknowledge that they will not be able to achieve their American ambitions.

They do, however, have another idea in mind. TV streaming has been exploding in the United States for several years, and there is no solution allowing companies to precisely target their audiences across streaming platforms. As soon as they return, Arthur decides to test the idea by creating a landing page where people can enter their email address if they are interested in learning more. He then launches a Google Ads campaign, spending $500 a day. After a week, he is convinced that this market has far greater potential than KMTX’s.

Arthur asks Kevin to spend three weeks working in isolation with another employee in an Airbnb on the new project, called Vibe. Using the black-and-white sketches Arthur has given them, they are tasked with creating a first mockup of the product. “That’s not what I imagined,” Arthur tells them repeatedly when he comes to check on the design’s progress. He does not hesitate to make them start over until he is completely satisfied. “Every integration has to be pixel-perfect,” he keeps repeating.

In 2022, the vision for Vibe becomes clearer and the platform begins to take shape. Arthur needs €6 million to develop the business in the United States and decides to sell KMTX for that amount. That represents one and a half times EBITDA, which is low, but he insists on an upfront payment and no earn-out.

Advanced discussions get underway with one company before a second, Seedtag, makes a bid. Arthur remains evasive with them. Several companies approach him, but he never gives in to the excitement—it had hurt him during the failed sale of MotionLead. He never lets discussions drift and is completely transparent throughout the process, knowing that hiding information can come back to haunt him. Except perhaps in one instance.

The sale is about to be finalized with the first company, but Arthur keeps Seedtag’s team on tenterhooks as they remain interested in acquiring KMTX.

“We’ve practically signed. We’re giving them five days. If it’s not signed by then, we’ll open discussions,” he tells them.

Five days later, they call.

“Is it signed?” they ask.

“No, but it’s going to happen,” Arthur answers.

Arthur stalls with the first company, which is beginning to ask questions, and one Saturday evening, a representative from Seedtag calls him again.

“How much?” he asks.

“Twenty-five,” Arthur says.

“Okay, deal.”

A few days later, after some adjustments, KMTX and Seedtag agree on a €20 million purchase price. Arthur sends a message to the first company he had been negotiating with: “Sorry, we signed with someone else.”

Just as the documents are about to be signed, Valentine, now his wife, gives birth to their first child. They are both at the maternity ward when Arthur’s phone rings. Seedtag’s representatives are on the other end of the line: “We have good news and bad news.”

*

Arthur stands beside the hospital bed where his wife is lying. Valentine holds their hours-old daughter in her arms, and Arthur puts the phone on speaker. “The good news is that we’re ready to sign. The bad news is that we can’t because we’re missing one document,” the Seedtag team tells them.

For several hours, the maternity room turns into a meeting room. Calls with the lawyers multiply. They take turns holding their baby girl, while Valentine, an M&A lawyer, joins the conversation. Although she has never worked for Arthur, she is a partner who intimately understands this world, its pace, and the psychological toll it can take. This time, the transaction goes through and Arthur buys a Porsche GT3.

Most of KMTX’s employees now work at Vibe. The Sales and Marketing teams are based in the United States, while the Tech and Product teams are based in France. Arthur has gone back to his roots and moved with Valentine to Aix-en-Provence to be closer to their families. Although he takes his children to daycare in the morning, he devotes his weekdays to work and is not always home in the evening. On weekends, however, he dedicates his time to his children, even if he allows himself to check the previous day’s numbers over his morning coffee. He makes one or two trips to New York each month, where he stays in a hotel.

Vibe generates $16 million in revenue in its first year and raises a $22.5 million Series A in February 2024. One evening, Arthur talks with Valentine, who is pregnant with their second child.

“The numbers are good,” Arthur tells her.

“What’s the plan? We need to decide what to do now,” she answers.

“I don’t know if we’re going to sell the company. Maybe it’ll be an IPO. But it’s a company I’m going to keep and build.”

“Then the answer is clear. We need to move to New York,” Valentine concludes.

*

When Arthur and Valentine walk through the sliding doors of the store that summer in 2025, Arthur looks at his wife and says, “There’s only one time in your life when you go to Walmart for the first time.” They have settled in Manhattan with their two children, and Valentine has put her legal career on hold because she does not have the credentials to practice law in the United States. She is using this career break to look after their children, but has no intention of remaining in that situation indefinitely.

Vibe generates $46 million in revenue in 2024 and is on track to reach $100 million in 2025. Every quarter, Arthur sends a business update in a newsletter to a select group of investors and a handful of M&A executives. By staying on their radar, he can accelerate the fundraising or sale process when the opportunity arises. That is how Vibe raises a $50 million Series B in two weeks in September 2025.

Hiring accelerates following the new funding round. Arthur looks for three qualities when hiring a new employee: impact, ambition and urgency. The welcome pack illustrates this well. Every new employee receives six cans of Red Bull, a black Vibe cap, four David protein bars, and three packs of Zyn Menthol. Arthur then defines an outcome to achieve, provides the context, and throws the person into the deep end.

“Boring visual,” Arthur comments on Slack when he spots a visual that has just been posted on social media. Those who need structure and diplomacy quickly drown. Those who thrive in chaos and come back with strong opinions and results stay. Arthur not only thrives in chaos, he is uncomfortable when things are going well. His employees regularly complain that they do not celebrate enough.

In December 2025, Arthur is meeting with his production team to brainstorm an advertisement. He has always been inspired by the humorous videos Maurice Lévy, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Publicis, produces at the end of each year. With his team, they wonder how they could tap into a cultural moment of the year, and think of American Eagle’s controversial “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans.”

“What if we dressed Arthur up as Sydney Sweeney?” one member of the production team says.

“Go for it. I’m in,” Arthur answers.

The team rewrites the script to promote Vibe and Arthur ends up dressed as a blonde with a large bust. The ad racks up several million views and it takes Arthur a week to get the glue off his chest.

Vibe pulls off another marketing stunt when, for its first billboard in San Francisco, the team decides to display the skull of prominent investor Marc Andreessen with the tagline, “Target Marc on TV.” The campaign is picked up everywhere on X and by the Wall Street Journal. Numerous industry executives and people close to Franck send him screenshots. Vibe enters another dimension.

In March 2026, Arthur receives a LinkedIn message from the head of M&A at a major company. Arthur has just begun a Series C process and has no intention of selling Vibe, but agrees to talk. During the meeting, he realizes that discussions have already taken place at the highest levels of the company and that this is a serious offer. Arthur therefore decides to convene Vibe’s board a few days later to tell them about the opportunity.

*

Arthur sits behind his computer, listening intently as the board members take turns speaking on Zoom. They all seem interested in the proposal, and one comment particularly catches Arthur’s attention. “I’ve seen founders with offers on the table who chose not to sell and ended up regretting it. You can’t not look at it. For your children, for your employees,” Nirav Tolia, the co-founder and CEO of Nextdoor, tells him.

Arthur brings in Qatalyst, a highly respected investment bank, to help drive up the bids. That is when Walmart enters the picture. At the first meeting with the American giant, Arthur and Franck are surrounded by people from the M&A team and one of Walmart’s business units. The conversation starts cautiously. The two partners walk them through Vibe’s trajectory, explain their technology, and share their vision. Two hours later, the partnership between the two companies feels like an obvious fit and everyone agrees to move forward.

Arthur summons Vibe’s directors and asks them to meet at the company’s New York offices. For three days, they lock themselves in a room to answer the 1,500 due diligence questions about the business. Pizza boxes, donuts, and empty coffee cups pile up on the tables. Vibe has been built with artificial intelligence at its core and its processes are meticulously documented. They use Claude to extract all the information they need and get answers in five minutes that would otherwise have taken two days.

Walmart wants to move fast. So does Vibe. The two companies set a goal of announcing the deal during Cannes Lions, a festival that brings together the biggest names in global advertising. They have one month to turn the term sheet into a definitive agreement. On the morning of June 23, Arthur is in Cannes when a new message appears in his inbox: “Your document has been signed.”

A few weeks later, Arthur is sitting at his desk in his bedroom in Aix-en-Provence. He creates his profile on the company’s internal platform and discovers his new title: VP Product Management, Walmart Connect Revenue. He then joins a video call with Walmart executives. He is still wearing his black Vibe cap, although he plans to trade it for a white Walmart one. When they ask him whether he would like to organize a party to celebrate the acquisition, Arthur answers “No, we’ll have a meeting in September to present the roadmap.”

Notes:

1. First of all, thank you to Arthur for the time and trust he has granted me over the past few weeks. I would also like to thank Franck Tetzlaff, Kevin Louzoun, Valentine Berquet and Daniel Jarjoura for our conversations and for reviewing this profile.

2. These profiles illustrate the work I do with entrepreneurs as a storytelling advisor, ghostwriter and writer. If you need help building and telling your story, you can reply to this email.

3. If you enjoyed this piece, you can support it by liking, commenting, and sharing. It helps me a lot to gain visibility on Substack and beyond.

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Nicolas Dessaigne closes his laptop. He’s sitting next to Julien Lemoine, his co-founder, and the plane the two entrepreneurs are on is about to touch down on the tarmac of San Francisco International Airport. They have spent the whole flight coding and polishing their pitch. A few weeks earlier, they had applied to join the startup accelerator Y Combinator with their startup, Algolia, and had been invited in for an interview. They didn’t want to leave anything to chance, and searched the internet far and wide for the trick questions that might be waiting for them at the big meeting.

The next day, Nicolas and Julien arrive at Y Combinator’s offices in Mountain View. Before going into the building, they take a photo next to the white-and-orange Y Combinator sign standing out front. Three partners are waiting for them in a room. There’s Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, Harj Taggar, and Kat Manalac. Just as the two engineers are expecting to launch into their pitch, Paul Buchheit asks them a question.

“What do you do better than Swiftype?”

Swiftype is a competitor of Algolia’s that had been accepted into one of the accelerator’s earlier batches.

Nicolas and Julien look at each other. They dive into a long technical answer, then follow it up with a demo of their search tool, before leaving the room with mixed feelings.

That evening, a new email appears in their inbox. Harj Taggar tells them they haven’t been accepted. He has no doubts about their ability to build a product, but he isn’t convinced by their market.

Nicolas and Julien still make the most of their time in Silicon Valley to meet other entrepreneurs. They have booked a hotel for a week and lined up a string of meetings. Most go nowhere, except for one evening, when they meet a fellow Frenchman, Guillaume Luccisano, then VP of Engineering at the startup SocialCam.

Guillaume has been paying $2,000 a month for a search solution that doesn’t work for him, for far too long.

“If you can do better, I’ll give you the $2,000 a month starting tomorrow,” he tells Nicolas and Julien.

“But it’s a prototype, it doesn’t work,” they reply.

“Doesn’t matter. Let’s test it,” Guillaume says.

The next day, as they watch the data come in, they realize the engine won’t handle the scale. They tell the team to stop everything and promise they’ll be ready in two weeks.

*

A year earlier, in 2012, Nicolas rings Julien’s doorbell. They had noticed a recurring problem on Stack Overflow, a forum for developers they browsed regularly: how to build an internal search tool for mobile applications that could work offline. But that day, Nicolas and Julien aren’t meeting to talk about that idea. They’re there to define the culture they want to build in their future startup, and they agree on the kind of people who will join Algolia: employees who take initiative and are “owners”. They drew on the book Freedom, Inc. by Brian Carney and Isaac Getz, which they’d both read. Plenty of companies stifle their employees’ initiative, and they had both seen it, together, in their previous jobs.

Though he comes from a family of entrepreneurs, Nicolas begins his professional life as an employee. His great-grandfather was a wheelwright who started doing electrical work between the World Wars. His grandfather created the company after the Second World War, and his father grew that company to about forty people. But Nicolas has no interest in taking over. He’s drawn to math in school, goes on to study engineering, and after a year and a half in Tokyo doing research, starts his career in 2001 as an R&D software developer at Arisem. The company is quickly bought by Thales, and it’s there that he meets Julien, then an R&D software engineer. Together, with a small budget and small teams, they manage to turn patents into products. Nicolas tells himself that if he ever builds a company, it will be with Julien, because he has the rare combination of being a super-smart engineer and having a complete understanding of the product and the market.

In 2006, Nicolas’s two bosses leave all at once. He doesn’t plan to apply for the role, but his wife pushes him.

“It’s an opportunity, go for the position two levels up. The fewer people above you, the more independent you’ll be,” she tells him.

Despite his fear that he isn’t the right match for the role, Nicolas puts himself forward and becomes Arisem’s Chief Technology Officer for four years. In 2010, he’s about to join the startup Exalead, where Julien had gone a little earlier, but the company gets bought out by Dassault right before he joins. Julien comes to Nicolas’s place to warn him a reorganization is underway, and offers him the role of Director of Product Management. Nicolas accepts, but after a year, he wonders whether he belongs at this startup, as he ends up spending more time working with Dassault. Julien, who has moved to another company in the meantime, is a little further along in his own thinking. He wants to start something and tells Nicolas.

Nicolas is 36 when he founds Algolia with Julien. They both have kids and mortgages, and decide to give themselves one year—not more, but not less either. Julien, who Nicolas considers the stronger engineer of the two, takes the role of CTO. Once they’ve agreed on the culture of their startup, they throw themselves into the product. Within a few months, their mobile search tool is a small feat of engineering. Unfortunately, Nicolas and Julien struggle to find customers. In January 2013, they decide to pivot to a search tool for web applications and roll out a first beta in March. That’s when they apply to Y Combinator and test their product with SocialCam’s team in San Francisco.

*

Two weeks after SocialCam starts using the product again, Nicolas and Julien are back in France. Guillaume calls them.

“I love the prototype, let’s put it into production,” he tells them.

“But we’re still in beta, we’re not ready yet,” they reply.

“If it crashes, it’s fine. I’ve got the other system,” Guillaume concludes.

Then he adds: “If you raise, I’d love to invest.”

Algolia doesn’t have many customers yet, but is starting to build some good references—SocialCam chief among them. “The moment we started saying, ‘You know, this big startup in the US is already using us,’ everyone looked at us differently,” Julien recalls. Investors especially. In 2013, Algolia closes a €1.2 million funding round in three months, with Alven Capital, Index Ventures, and Point Nine Capital.

Most of Algolia’s customers are American companies, and Nicolas and Julien travel there regularly to grow their market. They meet a number of Y Combinator alumni along the way.

“You should apply again,” someone tells Nicolas one day.

“Why? We just raised,” he replies.

Nicolas and Julien decide to apply a second time to join the California accelerator, even though the idea doesn’t sit particularly well with their investors. They don’t want to give up 7% of the company, and Nicolas and Julien agree with them that they’ll negotiate to stay under 3%. They spend less than half a day working on their pitch. This time, they set the technology and the product aside to focus on their traction and their numbers. They know by now why they’re the best: their search engine’s answers are the fastest and the most accurate. The second interview goes well, and that evening, while they’re at the hotel, Nicolas’s phone rings. It’s Paul Graham.

“Congratulations, you’re in,” Y Combinator’s founder tells them.

“Our investors don’t want to give up 7% of the company. That’s too much dilution. Is it possible to bring the stake down?” Nicolas asks.

“Take it or leave it,” Paul Graham says.

“Sorry, we’ll pass,” Nicolas replies.

*

The next day, Nicolas and Julien enter SocialCam’s offices in San Francisco. The sound of a basketball hitting the floor echoes. Michael Seibel, founder and CEO of SocialCam and a Partner at Y Combinator, stands there with a basketball in hand. The two entrepreneurs tell him about their choice not to join the accelerator.

“Wait, are you entrepreneurs or not entrepreneurs? Do you think that’s the right call?” Michael asks them.

“We’re convinced we should join,” they reply.

“So what’s the problem? You’re running the company. Your investors are there to give advice, but it’s ultimately your decision,” Michael says.

Their conversation lasts an hour before Nicolas and Julien step away into an office for fifteen minutes. They decide to reverse their decision and tell Michael, who calls Paul Graham. They need to show up Wednesday in Mountain View for kickoff. Right away, Nicolas emails his investors to set up a call first thing the next morning, Europe time. He tells them their decision to join Y Combinator despite the 7% dilution. “Okay, let’s do it,” his investors reply, without hesitation.

In January 2014, Nicolas, Julien, and the startup’s four employees gather in a rented house in Menlo Park. Their batch begins and they’ll spend three months together. They work all day, sometimes all night, seven days a week. The team ships new features every day. When something doesn’t work, they try something else. When it works, they double down on it. “That set the pace for everything after,” Nicolas recalls. At Y Combinator, they’re mentored by Garry Tan and Sam Altman. The goal is to grow revenue 10% a week, which they pull off. Demo Day approaches.

During the batch’s last week, Nicolas spends the entire week working on his fundraise and polishing the pitch he’ll give in front of the hundreds of investors there that day. Y Combinator stays open day and night for rehearsals. On the day itself, Nicolas has two minutes thirty to pitch their company. It’s an intimidating exercise, but Algolia has already raised money and doesn’t need fresh capital. The company still raises a $1.3 million extension to bring American investors onto the cap table. “For a tech company, it’s easier to sell into Germany from San Francisco than from Paris,” Nicolas admits.

Nicolas and Julien take long walks through the streets of Menlo Park regularly. It’s during one of these that the question comes up of settling in the Valley for good. They’re convinced they need a founder in the US. They don’t want to hire someone to run that market while they stay in Paris. “Exalead made that mistake,” Julien recalls. But in two months, Julien is about to become a father for the second time, so it isn’t the right moment for him. They decide that, for now, the team stays in France. “From that moment on, I knew I was going to live in San Francisco. It was the logical move because our market was global. The question wasn’t San Francisco or not. It was when,” Nicolas recalls.

Back in Paris, the goal is to build up their team, their product, and their market before crossing the Atlantic. Nicolas and Julien rent a small apartment in San Francisco, dark, with just one bed but with internet, and Nicolas goes out there two weeks out of every two months.

At the end of 2014, Algolia is doing $1.2 million in Annual Recurring Revenue with only nine people at the company. The startup raises an $18.3 million Series A a few months later, led by Accel. This new funding seals Nicolas’s permanent move to the US, while Julien stays in Paris. It’s a natural continuation for Nicolas, but a fresh start for his wife and their three children, ages two, five, and eight.

*

When Audrey Liese, Nicolas’s wife, steps up to the customs officer at San Francisco International Airport, he asks her a question she isn’t quite sure she understands.

“Why is your husband extraordinary?”—a reference to the O-1 visa.

“Because he married me,” she replies, smiling.

The customs officer doesn’t react.

Audrey agreed to move to the US right away, even though it meant putting on hold the parental daycare project she’d been building in the northern suburbs of Paris. Without a green card, she can’t work, and devotes herself to her children, who are homeschooled.

Algolia gives up the shabby little San Francisco apartment they’ve been renting for a bigger one, available to the whole Paris team. It has two bedrooms, five single beds, and a spreadsheet to manage the rotations. Julien goes out for two weeks every two months, and the whole team makes the trip regularly.

The California stays forge strong bonds between the French sales team and engineers. When Algolia moves into new offices on Rue de Rivoli in Paris, Nicolas and Julien are pleased to see sales sitting right alongside engineering in the open-space. Their buyers are CTOs, they need to speak their language. At a quarterly off-site for the technical team, the engineers propose a workshop of their own: “How can we better support sales at quarter-end?” A bonus tied to Algolia’s revenue, along with stock options, is rolled out for every employee.

By 2015, Algolia has 1,150 customers, up from 400 a year earlier. The “owner” culture is working. During a talk given by the company’s first salesperson in Paris, someone in the audience assumes he’s the CEO, which delights Nicolas. But everything is moving fast. The processes that worked six months ago no longer do, and Nicolas’s role isn’t the same anymore.

A first break appears once the startup passes ten employees. New hires don’t naturally absorb the “owner” culture, and on a flight to San Francisco, Nicolas writes a wiki page for the first time to formalize the concept. A second break comes when the company passes forty employees and a layer of middle management appears. Until then, there were five “leaders” and thirty-five individual contributors. The “owner” culture had been misread, and had curdled into something anti-management. Nicolas and Julien have to do deep work on Algolia’s values, drawing on Kim Scott’s Radical Candor and Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc.

In 2017, Algolia counts Twitch, Product Hunt, and Stripe among its clients, and opens new offices in New York, Atlanta, and London. While on a roadshow for a new funding round, Nicolas finds himself in a café with an investor and his Chief Financial Officer. When the meeting wraps up, his CFO looks surprised.

“I didn’t recognize you,” he tells Nicolas.

Nicolas had steered the conversation in a very direct, assertive way, a sharp contrast with how he could come across with his own employees.

“I gave way too much weight to other people’s opinions. When I had a strong opinion, there were times I’d say nothing, just to leave room for others to speak. To new employees or managers, I could come across as indecisive, and so not like a good leader,” he admits. “When I disagreed with them, I’d tell myself, ‘Wait, he’s got way more experience than me on this. I have to trust him.’ Today, I wouldn’t do that anymore.”

*

Nicolas scratches his head, looking at the financial reporting on his screen. He’s about to launch into a roadshow for a Series C at an $800 million valuation, and has just finished putting all his company’s numbers back in order after his CFO’s resignation. The CFO had pictured himself staying at Algolia through a potential IPO, but Nicolas had told him he’d need to bring in a new CFO for Algolia’s next stage. “We raised the Series B too easily. We were running our finances like a Series A company. The substance was there, but the form wasn’t,” Nicolas recalls.

Nicolas is going through the numbers for the first quarter of 2019. The $2 million gap between the revenue targets he’d set and the figures on his screen remains, despite his new Chief Revenue Officer’s assurances two weeks earlier that they would hit their goal. When Nicolas shares the numbers with prospective investors in March, they freeze and decide to take their time before making a decision. The deal is finalized in July at a $650 million valuation.

By September, the money is in the bank, but Nicolas has no CFO and doubts his CRO. He doubts himself too. “Did I make hiring mistakes? Would someone with more experience do a better job than me?” he asks himself.

A few weeks later, Nicolas draws a T on a sheet of paper. On one side, he writes “for.” On the other, “against.” He looks up, his eyes fixed on some invisible point. He takes his ego out of the equation and asks himself, with a bit of distance, whether he’s the right person to take Algolia further. Julien walks through it with him.

Despite the ocean between them, the two co-founders talk a lot. When they don’t talk, things go worse, and that’s no coincidence. So every Wednesday morning, they block off four hours together in their calendars, with no agenda.

Nicolas has few examples and little data on what a successful CEO transition looks like. But after a few months, he arrives at a conclusion. No, he isn’t the right person for Algolia’s next stage.

“I was in a low-ego mode. I didn’t trust myself enough. It’s funny, LLMs actually helped me put words to this whole trusting your gut thing. Your gut is like an LLM fine-tuned with a massive amount of data on your life, your company, everything. If it tells you something’s off, you have to trust it. I wasn’t trusting my gut.”

Once his decision is made, Nicolas talks with CEOs who’ve been hired into that role, and with founders who’ve stepped down as CEO. Over the course of the interviews he runs with candidates, one person stands out: Bernadette Nixon. Covid hits at the same time, but Nicolas doesn’t reconsider his decision. Nicolas and the company’s executives—only a handful of whom know what’s happening—hold ten meetings with Bernadette without ever actually meeting her in person. Seven months pass between the start of the search and the new CEO taking the role.

Nicolas initially plans to stay operational at the company, but not going into the office lets him gain some distance from the situation. Every day, he goes for walks with his wife around the neighborhood. “I found it so beautiful, being with my kids,” Audrey recalls. “I told him, ‘If you can live a little of that, it’ll be good, you’ll always find something else after.’” He eventually decides to step back from operations, but stay on the board.

One Sunday evening in May 2020, he’s sitting in front of his computer. He reads his email one last time. In about twenty lines, he announces he’s stepping down as CEO, and invites everyone to a Zoom meeting the next day. He hits Enter.

Nicolas spent two weeks preparing this moment alongside Julien, Bernadette Nixon, and a few executives. Normally, he prefers to go with his instinct. But this time, a script running several pages, with parts for Nicolas, Julien, and the new CEO, is drafted up in a Google Doc.

Three months later, it’s his last day at Algolia. He’s at home, in his office under the stairs, when someone knocks on the window. He gets up and sees his assistant, croissants in hand.

*

A few weeks after leaving Algolia, Nicolas’s phone rings. It’s Michael Seibel.

“What are you doing this winter?” he asks him, before offering him a spot as Visiting Partner at Y Combinator.

More and more founders building devtools are applying to the accelerator, and Nicolas has the perfect profile to guide them. He’s technical, but has deep management experience. Michael and Nicolas had also built a particular kind of relationship back in Algolia’s early days, when Nicolas invited Michael and his wife, passing through Paris, to lunch at home with his family instead of meeting at a café.

“He’s very even-keeled. He’s not going to yell or get too emotional, and he’s seen hiring and firing executives and dealing with boards. And when something is really, really important, Nicolas’s exclamation point screams louder than other people’s,” Michael says.

Nicolas had invested as a business angel in startups while he was at Algolia, but had never had time to actually spend with them. Supporting young startups was already something that drove him. At Y Combinator, he could do it, but at a much larger scale. He talks to his wife, who, despite the promise he’d made not to work for two years, agrees without hesitation.

He meets three other partners, in the middle of Covid, to make sure everyone’s aligned. Then he goes through onboarding.

“Onboarding?” he thinks to himself. It had been a while.

As a Visiting Partner, he sits in on interviews with startups applying to join the next batch. He has instant credibility thanks to Algolia, but is learning a different job on the fly. “I realized how much I didn’t know,” he says. One day, he comes out of an interview run with Dalton Caldwell, one of the partners. Nicolas loves the startup they’d just seen, but Dalton says no. In other interviews, where Nicolas would have said no, Dalton says yes. He learns that at an early stage, he should invest in the founders, not their ideas. He also realizes every startup is unique. “I realized how bad I was at the start because I was giving advice that applied to my company.”

A year later, Michael offers him a full-time partner role.

“Give me a day,” he replies, surprised, though he already knows he’ll say yes.

He accepts the next day.

Y Combinator runs four three-month batches a year, and each partner works on two of them. For three months, Nicolas is available to the founders in his batch. He runs office hours, takes part in events, and helps startups prepare for Demo Day. During the other three months, he spends his time reviewing applications, interviewing candidates for the next batch, and traveling to conferences and events to represent Y Combinator. On top of this, he remains available year-round to alumni.

“If I see a startup building something that isn’t local, I encourage them to come to SF. If you’re building an AI devtool, come to SF. Not because you’ll raise more money, but because the density of great founders is incomparable anywhere else in the world. You’re the average of the people around you. That’s YC’s biggest value add.”

On vacation, Nicolas spends thirty minutes with the founder of a fifty-person startup who reaches out urgently, with only three months of runway left. They haven’t seen each other in two years, and the company can’t manage to raise. “Based on your numbers and the situation, nobody’s going to want to invest. The first thing is to extend the runway. Get down to fifteen or twenty people and buy yourself at least a year. Then figure out how to give the company another shot,” he analyzes.

Another day, he’s in office hours with Alex Toussaint, co-founder of Tornyol, which builds micro-drones to kill mosquitoes. For several weeks, the startup has had a problem: it can’t find mosquitoes in San Francisco. Nicolas mentions it to his wife, who finds someone who can supply them with a jar of mosquito larvae. A few days later, Nicolas meets Alex and hands him the muddy jar.

“He always tells us the truth. We’ve built this relationship of trust where he can tell us pretty hard things, and we’re never going to take it badly. He has this mix of business sense and emotional intelligence,” says Anh-Tho Chuong, co-founder of Lago, a startup that went through Y Combinator in 2021 and builds an open-source billing platform. “You need to own sales. You’re the one who closed the most deals, so you’re the expert now,” Nicolas told her one day.

“He’s the best person there is at making others shine,” Julien says.

In 2024, Nicolas attends a conference organized by Y Combinator. Brian Chesky is on stage. His talk wasn’t planned, and the Airbnb founder has to hold the audience for thirty minutes. He starts telling the story of what went wrong at Airbnb, and the planned half hour turns into more than two hours of unbroken monologue. The 150 hand-picked entrepreneurs in the room hang on every word. He describes how, to save Airbnb during the pandemic, he went from a mode of delegating to experienced executives to one where he immersed himself in the deepest level of his company’s operations. Paul Graham, who is there, writes an essay about it afterward and coins the term “Founder Mode.”

“Whatever founder mode consists of, it’s pretty clear that it’s going to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company only via his or her direct reports. ‘Skip-level’ meetings will become the norm instead of a practice so unusual that there’s a name for it.” Paul Graham writes.

It’s a revelation for Nicolas. The story is a mirror of his own, and the conference lets him put into words what he lived through in 2019. If he’d had this framework back then, he would never have left.

*

A long line forms outside Station F in Paris, despite the beating sun. 700 people are expected this June afternoon, and the campus’s visitor hall fills up fast. Inside, two stands face each other, and guests help themselves to food and drinks. The entrepreneurs and engineers in the crowd rarely look older than their early thirties, and most of the conversations breaking out in small clusters are in English.

Meanwhile, Nicolas is in a green room downstairs, getting ready. He’s talking with Alexandre LeBrun, CEO of Ami Labs, which raised a billion dollars in March. There’s a gray sofa against the wall, and two armchairs on either side. On the table along the facing wall, bottles of still water, sparkling water, soda, and juice are lined up.

Nicolas and Alexandre LeBrun cross the concrete corridors to reach the Master Stage, a 352-seat auditorium. Off to the side of the stage, Nicolas reads his notes, looks up to watch the auditorium filling in, then checks his phone. He’s about to kick off YC Startup School Paris.

The lights dim. He walks out alone and stands still. He’s wearing an olive-green Henley, faded black jeans, and a pair of gray loafers with a flat white sole. In his hand, he holds an orange clipboard with a few sheets of paper.

“It’s good to be here, in France,” he says.

Everyone applauds.

He has a French accent, but the ease of someone used to speaking in a language that isn’t his own. He doesn’t search for his words.

“How many of you aren’t from Paris?” he asks.

Almost everyone raises a hand.

“How many of you aren’t from France?” he follows up.

Three-quarters of the room raises a hand.

He runs through the afternoon’s program before bringing out Alexandre LeBrun for the first talk. He sits down in the orange armchair, legs crossed, and settles into a thirty-minute conversation.

Above, people talk and network. They eat, grab a drink, and carry cups of popcorn in to catch the talks. Nicolas, below, moves from one conversation to the next, on AI and on the founders’ entrepreneurial journeys.

For the day’s last session, a Q&A is held on the Master Stage with the partners in attendance.

“How do you build an entrepreneurial ecosystem like SF’s?” someone in the audience asks.

The four partners glance at each other.

“Move to SF,” Nicolas answers, laughing.

When he steps out of the auditorium, a dozen people rush over with questions. For two hours, the crowd never thins. A half-circle forms tightly around him, and as soon as one person leaves, two more arrive. He shakes the hand of everyone who asks him a question and gives them a smile. Some just want a photo with him, others stay to listen. For every question, he listens, makes his case, then gives his answer. An assistant pushes through to hand him a liter bottle of San Pellegrino, but he barely touches it.

At 9pm, he poses for a handful of photos, then heads down to the green room. The ringing in his ears fades to silence. He eats some petits fours, then a Partner and their assistant join him. They debrief in the elevator on the way up to the exit. When the doors open, the Paris campus’s visitor hall is empty and the lights are off. Nicolas heads back to his hotel.

Notes:

1. First of all, thank you to Nicolas for his time and the trust he has given me over the past few weeks. I would also like to thank Ludovic Granger for connecting us, as well as Julien Lemoine, Audrey Liese, Michael Seibel, Anh-Tho Chuong, and Alex Toussaint for our conversations and for reviewing this profile.

2. These deeply reported profiles illustrate the work I do with entrepreneurs as a storytelling advisor and ghostwriter. If you feel like you’re sharing your CV when you should be telling a story, I can help.

3. If you enjoyed this piece, you can support it by liking, commenting, and sharing. It helps me a lot to gain visibility on Substack and beyond.

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4. I’m already working on my next profile. If you don’t want to miss it, you can have it delivered straight to your inbox.

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In the departures hall of Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport, Edouard Caraco checks his emails on his iPhone. His wife is beside him. They married a few months earlier, and are about to leave the cold of a Parisian winter for the warmth of the African continent. He locks his phone, then opens it again. For six months, not a single day has passed without an exchange with his lawyers, a new twist, a piece of bad news to absorb.

Edouard hands his boarding pass and passport to the attendant and walks down the jetway. He finds his seat. When the plane’s wheels leave the tarmac, the pressure bears down on his shoulders. His head starts to feel heavy, his throat tightens, shivers run up his back. He is cold, then hot.

“My body was releasing the pressure.”

*

One day, when he is thirteen, Edouard is walking down the street with his brother Arthur. In the distance, they spot Luis Fernandez, the Paris Saint-Germain manager, a club they both support.

“Come on, let’s go ask for an autograph,” Edouard says.

“We’re not going to bother him, that’s Luis Fernandez,” his brother replies.

He hasn’t finished the sentence before Edouard is already gone.

“Edouard has had something singular about him since he was very young,” his brother Arthur recalls. Along the sidelines of football pitches, it is not unusual to see him deep in conversation with someone three times his age. Something that puzzles, and occasionally worries, his parents.

It is on those same pitches that he meets Timothée Linÿer. “He was much better than me,” Edouard remembers—a line he returns to often when talking about Timothée. Something binds the two young footballers quickly. They both have boundless ambition. At middle school, they gather at Edouard’s parents’ place to sketch out businesses they might one day build together. Early on, they become each other’s believers, convincing one another they will make it, that nothing will stop them.

At twenty, Edouard spends several hours a week cleaning the toilets of London apartments. He is not a cleaner, he is a student at the London School of Economics. With Timothée, they have launched a company alongside their studies called Keyweee, a short-term rental management service in London. They have fifty properties under management, mostly belonging to other students. The idea came to them when they struggled to rent out their London apartments every time they went back to France for holidays.

In London, they build an environment designed for success. Like them, the friends they make are ambitious. Edouard and Timothée are not fond of school. They would rather clean Keyweee apartments than polish a lecture-hall bench. They lock themselves away for a month in southwestern France, at their grandparents’, to grind through exams and catch up.

When they finish their degrees three years later, they decide to start their careers at large companies. They want to understand office life, and to build some structure before diving back into entrepreneurship. Besides, some of their friends are signing serious contracts, while they are cleaning toilets and managing apartment key handovers. Edouard joins Amazon as an Associate Partner Manager. Timothée enters JP Morgan as an Investment Banking Analyst.

Every day, Edouard and Timothée call each other. They miss their freedom. If there is ever a time to take risks, it is now. They don’t want to become prisoners of their own comfort. Later will be too late. After just two months, Edouard quits Amazon. Timothée follows a few months later. They join the two co-founders of Wing, a French logistics startup for e-commerce, tasked with developing the business in London in exchange for equity. After two years, they decide to leave. They want to play the entrepreneurship game in full. More risk, more reward.

Before starting something new, the two friends separate for the first time in years and spend two months apart. Edouard travels alone to Central America. A friend joins him, then his brother. He takes in the landscape and immerses himself in Irvin Yalom’s The Spinoza Problem. Timothée is on the other side of the world, in India, but the two friends keep calling each other, talking through their next business. When their friends were in college and going out, they were building Keyweee. Now, as those same friends watch promising careers open up, the pair is out of work, drawing unemployment, and moving back in with their parents.

*

The alarm goes off one morning in March 2018. Edouard gets up, pulls on his shorts, his jersey, his sneakers, and joins Timothée for a run through the streets of Biarritz. Every day of that month in southwestern France begins this way. Then the workday starts.

A few weeks earlier, they had written on a whiteboard the names of companies they could compete with. The first name comes immediately: Vente Privée. There will not be a second. Edouard and Timothée had discovered e-commerce during their time at Wing. Thinking through how to compete with the French online discount giant, they reach a conclusion: “They are very good at selling to our mothers, not to our girlfriends.” They each put in €500 and launch The Bradery.

In Biarritz, at Edouard’s grandparents’ place, their days are devoted to the new project and to sport. Timothée sets up the Shopify. He takes inspiration from what large merchants are doing in the United States. With €1,000 in capital, spending €200 on a theme is out of the question. He picks a free one. He also takes care of developing The Bradery’s Instagram page. Edouard, on his side, spends his days convincing brands to give them a chance to sell a few of their pieces on The Bradery. “Nothing could stop us,” he recalls. He approaches brands as a co-creator, not a vendor. Rather than spending his days building automated email sequences with an uncertain message, he picks up the phone and calls. The human touch makes people want to help.

Sometimes, at five in the afternoon, Edouard and Timothée have nothing left to do. It scares them. They wonder what more they can do. That is the difficulty of starting from a blank page. There is everything to do and nothing to do. The to-do list does not fall from the sky. You have to be able to create your own success. One more message, one more call, one more post. Every day, they repeat the same tasks, often without result. And then one day, without anything having changed, through the simple repetition of an action, an opportunity appears.

After a month, The Bradery makes its first sale. They sell eleven products from the brand Maradji. Convincing other brands remains difficult and the two entrepreneurs run one sale every three weeks in the months that follow. One of those sales ends with zero products sold and they invent an excuse for the brand to avoid looking like amateurs.

The French football team has just been crowned world champions in July 2018 and Edouard and Timothée decide to sell French national team jerseys, unbranded, with two stars, which they will produce themselves. Not entirely legal, not entirely their business model, but Edouard pushes. “He took risks,” his brother recalls. “I am more risk-averse, I thought it was too risky at that stage of the company. But every time he took a risk, it paid off.” Three hundred jerseys are sold. The Bradery gains a little visibility through the operation and tests its processes. Customer service, confirmation emails and tracking are working well.

Two months later, Edouard and Timothée are received at the office of the Gérard Darel group. A mutual contact has gotten them a meeting with the brand’s CEO and his right-hand man. They are welcomed more out of courtesy than anything else. From the start, the two young entrepreneurs try to hide the lack of maturity of their company. After three minutes of conversation, they are challenged on those very weaknesses they had tried to conceal. They leave drained, but with feedback. They each take ownership of processes to improve and are given their chance a few weeks later. They make 75 sales of a Pablo coat, one of the group’s brands. Very little for the company, but it unlocks everything for The Bradery. The Instagram-Shopify-logistics execution works and the credibility of that first sale makes conversations with other brands easier.

The Bradery joins the LVMH “La Maison des Startups” programme at Station F. Their offices on the Parisian startup campus also serve as a warehouse. They spend their weekends there, storing, packing and shipping parcels. Edouard lines up back-to-back meetings with brands. “What on earth did he tell them,” Timothée wonders every time Edouard comes back from a meeting saying “They’re on board.” Every afternoon, Edouard and Timothée lock themselves in a room to call customers, gather feedback, and find out which brands they would like on the platform. They pick up customers little by little, by every means possible. One Sunday afternoon, they go to La Vallée Village, a large outlet shopping complex outside Paris, to hand out flyers. “No need to go to La Vallée Village anymore, you can find your favourite brands on The Bradery,” they read.

Despite the significant efforts, their business grows slowly. One evening, a dinner is organised between Edouard, Timothée, and a few people who have been advising The Bradery since the beginning. The two entrepreneurs are thinking about hiring, and therefore raising. “It’s too early, you haven’t proven the thing, there is nothing to raise on right now,” they are told.

A few days later, Edouard and Timothée meet at an Italian restaurant in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. Just the two of them this time. They want to take stock of their situation.

“What do we do?” they ask each other.

The answer takes time to come. When it does, it is the same for both of them.

“We stop and do something else.”

They shake on it.

*

When they arrive at the office the next morning, a few emails are waiting in their inbox. Two brands have responded to their outreach and Edouard and Timothée want to honour their commitments. The sales go slightly better than expected, and other brands give their agreement to appear on The Bradery. Without noticing, they had thrown themselves back into the adventure. After generating €200,000 in sales in their first year, they hit €1 million in 2019 and raise €1.3 million from Otium Capital, Secret Fund, and Dominique Romano. They don’t structurally need the money. The Bradery’s customers pay directly on the app during flash sales, and The Bradery pays the partner brands’ stock in a second step. The money comes in before it goes out. But the raise will allow the young team to hire, and to benefit from the investors’ network to get introduced to new brands. To think that, a few months earlier, they were on the verge of giving up.

In 2020, Covid strikes. The uncertainty hanging over the global economy clears quickly for the two entrepreneurs. On one hand, people understand they will keep getting paid and start buying more and more online. On the other, brands understand their stores will not be reopening any time soon and that stock sitting idle in their warehouses needs to move.

One Sunday morning in November 2020, at 8:45am, Edouard is at his computer. He is in a house in Biarritz with his girlfriend and her mother. France is in its second lockdown. In fifteen minutes, a Sandro sale goes live. Since the early days of The Bradery, it is the best-known brand sold on the platform. Like every morning, Edouard logs into Shopify to check the traffic on the site. He stares at the number on his screen. 17,000 people are waiting for the sale to launch. He calls Timothée, euphoric. The two friends can’t believe it. In the house, Edouard announces: “If we sell more than a million euros, I am going to buy caviar.” He spends the morning pacing the garden, earphones in, making calls to fill the ambient silence he can no longer control. At eleven, he checks the sales total. Another number appears on the screen: €1.2 million. Edouard gets behind the wheel of his car and sets out to buy caviar. By evening, the figure has reached €1.6 million. 15,000 orders placed in a single day. The euphoria does not last.

The stock from the previous sale arrives late, on the same day as the Sandro stock. Shipping 15,000 orders is already a challenge, but now they have to dispatch two sales at once. The parcels fall several weeks behind schedule. Christmas is approaching and the messages from customers waiting for their orders are sharp. Sometimes cruel. “You are good for nothing,” that is what the young customer service employees read every day in the complaints addressed to them. For every aggressive message, Edouard and Timothée pick up the phone and call the customer to defuse the situation.

From the outside, the signs of success are obvious. Sales are larger. Brands on the app are better known. The number of Instagram followers never stops growing. But from the inside, Edouard and Timothée feel like they are living in a house of cards, where the slightest gust of wind could bring everything down.

*

One morning, while scrolling through his competitor Vente Privée’s app, Edouard is surprised to see a Bash sale appear. For several weeks, he has been trying to convince the brand’s founders to offer their products on The Bradery. “We don’t have stock,” they tell him repeatedly. He takes a screenshot, goes to a florist, and spends €200 on a bouquet of white roses which he sends to the brand’s founders. When they receive it, they read the note accompanying the bouquet. “Dear Barbara and Sharon, if you no longer wish to be stuck between a toolbox and a plastic bin, call me. Edouard.” The afternoon passes. Nothing. He wonders if, this time, he has gone too far.

“His tenacious side, sometimes aggressive, is both his strength and his flaw. It makes him polarising. For people who lack confidence, it throws them off,” his brother says. “Every winner took their shot,” Edouard prefers to tell himself.

When evening comes, his phone rings. It is the Bash founders. “The next sale is yours.”

In 2021, The Bradery generates €50 million in sales, mostly from France. Edouard has breakfast and lunch every day with brands he works with or would like to work with. He often meets at Carette, near his apartment at Trocadéro. He arrives with his hair still wet, greets the owner and sits down. He is never on his laptop, always on the phone or face to face with clients, looking for new opportunities.

A small part of The Bradery’s business also comes from the Benelux and Spain. Edouard and Timothée had tried to accelerate in Europe by opening offices in Barcelona and Amsterdam, but managing the expansion from France proved too complicated. They still had too much to do to conquer the French market before entering others, and close the offices after a few months.

“When things don’t go as planned and it’s time to question yourself, I know I never need to remind Edouard. He has already done it. He sets the bar very high,” says Timothée.

Two feelings compete in the two friends at this point. They would like to generate a little cash for themselves—a reward for all the work put in over three years—but also to keep pushing.

One public holiday in the summer of 2021, representatives from Zalando walk through the doors of The Bradery’s offices to discuss a potential acquisition. Around the small lunch table, certainly not suited for a meeting of this kind, Edouard and Timothée are surrounded by twelve people. A several-page document with a summary of the situation, which they know by heart, is handed out. For ten minutes, a cathedral silence falls over the room. Edouard and Timothée glance at each other sideways, on the verge of bursting out laughing. They pretend to highlight passages. The culture clash proves too great for the deal to survive.

Showroomprivé, with whom they had already started talking a year earlier, as well as Vente Privée, also enter into discussions to acquire the startup. The process is exhausting, but a deal takes shape for the two entrepreneurs. Vente Privée withdraws, and Edouard and Timothée, getting along very well with David Dayan, the co-founder and CEO of Showroomprivé, decide to sell 51% of The Bradery’s capital. The two companies are competitors, but complementary. The deal will allow Showroomprivé to bring a younger market into its group, and The Bradery will benefit from the weight of Showroomprivé, which generates one billion euros in revenue, to go after new brands. The Bradery keeps its offices and its independence. In three years, they will be able to sell the rest of their capital.

Edouard and Timothée cannot imagine turning down such an opportunity on the eve of their thirties. The Bradery is their baby, but they could build other businesses afterwards. Edouard has always been inspired by the diversity of Richard Branson’s entrepreneurial path and his Virgin group, in aviation, music, telecommunications. The acquisition would also consolidate the freedom he is so attached to.

But after a year and a half under Showroomprivé’s wing, the two friends realise that things will not go as planned.

*

During the summer of 2024, Edouard, Timothée and their lawyers receive an email from Showroomprivé’s lawyers. The end of the earn-out period, at the end of 2025, is approaching, and according to Showroomprivé’s management, The Bradery is not sufficiently structured for the founders to leave at the end of that period. The second part of the deal is being called into question. Edouard and Timothée disagree, but find themselves at an impasse. Certain points in the initial deal document do not protect them sufficiently. The two co-founders blame their lawyers for not having warned them more; they change lawyers once, then a second time. Long negotiations begin.

For a year, Edouard loses all his bearings. The lack of perspective robs him of all freedom. He feels prisoner of a situation he cannot control. He does not know if he will stay or if he will leave. “I went to work every morning with a knot in my stomach,” Timothée recalls. For a year, the two friends talk to their lawyers every day. During the day, their energy goes into operations. The Bradery continues to grow—its revenue has tripled since 2021—but the teams are asking questions about their future. They do not know if they will be absorbed into Showroomprivé and lose their two co-founders. In the evening, Edouard and Timothée devote what little energy they have left to talking with their lawyers, often by phone, by video call, or sometimes in their offices. The news is rarely good and Edouard struggles to keep his composure.

“I tend to let myself be carried away by my emotions. I talked too much. The upside is that you are someone straightforward. But in a negotiation, where there is a more complex set of emotions, I was not good. I could feel myself falling into the trap, but I fell into it anyway. That frustration put me in a difficult position. What you get out of frustration is rarely positive. It never serves your interests. You have to stay calm, silent. I learned a lot.”

“Timothée is much calmer than me in that kind of situation. He is smart enough to know that when I have talked too much, he knows that I know it. Sometimes I could feel he wanted to tell me. But we know each other so well. He does not need to say things for me to know what he wants to say.”

Edouard finds comfort with his friends, to whom he confides. “I must have been unbearable for most of the people I spent time with. Fortunately I had my friends and my wife to talk to. Without them it would have been impossible.”

Despite his fever on the plane, he manages to disconnect, with his wife, on the African continent—the lack of signal in certain regions helping him switch off in the first few days. He comes back refreshed, more motivated than ever to find a solution.

After countless daily back-and-forths with the lawyers for a year, Edouard and Timothée decide to buy back 100% of their company’s capital. To do so, they need to raise €19 million in debt. A tour of the banks, accompanied by their investment bank, begins. They face a first rejection. A banking pool has to be assembled, and it only takes one bank to pull out for everything to collapse. Every day, Edouard calls his brother. One day, the beginning of a solution seems to take shape. The next day, it falls apart.

“Up until now, everything we had done had gone well, without too many obstacles, all things considered. This is the biggest ordeal Timothée and I have been through. We never fought. And yet I drove him mad with my paranoia. I was convinced the worst was certain. That must have been a weight for him. He was an incredible support, someone I could lean on. And because he knows my weaknesses, he has the right words to lift my spirits. That is what works when you are a duo. When he was not doing well, I was doing well and I lifted his spirits. And when I was not doing well, he was doing better and he motivated me again. We pulled each other through.”

In November 2025, the deal is not finalised but is on track. A letter of intent was signed a few weeks earlier. The two friends are about to own 100% of The Bradery’s capital again, at a new valuation of €43.6 million. For the first time in a year and a half, Edouard breathes. That day, he is on his way to the maternity ward. His daughter, Giulia, has just been born. His family is there. Timothée too.

Notes:

1. Thank you to Edouard for his time. Despite a packed schedule, we spent several hours together over the past few weeks. Thank you to Timothée Linÿer and Arthur Caraco for our conversations. GDIY and TheBoldWay podcasts were also invaluable groundwork.

2. These profiles illustrate the work I do privately with founders as a storytelling consultant and ghostwriter. As a founder, you tell stories every day. If you don’t do it well, you miss opportunities to hire talent, attract investors and sign customers. If you feel like you’re sharing your CV when you should be telling a story, reply to this email.

3. If you enjoyed this piece, you can show your support by liking, commenting and sharing. It helps me a lot to gain visibility on Substack and beyond.

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A television screen stands behind Jean de La Rochebrochard. It is 11 a.m., and it reads Participant 24/100—01:32. The thermometer in the vast Halle de La Machine, in Toulouse, registers 35 degrees. Jean is dressed accordingly. He wears a white V-neck t-shirt that reveals a tan line at the bottom of the biceps, navy chino shorts that show his shaved legs, and a pair of cream suede loafers. His IronMan cap is set aside, but the Garmin stays on his left wrist. Standing, then sitting, then standing again, he listens carefully to the hundred entrepreneurs who have come from France, Belgium, and Spain to pitch him their projects.

A few days earlier, he had read a comment online: “Why are you wasting time pitching to Jean? You should be talking to your customers.” So Jean does not want to disappoint the founders who made the trip. A bottle of water, coffee, and two cans of Red Bull fuel him—the night before, he had switched hotels late in the evening because the air conditioning was broken.

For ten hours, Jean moves from healthcare to defense, education to hardware, music to nutrition. He listens more than he speaks, but his feedback is sharp. It catches founders off guard, makes them think, sometimes alters a trajectory. It is 7 p.m. when the marathon ends. His partner hands him a box of DeVilmar cookies. The first bite, in the now-empty hall, brings him back to life.

The following Monday afternoon, Jean is back behind his screen, camera on. From two to six, from his house in the south of France, he runs through twelve twenty-minute meetings with founders. He does the same the next afternoon, and repeats the pattern every week. By the end of each meeting, his decision is made. Either he invests, or he passes. Within twenty-four hours, he sends an email with a final answer. Sometimes a term sheet.

Like the day Jean is in Barcelona and gets a message from Antoine Martin, the co-founder of Zenly and Amo: “You have to meet the team at Sourced, their model is really interesting.” Jean writes that same day and meets the CEO Eiso Kant, who has come up from Madrid. That night, he sends him a term sheet. “Look how crazy a VC sending a term sheet over Whatsapp,” Eiso Kant texts his co-founder.

*

One evening in 2010, Jean shares a beer with Pascal Mercier, a fundraising adviser well known in the Paris scene. They had met by accident on Twitter, when Jean had forgotten to mention him in a retweet. Mercier had pointed it out. “I felt like a bit of an idiot,” Jean recalls, before editing his tweet. “Come tell me about your fundraises sometime,” Mercier slipped him in a private message.

“I want the number one to hire me, and the number one is you,” Jean says at that first meeting. He knows it is a one-shot opportunity and he does not want to miss it.

In school, Jean spent each day waiting for the next one. He repeated the year in seconde, repeated again at university, and landed in a master’s in International Strategic Management at the Sorbonne after being turned down by the finance programs he had aimed for. Alongside his studies, he ran AdWords campaigns and built websites for his father’s restaurant-owner friends. After sending out a hundred emails with the same cover letter and the same CV, he found an internship at a consulting firm in the middle of the subprime crisis. He stayed a year and a half, worked on fundraises, then went out on his own with a former colleague for two years.

“I only work with you if there’s a fit,” Mercier replies. “And to see if there’s a fit, we need to grab a few beers over the next few months.”

After four meetings and another beer with the team, Jean joins. “I didn’t hire Jean. Jean picked me as his boss,” Mercier laughs.

One afternoon, as Jean walks him through a deck, Mercier interrupts him several times.

“Yes, I know,” Jean keeps saying.

“No—and when you don’t know, say so,” Mercier tells him before continuing. “You think it makes you smaller, but it doesn’t. It shows that you’re powerful. That you can afford it. Only the chef says ‘I don’t know.’ The sous-chef says ‘I know, I know, I know.’ You’ll see, when you say you don’t know, people will say ‘wow.’ And they’ll be thrilled to explain.” Years later, Jean still tells this story on the podcasts he goes on.

He thrives in this small team of four, and discovers he is good at selling. Sometimes, before meetings, he slips into a corner of the room to read and concentrate, alone in the silence. Other times, Pascal Mercier has to calm him down, when he starts scribbling a flurry of ideas on a scrap of paper in front of clients, full of energy.

During this period, Jean grows closer to the entrepreneurs. One early morning in 2013, at six o’clock, Alert Us—Antoine Martin’s first project, a geolocation app for teenagers’ safety—launches with great fanfare on Vente Privée. That day, the team is flooded with emails and, among the first, a mysterious message.

“Nice work guys, this is killer — Jean 2LR.”

Then, fifteen minutes later, a second email lands in the thread.

“That said, there’s a lot of work to do on the UX.”

The next day, once the storm has passed and after some quick research on what UX means, Antoine Martin takes the time to write back to this stranger.

“Thanks for the feedback, what do you mean?”

“I’m five minutes away, I’ll come grab a coffee in fifteen,” Jean replies.

Fifteen minutes later, he taps on the ground-floor office window. He sits down, takes a few sips of his coffee, and rolls through his feedback. For a year, he drops by unannounced every month to help the team.

The closer Jean gets to the entrepreneurs, the more distant he becomes from investors. He resents the way they invest, the way they behave. For some time now he has wanted to invest himself, and he has clear ideas about how to do it. He wants to make a lot of deals, take a lot of risks, invest the American way. He applies to venture funds, but no one hires him. A fundraising adviser turned investor, that is not how it works.

One day, he meets Martin Mignot, an investor at Index Ventures, who introduces him to an unusual crew: Nicolas Colin, Alice Zagury, and Oussama Ammar. The three had launched The Family six months earlier, and from those first conversations with the team Jean picks up a unique energy. Since the investors don’t want him, he will go to a place where he can build a fund of his own, or at least move up a level.

“I can pay you now, but in three months, I don’t know. I’d rather you knew that,” Oussama Ammar warns him. Jean has just turned thirty, has little money set aside, and is now expecting his third child over three and a half years. He resigns two weeks later, without telling his wife how uncertain the situation is.

*

Jean stands still in front of a hundred entrepreneurs. Two palm trees, brushing the glass roof above him, rise on either side. Oriental rugs cover the floor, a small wooden table sits to his left, his MacBook on it. He has not yet shed his investment-banker habits and wears a shirt and a blazer. Slides scroll across the four screens behind him that read as one; he is giving a workshop on fundraising.

Jean helps the startups in the accelerator with fundraising and sales. With Pascal Mercier, he had learned to sell. At The Family, he learns to speak on stage, and he begins to write. In speech and on the page, he does not soften his words. His vocabulary cuts, so do his positions. “Sometimes you don’t communicate well. The world isn’t black or white,” Pascal Mercier warns him, still watching over him.

The more investors Jean meets, the more his frustration grows. He finds that they don’t reply to emails, that they show up late. “I want to show them what investing is. I want to crush them. I want to be number one,” he tells himself. He resented investors for being arrogant in private; he was going to be arrogant in public.

He runs into that same lack of responsiveness and interest when he goes out fundraising with Captain Train. It is what pushes him to send an email to Xavier Niel, whom he has never met, to suggest he invest. Niel accepts the meeting with the CEO, a meeting Jean decides not to attend.

He keeps a low profile in the months that follow, but does not let Niel forget him. Every so often he sends him deals—after Captain Train, Niel also invests in Wedoogift, another startup Jean brings to him.

“Hey, when are you coming to see me?” Niel writes him a few weeks later.

In March 2015, Jean walks past the columns at the entrance of Iliad headquarters, the parent company of Free, in the eighth arrondissement of Paris. He takes the lift to the eighth floor and settles on a grey couch in a meeting room. Jean has taken the afternoon off. He does not know how long this will last, or why he is there. He hopes, without admitting it to himself, that it is about Kima. He has one question, and he is saving it for the end.

Niel walks in. He is not in his usual white shirt but in a t-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. He is unshaven, it is a week off. The conversation runs for two hours. Jean and Niel talk about The Family, about investing, about Captain Train. Niel asks a lot of questions.

“One of the things he does really well, like every great entrepreneur, is ask a lot of questions. These are people who are good at their decisions because they ask an enormous number of questions. They take in a quantity of information per minute that has nothing to do with anyone else, and they build up a form of strategic discernment that’s exceptional, that others don’t have,” Jean says.

At the end of the two hours, it is his turn to ask his. He knows that Jérémie Berrebi, who runs the venture capital arm of his family office, is on his way out.

“And, by the way, Kima? How is it going now that Jérémie is leaving?” he asks.

“Oh you know, Kima, there are still the two analysts, it’s running,” Niel answers.

A memory comes back to Jean. His meeting with Jérémie Berrebi a few years earlier, when he had thought to himself, “That guy has my dream job, a job I will never have.”

*

Two weeks after that meeting, Jean’s phone rings. The head of Niel’s holding company is on the line. “Jean, we know you’re very happy at The Family, but Xavier wanted to know whether you’d be interested in joining Kima?” Jean accepts, but does not forget to set his terms. Six months of negotiations follow over compensation. Jean waits it out and refuses to ask Niel to step in to speed up his arrival. “If he hires me, it’s not so I can be a pain,” he tells himself.

When Alert Us becomes Zenly in 2015 and goes out fundraising, Jean is not yet officially at Kima. The founders decide to spend a few days in London, where venture investors are more active. An hour before departure, Jean announces he is coming along.

After two hours and fifteen minutes, the Eurostar pulls into St Pancras. It is morning. The two founders have only one meeting on the books for the next forty-eight hours. Once they reach the apartment a friend of Martin’s has lent them, Jean settles in his corner, opens his laptop, and sends twenty emails to London investors in his network. Each one starts the same way: “I know you won’t do it, but for your information…” He unlocks about ten meetings that way, but the partners they meet would rather invest smaller tickets, directly, since Zenly is not yet generating revenue. Kima, which usually invests €150,000, is going to have to lead the round—a few million.

Several emails are exchanged with Niel that summer.

“I don’t know what you usually do. To co-lead the round, you would need to meet them first,” Jean writes.

The next day, Niel writes back.

“But you’ve met them, and you’re saying it’s a future hit?”

Then, two hours later: “I trust you :)”

In September 2015, Jean moves into an office on the second floor, a few floors below Xavier Niel. He has no job description, no roadmap. Months pass and the two have still not seen each other again. A mix of trust and distance settles between them, which is uncomfortable for Jean. But however rarely they meet, Xavier Niel is always available and answers his emails at lightning speed. How does he do it? Jean wonders. Since arriving at Kima, he has let his calendar overrun him. Two investments a week takes organization.

A few weeks after Jean’s arrival, Alexis Robert is the one waiting at Iliad. He had already met the other members of the team, and Jean was the last person he was meant to meet. Robert had spent a long time wondering how to dress for the meeting. Suit or casual? He had finally settled on a navy t-shirt. When he saw Jean coming toward him in the distance, he wondered if he had made a mistake. Jean is in a suit—the only time Robert will ever see him dressed that way.

Alexis Robert has been a coder since he was a child, and joins Kima after several entrepreneurial ventures. He is applying for a mission that is unusual for a venture firm at the time: build the firm’s tech and automate its processes. But his role quickly outgrows, and by far, what it was at the start.

Jean and Alexis Robert are yin and yang. One fouls things up, the other cleans them up. Jean is the public face of Kima—the external CEO. He goes on podcasts and tends to his content. Alexis Robert is the hidden face of Kima—the internal CEO. He creates the reports for Niel’s holding company and runs the team. That balance is what Kima rests on today.

Jean is a solo flyer. He is at ease in small teams and likes to execute on his own. Interactions cost him energy. This lean model, “in Xavier Niel’s image,” is what he loves about Kima. Everyone is autonomous, and that is a condition for joining the team. “I’m a poor manager.” Jean does not take his employees by the hand, does not give feedback, does not run team meetings or one-to-ones. Everyone works from home. He moves between Paris, New York, and the south of France, and the work is mostly asynchronous. There have been stretches where Jean and Alexis Robert did not see each other for months. Just as Xavier Niel did with him in his early days, Jean sets up with his employees a mix of trust and distance that can throw people off.

When people criticize Kima’s model—investing in a very large number of startups—Jean takes a wicked pleasure in answering: “We’re everywhere, but we’re in every good deal.”

Two investments a week do not allow Jean to be proactive with the entrepreneurs he backs, but he always makes himself available.

Sometimes in the spur of the moment. Like when Alexandre Louisy, the co-founder and CEO of Upflow, in which Kima invested, is at his New York office. “Alex, I’m downstairs, come grab lunch,” Jean writes. Lunch lasts twenty minutes, over a sandwich or a salad.

As with his employees, Jean does not coddle his entrepreneurs, does not take them by the hand, and gives them his time only when they need it. His goal is to optimize the ratio between the time he gives and the impact he has. That comes from clear-sightedness, followed by frank, direct conversations. With more than a thousand startups in Kima’s portfolio, he has seen every problem there is, which gives him an unusual capacity for discernment. He does not expect entrepreneurs to take all of his recommendations at face value, but he watches what they do with them. If they do not react, he moves on.

“Entrepreneurs—who they are, what they become, what keeps them up at night—it moves me, it feeds me, it makes me want to be in the trenches with them. I’m good when things are going badly. I’m not good when everything is fine. I’m not the kind to send confetti,” he explains.

One summer day in 2016, Jean is at the wheel of a Jeep heading for Coachella. He is with Michael Goldenstein, a young hire running growth at Zenly in the United States. In the trunk, several bags hold three thousand PopSockets stamped with the startup’s logo, which Jean had ordered a few days earlier on Alibaba. A party is being thrown at a house rented by the young influencer Jake Paul, with whom Zenly has struck a partnership. This is a few weeks before the acquisition of the French startup by Snap closes, and the two founders are stuck in Paris. Jean steps in for them at the last minute, takes Goldenstein along to spend several days at the festival sticking the accessories onto influencers’ phones. Forty-five days later, Snap acquires Zenly for over 300 million dollars.

These flashes, these last-minute trips alongside the entrepreneurs, Jean loves them. He feels alive. Useful.

*

A few months later, he is sitting at his computer screen. He does not move from it all day, he has broken his foot playing squash. Unable to do much else, he decides to put his immobility to use. He had given a workshop at The Family on productivity, which he had called Human Machine, but he had never managed to articulate his thinking properly. Writing a book might let him do it. He decides to dedicate two hours a day to writing, but nothing comes out. His own nature, that of a disorganized person, resists him. If he writes, it is also to learn.

Back on his feet, he decides to isolate himself for four weeks in an Airbnb in Los Angeles to finish the book. Every day, he wakes up at five in the morning, works through his emails until eight, writes until two, takes meetings until six, then ends his day going through his emails again. By the end of his stay in California, the book is done. On the back cover, he writes: “Always strive to become the best version of yourself.”

“Getting him to fill in a CRM is always a struggle,” Alexis Robert laughs.

Jean gets 200 emails a day—about twenty pitches, ten updates from the entrepreneurs in his portfolio, ten documents to sign online, and portfolio management.

He looks at all of them. His job is to pick out the weak signals, which is what technology cannot do. Reading a pitch takes him between one and four minutes. Investing in a startup that fails is part of the job. Not investing in a startup that succeeds is annoying. But what he does not want is to lack the access to invest, to lack the choice of saying no.

Only then does he reach for, eight times out of ten, the shortcut he uses the most on Superhuman, the app he uses to manage his email: ;. “No deal FR” or “No deal EN” opens up, and the message appears: “Hi, thanks for your email, unfortunately that won’t be an opportunity for us, sorry.”

Niel is known for answering all his emails quickly. Jean adopts the same rule and builds systems to make sure he never breaks it.

*

One summer in 2021, Jean is waiting in a private jet on the tarmac at San Francisco airport. He is early. A message comes up on his phone. It is Xavier Niel.

“Heading to In&Out

You want something?”

“A double double :) thanks,” Jean answers.

“Protein style or the real one?

With or without onions?

Anything else?”

Thirty minutes later, Niel hands Jean a hot burger.

“Cool, it’s still warm!” Jean thanks him.

“It is still warm because Xavier waited to finish his burger before lining up to get yours,” the person with Niel whispers to him.

Jean keeps the moment and files it away with the others. There is one he has been repeating to himself ever since he started spending time around the French billionaire: the more power you have, the kinder and more generous you must be.

Jean’s job is to bring serenity to Niel—by making deals, by performing, by being there for the entrepreneurs. He is Niel’s proxy with them. When entrepreneurs call him, they should feel as if they are talking to Niel. And when Niel tells them something, Jean had better have told them the same thing.

“I tell myself regularly that I’m not good enough. Not for him, not for the entrepreneurs, not for my fiancée, not for my children. My neurosis is not being good enough. With Xavier, I ask myself that question every day.”

For Jean, there are three qualities that matter for working with Niel: honesty, likability, and efficiency—on top of performing. Jean cultivates them every day and makes sure he is ready to answer the message he will receive after the next big funding round of a startup: “Did we invest in this startup at the seed round?”

*

In January 2024, Jean and Pia d’Iribarne are coming out of a lunch with an entrepreneur, and the first New Wave fund—on which they have both been Partners for three years, and on which Xavier Niel and Antoine Martin are founders and LPs—is a success. Mistral AI, Poolside, and BeReal are among the early investments. A second hundred-million-euro fund is about to close, but something on the way out of the restaurant brings Jean back to the same realization. He can no longer work with his partner. He has known for six months, but says nothing. Each new frustration, he closes up. Until that moment, a few days after the lunch, when Jean tells d’Iribarne he is not joining her in the second fund. The amicable split he proposes is brushed aside. A few days later, he is fired.

The press picks up the story. Rumors circulate about New Wave, about him, about his personal life. His reputation takes a hit, but Jean does not react. “It’s a major mistake. At the time, I don’t understand it. It’s not the Jean I know,” Antoine Martin says. “His way of resolving the conflict was to give everything up.”

Niel reads him the riot act: “You messed up. You’re doing this a month before closing the fund. I get it, but you could have handled it better. You should have split earlier and negotiated your shareholder agreement better.”

Jean takes it.

“I dragged my feet. I didn’t want to face the truth. I should have dealt with it faster, and been more combative. I don’t like to come with my problems, I like to come with solutions. I compensate, I stay quiet. It’s the fear of being rejected. The fear that the moment I show a weakness, the person across from me has less admiration for me. So you pretend to always be there, always up to it. When something is wrong, you don’t say so. You lock your emotions away. For a long time I did that, and breakups were brutal because people didn’t see them coming.”

“This crisis reconnected me to something important. I always talked to people about body and mind. You have to sleep well, eat well, exercise well. For the mind, always be in a dynamic of learning, of improvement, open to feedback. But I had completely neglected the importance of the soul, which is the only thing left when everything falls apart. I reconnected to that. And to the idea that the first thing to do, in your daily life, is to learn to let go, to forgive yourself, to love yourself, and do the same with others.”

*

A few months later, Jean breaks the surface. He is gasping. His Garmin reads 160 bpm and he can hear his heart pounding in his ears. He is eight minutes behind on the 1:14 swim he had planned with his coach. He had aimed for 1:50/100m but his watch shows an average of 2:03. He runs toward the transition zone, pulling off his goggles and his swim cap, yanking the cord that unzips his black neoprene wetsuit. He had rehearsed the move many times. He is now in a red trisuit with Jean de La Rochebrochard printed on the back, above an angular flat design representing a tiger, a horse, and a dragon—the three Chinese signs of his children—designed as a heart. He puts on his visored helmet, pulls on his black compression socks, climbs onto his Canyon Speedmax—also red—and sets off for 180 km on the roads above Nice.

He checks his bike computer often. First climb, 270 watts, under control. Second climb, 260 watts, something is off. He had planned to be at 158 bpm but he is stuck at 153 with twenty watts less. Dark thoughts settle in. He plays back, on a loop, a scene from an episode of the Netflix series Tour de France: “Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.” When he unclips from his bike, his watch reads 5:30 for the second leg. He laces up his white Nike Alphaflys for the 42 km run, planning to hold a pace of 4:45/km. When he crosses the finish line, 10 hours, 23 minutes and 15 seconds after the start, his body has taken control over his thoughts. He raises his fists, closes his eyes, and stops the run on his Garmin.

Jean had never done much sport before this. He had tried squash and climbing, but had quickly given up. A friend who had just moved to Aix-en-Provence had convinced him in 2021 to join his cycling group. In 2023, he raced his first half-ironman and finished it not without difficulty—he realized he could not really swim freestyle, and finished the swim in breaststroke—six minutes behind the planned 5:30. But he is hooked. He finds himself in the effort and the resilience the sport demands. “I grind people down.”

He also loves the data that pours out of every gadget he buys to keep improving: speed, power, heart rate, cadence, elevation. It reminds him of the Google Sheets of the entrepreneurs he watches go by at Kima.

One day, he shows up at Zenly’s offices and spends four hours diving into the startup’s numbers. He opens a Google Sheet, drops in stacks of raw data, and turns it into a story: organic reality, retention, the comparison to the market.

For three years, Jean spends his time on the road, on the shoulder of the road, or in a pool. Chronic tiredness has become normal. His calendar revolves around his sessions, and doing everything at once becomes hard. He sets the Ironmans aside and replaces them with fifteen minutes a day of high-intensity interval training and a few swim sessions whenever he can. A new project also takes up his time.

In 2025, he partners with Emmanuel Seugé, the founder of Cassius, to deploy the American VC’s third fund, which invests at the intersection of consumer and tech, in repeat European founders looking to take on the American market. Jean has known Seugé since 2017. They had crossed paths on deals, co-invested, ended up in the same scrapes. Emmanuel is based in Atlanta and, like Jean, he prefers the trenches to the cocktails. “You see what people are really made of when things go to hell,” Jean says.

*

Spring 2026, he walks along the harbor in Bormes-les-Mimosas. The sky is clear and the sun is bright. The week is winding down, it is Friday at noon. One might think he is talking to himself, but he is not. He is dictating voice notes with Wispr Flow, which sends them automatically to Superhuman, where they come out written in his tone of voice. The emails go out one after the other: “I’m trying to be worthy of the boss.” Before heading home, he sits down and looks out at the Mediterranean stretched in front of him. He meditates, then he prays.

Notes:

1. Above all, thank you to Jean. We spent long hours on the phone these past weeks and, as you may have noticed in this profile, he confided, unfiltered. Also, thank you to Pascal Mercier and Antoine Martin for welcoming me into their offices, and to Alex Louisy and Alexis Robert for our discussions. A few podcasts helped me get a sense of Jean’s story too: GDIY, Makrs, Silicon Carne, and Little Big Things, whose visual I used for my illustration. Finally, Jean’s blog was a treasure trove of anecdotes and sharp thoughts.

2. These deeply reported profiles illustrate the work I do with founders, helping them build and tell their narrative. If you’d like to know more, here are three steps to start with.

3. If you enjoyed this piece, you can show your support by liking, commenting, and sharing. It helps me a lot to gain visibility on Substack and beyond.

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All eyes were fixed on the right side of the stage. Mobile phones were raised above the crowd. Some stood on tiptoe trying to make out a face, even just a silhouette of hair.

The taller ones could spot a small circle of four people deep in conversation. There was Xavier Niel, the billionaire entrepreneur behind Free and Station F; Roxanne Varza, the campus director; Clara Chappaz, then Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence; and the man everyone was waiting for: Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, who was about to take the stage.

On February 11, 2025, Altman appeared at Business Day held at Station F as part of the AI Summit. He would occasionally slip into the transparent soundproof booths of the Share space to take calls from the United States. His former associate turned rival, Elon Musk, had just made a $100 billion offer to acquire OpenAI.

On stage, dressed in a charcoal suit, a matching polka-dot tie, and tan Oxford shoes, he wore the red French Tech rooster proudly on the lapel. Interviewed by Chappaz, he praised France at length: “The engineering talent, the entrepreneurial spirit, the belief in energy, which I expect will become super important as we continue in this AI journey. France has got a lot of advantages.”

As he stepped off stage, Altman exchanged a few words with the next speaker. It was Yann LeCun, former Chief AI Scientist at Meta and now founder of AMI Labs.

Earlier that day, French President Emmanuel Macron had taken the stage. A crowd gathered around him, as it does at each of his appearances on campus. Behind him stood the leading figures of the French tech scene: Arthur Mensch of Mistral AI, Eleonore Crespo of Pigment, Florian Douetteau of Dataiku, Clément Delangue of Hugging Face, and many more. “We have everything we need here to succeed in AI,” he declared.

That afternoon, the world was watching Paris, and Station F was its epicentre.

*

In 2014, a new message appeared in Varza’s inbox while she was on holiday in the United States, her home country. The director of Station F was born in Palo Alto, California—something that catches you off guard the first time you hear her speak since her French is that flawless.

The subject line was intriguing: “Are you having trouble with jet lag?” The sender was Xavier Niel, whom she had met a few years earlier when she was a journalist at TechCrunch. The French entrepreneur had been working on a project for two years and asked Varza whether she would be willing to benchmark the world’s most successful incubators for him. She agreed, not knowing where any of it would lead.

A year earlier, Niel had acquired the Halle Freyssinet, a historic railway building constructed in the 1920s near the Gare d’Austerlitz, in Paris’s 13th district. “I have this big building, I’m going to put 1,000 startups in it.” That, in its entirety, was his pitch to Varza.

Vague as the proposal was, Niel’s objective was clear: to put the French tech ecosystem on the map. As he put it at a conference in 2018, “we are often very good, but we are not good at image,” speaking of France. After a few meetings, Niel asked Varza to lead the project. “I want to do everything,” she replied.

Varza took the opposite path from most French and European startups. She arrived from California in 2005 for a university exchange in Bordeaux as part of her French literature degree, fell in love with France first, then with its tech ecosystem. Everything still had to be built. She started working for Business France, tasked with encouraging Silicon Valley companies to set up in France. She documented her adventures on the blog TechBaguette, chronicling “the adventures of a Silicon Valley native discovering the tech startup scene in Paris, France.” Her writing talent and deep knowledge of the French tech scene led her to become editor of TechCrunch France in 2010, before joining Microsoft’s incubator in the Sentier district of Paris in 2012.

Varza holds three passports: American, Iranian, and French since 2019. Beyond her experience in tech, which makes her the ideal profile to run a campus of this kind, she embodies the multiculturalism that Niel values and wanted to bring to Station F. More than 70 nationalities are represented on campus today, and from the start Varza established English as the primary language for communications.

In 2014, the first stone of the campus was laid by the then-president François Hollande. When Niel presented him with the project, the President replied “But are you certain there are 1,000 startups in France?” Niel had never asked himself the question, but it turned out there were, with 11,000 applications submitted in the first year.

Three years of construction work followed before the building came back to life, with a launch scheduled for April 2017. In the meantime, Varza visited Google Campus in London, The Factory in Berlin, and The Box in San Francisco, drawing inspiration and working out what kind of support Station F would offer its startups. It was during a conversation with the founder of Algolia that something clicked. “He did not like the idea of Station F,” she recounted in an interview with British media outlet Sifted. “He was like, ‘I’m never going to go there. And let me tell you why. My company is 60 people. I really want my brand, I don’t want to be competing with people around me for talent...’ He really broke it down for me, and that helped me understand the disadvantages of being in this kind of space and what kind of company would actually benefit.” The campus would therefore support early-stage startups with fewer than 15 employees.

After a three-month delay caused by a flood—the three basement levels were inundated due to a badly installed pipe, and since all the technical infrastructure was underground, the damage was severe—Station F launched in all its glory on June 29, 2017.

A white square stage was set up in the middle of the Share space, one of the three areas that make up the campus. Varza began her speech in front of the 2,000 people gathered around her. First in English, then in French, she worked the crowd. Niel, discreet but warmly applauded during the acknowledgments, watched his protégée from the front row alongside Jean-Michel Wilmotte, the architect behind the hall’s transformation. Anne Hidalgo spoke next, then President Macron, elected two months earlier. He closed his ten-minute speech by declaring, in English: “Entrepreneur is the new France.”

In normal times, the Share space is quiet. It is a vast two-storey hall whose scale you can’t grasp straight away. That is, until you look up. On either side, across the glass walls of both floors, logos accumulate: Mistral AI, OpenAI, Kima Ventures, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, La French Tech. Dozens of companies, investors, campus partners, each with their own small patch of territory. On some days, up to 2,000 people pack in for an event, and the artwork at the center—a multicolored mountain of modelling clay in aluminum, sculpted by Jeff Koons—disappears into the crowd. On other days, in absolute silence, an entrepreneur crosses the hall with purpose, MacBook under their arm, on their way to meet an investor. Sometimes a foreign delegation follows a guide, often Varza, heads tilted back. Here, you always look up.

On the other side of the Passage Louise, the atmosphere shifts. In the Create space, there is life. People standing, conversations, movement. Along the sides, it is no longer the logos of investors you see but those of the incubators: Microsoft, Meta, HEC, CentraleSupélec, LVMH, Binance, and many more. For nine years, the biggest names in global tech, the flagships of French industry, and the country’s leading schools have each run a programme here. Thirty in total, including three in-house, and 3,000 desks. This is where entrepreneurs spend their days, but not their whole lives. “The people who come to Station F, we want to keep them for six months and then have them go elsewhere,” Niel said a year after the campus launched.

Through a second passage, Anatole, accessible from either side, the Chill space, better known as La Felicità, reveals itself. It is a 4,500 square-meter food court created by restaurant group Big Mamma, open to the general public. A long queue regularly forms along the building on evenings and weekends. “I didn’t even know there was a startup space here,” you sometimes hear. Red oriental rugs cover the floor, and rail cars form a corridor through lush greenery, leading you toward several dining areas. There are pizzas, pastas, and cocktails at the bar. On a weekday afternoon, in a corner, you might spot Ivan Zhao, co-founder and CEO of Notion, talking with a handful of campus entrepreneurs. In the evenings, groups of friends and colleagues gather for happy hour. Private events are hosted by investors and companies in the two mezzanines. On weekends, families come for lunch.

A few kilometers away, following the Seine, you reach Ivry-sur-Seine, in Val-de-Marne—the département where Niel was born. To help entrepreneurs accepted into the programmes find housing, particularly those coming from abroad, Station F developed Flatmates there, a coliving space with 600 units. Housing costs in Paris have skyrocketed.

*

The offices of Nicolas Desruelles, head of support programmes at La French Tech, a division of the Ministry of Economy and Finance, are on the second floor of the Share zone. From the very start, Niel wanted all public services like Urssaf, the tax authorities, or Bpifrance to be accessible to campus startups. A tax issue? Looking for public funding? You just had to cross the Passage Louise and change zones.

Every day, when Desruelles glances down at what’s happening in the hall, a visit is underway. “I am impressed by Station F’s ability to maintain the reputation of this place. It is the place to be,” he tells me.

One of Station F’s great achievements, and this from the very beginning despite its still-growing fame, has been its ability to attract the most globally influential figures in tech. Like one afternoon in September 2018, all eyes in the Create space were fixed on a small group touring the campus. Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, dressed in a white shirt and white trousers, followed Xavier Niel, in a navy t-shirt and navy trousers, who was showing him around with Varza at his side. By the end of the day, 300 people had gathered at the Master Stage to pose questions to the American entrepreneur in a Q&A session—one of the most inspiring talks, according to Varza.

The first time Varza welcomed a foreign head of state, the president of Argentina, things came together at the last minute and in somewhat of a panic. She was given thirty minutes’ notice before the delegation arrived, and was wearing a pair of torn jeans. The logistics have now been organized to a tee. On average, 4,000 people pass through the campus every day, and the venue hosts 1,000 events a year.

Station F is a place where French political figures like to be seen. For the political class, it is an opportunity to present themselves as champions of innovation to a young population of entrepreneurs. For the latter, it is an opportunity to raise some of their concerns. La French Tech is their way in.

A few years ago, that is how Desruelles found himself in a Parisian car park with civil society representatives and executives from a French startup specializing in parking space rentals. They were there to walk through a user’s journey and assess the risks involved. A very old administrative law was preventing the app from being used in certain categories of parking spaces. The startup turned to La French Tech, which pushed through a decree across the relevant ministries—Economy, Interior, and Labor—to find a solution. Done.

*

Microsoft’s first programme at Station F was called AI Factory and was made up of 7 startups. Among them, Recast AI, the very first campus startup to be acquired, and Hugging Face, the campus’s first unicorn.

Before joining Station F, Hugging Face’s first office was above a ramen restaurant in Paris’s 2nd district. In 2017, the young four-person team joined the Microsoft programme, before moving through those of Ubisoft and then Naver. The startup had arrived with a chatbot project for teenagers, before becoming a globally recognized open source platform dedicated to machine learning. “Station F was super helpful and the creativity and convenience of being able to work together from the same location as so many talented teams in the early days was awesome. Station F is like the lighthouse of creativity and talent in Paris and in Europe,” recounted Julien Chaumond, co-founder of Hugging Face, in an interview for Station F.

Since then, the company has become an important campus partner. It offers mentoring, access to its models, and regularly organizes large events there—like in 2023, when the team brought llamas to the front of the campus, a nod to its Llama model. 2,000 people attended that evening.

In 2025, Hugging Face also acquired Pollen Robotics, a campus startup. Station F is a breeding ground for acquisitions, a central topic at Station F, and more broadly across the French and European ecosystems, one that Varza is keen to push. “We want to see more M&A in our ecosystem, so today we are hosting a dedicated M&A session for our Station F partners and select founders,” she wrote recently in a LinkedIn post.

In October 2025, Microsoft launched a call for applications to join the latest cohort of its programme. Since 2023, the American company’s programme has been renamed GenAI Studio. Its first two cohorts raised a combined total of 65 million euros, and this latest one counts Mistral AI, Nvidia, GitHub, Cellenza, Databricks, and Engie among its partners.

30 startups were shortlisted after an initial screening. Over the course of a full day, each candidate spent an hour in a campus office with two of Microsoft’s cloud solution architects to review their product architecture. Only 20 startups continued through the process, the second part of which took place at Microsoft France’s headquarters in Issy-les-Moulineaux, on the outskirts of Paris. The jury was made up of two representatives from each of the programme’s six partners. Members of Microsoft France’s executive committee were present, and entrepreneurs had ten minutes to convince the jury of their startup’s potential. At the end of this long and grueling process, 15 startups were selected to join the four-month programme.

Each selected startup receives $350,000 in Microsoft Azure credits. “It’s like non-dilutive funding,” Maxime Zarrillo, the programme director, tells me. Beyond sourcing talent early, it allows Microsoft to bring them onto their cloud quickly and see a return on investment within a few years.

Like the rest of the tech world, Station F has been making a strong pivot toward AI for several years now, positioning itself as an essential global hub. 1.5 billion euros were raised in 2025 on the campus, with 80% of those startups working in AI—a broader trend visible across France, Europe, and the world. In 2025, according to a report by Alexandre Dewez, Partner at 20VC, 23% of fundraising rounds and 43% of capital raised involved AI startups. That figure reaches 64% in the United States and 43% in Europe. American investment funds account for 55% of the amounts raised in France.

“When we did the inaugural round in Mistral, I felt a moment in the US where people were saying ‘What’s this AI thing happening in Paris?’” Antoine Moyroud, Partner at the global venture firm Lightspeed, tells me. “Station F contributes to that narrative.”

In February, Station F launched its new in-house programme dedicated to AI: F/ai. To get in, you need a referral—either from Tech Partners, among them OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral AI, or Lovable; or from VC partners, among them Sequoia, Lightspeed, 20VC, or General Catalyst. Those lucky enough to join the new programme have had the opportunity to discuss the future of AI in person with Yann LeCun, prepare the communications around their fundraising rounds with Meta’s former head of communications, and learn how to build a product that keeps users coming back with Lovable’s Head of Product.

The first cohort is 80% repeat founders, one in three entrepreneurs in the programme has already completed an exit of over 10 million euros, and one in two teams includes at least one researcher. A higher proportion of repeat founders is a positive signal for a prominent VC like Lightspeed.

Station F’s achievement, for a campus focused on early stage so far, has been successfully attracting more mature entrepreneurs. Moyroud—who for the past two years has run a masterclass on fundraising best practices for startups in the Future 40, an index grouping the 40 most promising companies on the campus—now helps F/ai programme startups with sourcing and deal-making. This is not just about resources. It is about a powerful network put to work for the startups.

In 2024, Ludovic Granger and Milan Stankovic had been working from their respective apartments for two months when they were invited to apply to Station F’s in-house programme, the Founders Program—a mentorship lasting between 3 and 18 months, costing 259€ per desk per month.

Their startup LeadBay, which helps companies find and convert prospects, had a handful of clients. “I had no particular view on it since it wasn’t a very well-known programme. When we showed up there, it was incredible,” Granger tells me.

From the very first days, the 20 entrepreneurs in the cohort gathered around a table with Niel, who told them he wasn’t intelligent and why failing matters. But beyond the inspiring conversations, it was above all the encounters with other entrepreneurs in the programme that allowed the two entrepreneurs to up their game. To attract the best talent, Station F invites each entrepreneur to recommend others for future cohorts.

One day, an investor from OpenAI’s investment fund sent a message to Varza saying he was stopping in Paris on his way to Berlin. He wanted to meet three campus entrepreneurs. A few weeks later, Granger found himself in one of the campus’s small glass-walled rooms with two other entrepreneurs, in an informal conversation with that investor. Varza then introduced the LeadBay team to prominent American VCs A16Z and Sequoia. “Roxanne has access to every investor on the planet,” he tells me. Not only does Varza help her startups raise funds, she can also invest in them directly. After a year as a scout for Atomico, she became a scout for Sequoia in 2020, where she has made more than 60 investments.

After a few months at Station F, LeadBay crossed the Atlantic and spent three months in San Francisco. After seven unsuccessful attempts, the French startup was accepted into Y Combinator.

At YC, LeadBay was followed by Garry Tan, the accelerator’s CEO. In the first office hours, he asked each entrepreneur what goals they were setting for themselves two months out. The first entrepreneur, who had launched his company a few weeks earlier, announced he was going to hit $600,000. The second, $800,000. Granger, a little further along, and not wanting to look like a small player, raised his target to $1.5 million. “You go home with your co-founder and you tell yourself that everyone here is capable of doing $1.5 million in eight weeks. That momentum, that pace, we didn’t have that at Station F and in France.” Loud ambition is contagious. Granger caught it, and it changed what he allows himself to want.

European founders can be more cautious in how they articulate their vision, according to Moyroud. In the Valley, the whole world converges with the ambition to change it, and they’re not afraid to say so. An ambition that sometimes sits uncomfortably within French and European culture. “I slightly regret the unicorn bashing. Uber and Amazon spent billions for ten years before reaching profitability. Our unicorns, barely having raised 200 million, are criticized for not being profitable,” Desruelles tells me. “Putting companies that haven’t managed to scale on trial is harmful,” Moyroud says.

Many campus startups take flight to the United States. Or at least, that’s the ambition for many of them. The campus’s first unicorn, Hugging Face, is a Franco-American company with headquarters split between New York and Paris. “Between SMEs and large accounts, there is a much bigger middle market,” Zarrillo tells me.

Like Varza, some make the journey in reverse. The campus’s most recent unicorn, Profound, a startup that helps companies become visible in the age of AI search, is based in New York. It began by joining the LVMH group’s La Maison des Startups programme. But unlike Varza, the startup did not settle permanently in the French capital and operates from its multiple American offices, where most of its clients are based.

Today, 75% of LeadBay’s signups are American companies, whose buying behavior is far quicker than in Europe. “The market likes to test and pays for it. It gives us a much faster feedback loop,” Granger explains.

“There is a missing ecosystem of players, from SMEs to large groups, ready to buy software at a faster pace,” Moyroud says. “And YC has done a great job with the inbreeding of the programme,” referring to startups that quickly buy each other’s solutions. “Station F does it less. It’s harder because there are more programmes. But the Future 40 could become that European, or even global, YC.”

One evening in February, darkness had settled over the campus’s Share space. Only one room on the ground floor remained lit. Granger and Stankovic were screening a documentary about their time at Y Combinator: Secrets of the Bay. Three fifteen-minute excerpts were interspersed with Q&A sessions held in English. A hundred people filled the room. Entrepreneurs of every nationality, investors, Station F staff. Nicolas Desruelles was there too. During the screening, pizza slices ordered from La Felicità made their way between the rows of chairs. That evening, it was not the world looking at Station F. It was Station F setting out to conquer it.

Main sources and references:

Thank you to Ludovic Granger, Nicolas Desruelles, Maxime Zarrillo, Antoine Moyroud, and the Station F team for their time. Roxanne Varza’s appearance on the Génération Do It Yourself podcast was invaluable in helping me understand the history of the campus. I also recommend Alexandre Dewez’s report on The State of the French Tech Ecosystem 2025.

Most entrepreneurs sell what they build, but the best ones sell what it means. Access my one-page memo to learn how to craft your story.

TY

On the Piccadilly Line, heading toward north London, you can already feel the fervor. The carriage is packed. Red and white dominate the Tube—on jerseys, scarves, caps. It’s a sunny Saturday afternoon. You’re with family or friends. When you exit Holloway Road station, the Emirates Stadium reveals itself. You sense something special in the air. A dense crowd moves in the same direction. You pass two black cannons, symbols of the Arsenal club, or the statue of Thierry Henry, sliding on his knees. You feel the heritage of this club created at the end of the 19th century.

The atmosphere is electric at the stadium gates. People laugh, grow excited, have a drink. After security, you tap your phone to pass through the turnstiles, then climb the stairs to enter the stadium. A pulsing musical backdrop resonates louder and louder in your ears. Then a pitch 113 meters long by 76 wide, magnificently green and as smooth as a billiard table, opens before you. You sit down, a beer or soda in hand, perhaps a hot dog for the hungriest among you. Your leg trembles with anticipation when intense music rises through the stadium. The excitement reaches its peak. The players enter the pitch. Let the spectacle begin.

With each Gunners goal—the team’s nickname—the stadium erupts. People celebrate, hug, kiss. The emotions are raw, immediate. Joy, fear, surprise. And it’s there, in these moments of pure communion, that your gaze sometimes falls on a logo. Airwallex. Zilch. Names inscribed on panels, or embedded in your experience of going to the stadium. Discreet but omnipresent. They don’t shout their presence. They permeate, mingle with the adrenaline, with the joy, with the pride of the 60,000 people present that day. When you leave the stadium, you depart laden with emotion and passion. And somewhere, without even realizing it, these brands have traveled with you. Perhaps they have won your heart, too.

*

Where traditional banks once built trust through magnificent buildings and branches, new money now seeks it through stadiums and jerseys. Fintechs attach themselves to the emotional infrastructure that their platforms alone cannot create. “It’s about building deep, emotional connections with fans,” Kirsty Spickett, Chief Marketing Officer of Zilch, tells me about their partnership with Arsenal. “Showing up authentically in the moments fans are engaging with their club and other fans is key.” But that emotion alone doesn’t drive the decisions. There’s rigorous strategic thinking upstream, and clear objectives that need to be met.

Steven Watson, Head of Brand and Experiences Marketing at Airwallex, breaks down the calculation very clearly. “You’re trying to get coverage, comprehension and trust. You get the coverage because of the sheer exposure that a lot of these sports teams bring. You get the comprehension because you get almost a permission to talk about yourself, because you’re anchoring on something that is tapping into people’s passion points. And then you get the trust, because, again, you’re anchoring yourself with a brand or a team that is highly trusted by its audience.”

Money has become digital. The branch disappeared from daily life. The ritual disappeared with it. What remains is the need for trust, for connection, for something tangible to hold onto. Sport provides that anchor.

The choice of football—and Arsenal specifically—is far from arbitrary. Football is the most famous sport on the planet, and the Premier League is the most watched championship in the world, broadcast in 190 countries. Arsenal has 31.8 million followers on Instagram. But it goes beyond numbers. The identity and the history matter too.

Watson explains the deeper resonance: “If you look back at the very early days of Arsène Wenger, he started to introduce new training methods that had never been seen before in top-level football. And so that was innovative for its time, and they continued to move on in this kind of innovative way.” The parallel is powerful for a fintech company.

The global dimension proved equally crucial. Airwallex wanted to tap into Arsenal’s international reach to activate its brand across each of its markets. Arsenal’s appeal spans continents. They’re beloved in Asia-Pacific, growing rapidly in North America, and commanding a huge fan base in South America.

For Zilch, a London-based business with international ambitions, the logic was similar. The reflection began with the UK market (Arsenal has a strong national reach for both its men’s and women’s teams), but the global reach of the club and its alignment with Zilch’s planned European and American expansions was equally relevant.

The approach of these two companies stands in contrast to that of big financial institutions like Visa, which partner on events like the World Cup or Olympics for massive visibility all at once, often using access as a perk for clients rather than pursuing direct brand-building with consumers.

Airwallex has also turned its attention to Formula One, though the costs are considerably steeper. In 2024, the company signed a multi-year partnership with McLaren, displaying its logo on the car halo, driver suits, and team materials. Between 2019 and 2024, Liberty Media reports that F1’s annual sponsorship revenue more than doubled to $636 million. At a team level, total sponsorship revenue increased by 60% to $1.3 billion over the same period, according to Nielsen Sports. The sport has 52 million fans in the United States alone, and 827 million worldwide—a 63% increase since 2018. And when you look at the geographic map of F1’s races, it closely mirrors the markets where international scale-ups are expanding.

*

The timing of these partnerships reflects a broader maturation in the fintech sector. The ecosystem is now mature enough, financially and institutionally, to sustain partnerships that were once reserved for banks. As Airwallex co-founder and CEO Jack Zhang noted in a tweet:

Watson echoes this evolution: “We need to ensure that our brand also has the level of prominence that our product has.” For Zilch, which initially focused on performance marketing to acquire customers, the shift represents a strong change in strategy. “This is not about new customers,” Spickett emphasizes. The partnership isn’t measured by new customer acquisition metrics. It’s purely a brand play, which liberates them to have more fun with the rights they’ve secured. The focus shifts to something less quantifiable but perhaps more valuable: bringing joy.

Building these partnerships proves more complex than simply writing a check. For Zilch, Spickett and the CEO Philip Belamant were directly involved in a process that took almost a year. When they presented the proposal to the board, approval came immediately. The objective was clear: to grow brand and trust quickly. Both Zilch and Airwallex talked to practically all of the major Premier League teams before landing on their final choices.

Arsenal has roughly 30 partners, each with category exclusivity. This structure is common across most clubs. Arsenal didn’t have a payment partner, and Zilch’s solution aligned perfectly with the club’s need for a better payment experience.

For Airwallex, the evaluation process involved measuring what Watson calls the “opportunity cost.” What is their reach? What’s the commercial goal? How many people are on their partnership team? Can they facilitate B2B introductions? Which territories do they cover? But perhaps the most distinctive element of these modern fintech partnerships is the product integration. “We like to work with partners who are willing to also adopt our product set. Generally, we always ensure that whoever we partner with will adopt our product. This means we can help them with their success on their financial journey, as well as us being able to tell that story through case studies.” Watson explains.

The process quickly evolved into parallel conversations. Airwallex’s team moved swiftly to engage with the partner’s financial controllers and CFO, presenting comprehensive product demonstrations that showcase what their technology could do. What emerged were two distinct groups of enthusiasts within the partner organization. The partnerships team saw the opportunity for brand awareness through the activation activities that accompany the deal. Meanwhile, the finance team grew excited about modernizing their existing tech stack with Airwallex’s solutions.

For Zilch, the business partnership was part of the deal from day one as well, though the path to communicating its value wasn’t immediately obvious. “If you’re a clothing brand or a beauty brand, it’s clear what you’re going to bring,” Spickett reflects. “Fintech is tricky. We had to explain who we are and what we’re doing, why this is important for fans, and why this would enable that joy that we’re trying to create. We also wanted to make sure this integration was authentic and brought value to the fans. That’s why we’ve integrated at point of sale in Arsenal Direct and the Armoury, so Zilch cardholders can get a 10% discount on all purchases as well as split the cost of purchases over time at 0% interest.”

Activation—the ways in which partnerships come alive for consumers—matters enormously for B2C companies like Zilch. The company pushes hard on fan activation with creative approaches that avoid heavy-handed branding. “We turn two green seats in the stadium every single ladies and men’s match, and just before the game starts, we have a couple of people in our big green jackets that go down and surprise them. It might be a pitch side tour, it might be a signed shirt, and it’s just another way for us to do something and link our brand without shoehorning our branding. This is about clever linking rather than getting the players to say, ‘I shop using Zilch’.”

The future of money won’t only be regulated or engineered. It will also be narrated. And increasingly, those narratives will unfold in stadiums, in the shared heartbreak of a missed penalty, in the ecstasy of a last-minute goal.

Thank you to Kirsty and Steven for their time, generosity, and insights.

Most entrepreneurs and companies sell what they build, but the best ones sell what it means. Access my one-page memo to learn how to craft your story.

TY

Quentin Nickmans had just arrived at Gare du Nord in Paris, coming from Brussels. The weather was unusually mild for Christmas Eve. The Belgian co-founder of the startup studio Hexa—known as eFounders until 2022—regularly shuttled back and forth between Brussels and Paris. This trip, however, was not planned.

For several months, he had been in negotiations with an investor who was set to underwrite the startup studio’s entire first funding round. Everything appeared to be settled. The term sheet had been reviewed. The timetable approved. But at the very end of the process, Quentin was dealt a crushing blow. The investor announced that he would only sign at a valuation cut in half.

That was out of the question, even as time was working against Quentin. After having financed the launch of seven companies with their own funds, the startup studio was nearing a breaking point. It was then that Thibaud Elzière, eFounders’ second co-founder, decided to introduce him to Oleg Tscheltzoff, an entrepreneur with whom he had built his previous company. The meeting took place at the Paris hotel where Quentin was staying. The conversation lasted barely an hour, but it was intense. After a few calculations and notes scribbled on a paper napkin, the two men shook hands. The broad outlines of the investment were set, and in June 2015, the startup studio completed its first funding round.

To understand this moment of tension, we have to go back ten years, to a story already marked by creation, risk, and liquidity.

*

In 2004, Thibaud Elzière was writing the first lines of code for a project called Foto36, a nod to Kreuzberg, the Berlin neighborhood where he was finishing his studies. His ambition was to build a marketplace where professional photographers and designers could sell images. On June 22, 2004, he secured the domain name Fotolia, moved to Brussels, and met Oleg Tscheltzoff and Patrick Chassany, with whom he joined forces. The startup would go on to become one of the world’s largest online image banks and was eventually acquired by Adobe for $800 million, through a series of transactions completed by 2014.

Quentin Nickmans, for his part, had long been drawn to entrepreneurship, with a particular affinity for technology. Born into a family of industrial entrepreneurs, he discovered computing as a child, when he received his first computer: a Commodore 64. He waited, however, before making the entrepreneurial leap. He began his career in consulting at Boston Consulting Group, where, over four years, he immersed himself in a wide range of projects. He later launched EatingDesk, a meal-delivery platform that was sold in 2009.

In 2010, Thibaud regularly made his way to the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where, on the first Wednesday of each month, hundreds of people gathered to discuss technology and entrepreneurship. There, he ran into a friend, Jean Derély, to whom he confided his many ideas and his constant urge to start new ventures. Derély suggested introducing him to a friend of his, Quentin Nickmans, who harbored similar ambitions.

A meeting was arranged in a bar in the Belgian capital. The chemistry was immediate, and the complementarity obvious. Thibaud, overflowing with ideas, was looking for structure. Quentin was precisely the person who could provide it. One desire, however, united the two future partners above all others: the ambition to launch several projects at the same time. What they both loved was thinking through ideas, refining them, bringing them into the world, and then letting them take flight.

That is how eFounders, the Paris-based but Brussels-born startup studio, came into being.

*

The first comparisons with Rocket Internet, the German startup studio, surfaced quickly. From the outset, however, eFounders’ vision and model set it apart. Rather than rapidly replicating business models that had already proven successful elsewhere, eFounders set out to co-create original, innovative startups in the “Future of Work”, in partnership with entrepreneurs to whom the studio granted half of the equity, and full independence once the incubation phase was over. Every one of eFounders’ early projects stemmed from problems Thibaud had encountered in his previous ventures.

Three companies were launched between 2011 and 2013: Mailjet, an email-delivery platform, and TextMaster, a professional translation and copywriting platform, both in 2011; then Mention, a monitoring tool, in 2013. These early projects were financed directly by Quentin and Thibaud. The startup studio’s early positioning also drew criticism, with some investors viewing it as a way to take advantage of an immature ecosystem to secure equity from young entrepreneurs.

eFounders nonetheless pressed on. By 2014, after three years of experimentation and initial successes, its reputation had grown, and an increasing number of talented entrepreneurs began knocking on the studio’s door. That year, three companies were launched in parallel: Aircall, Front, and Solved.

Despite Aircall’s difficult beginnings—no one wanted to invest in the project, two CTOs left the company, and it was initially rejected by Y Combinator—the cloud-telephony startup would become one of eFounders’ greatest success stories. Front, which moved to the Valley in 2014 to join the Californian accelerator, achieved similar success. Solved, by contrast, illustrates the other side of the eFounders reality. Not every bet becomes a unicorn, but each one feeds the studio’s collective learning.

The model, highly cash-intensive since the startup studio only generated revenue at exit, was still in its infancy. But Thibaud, Quentin, and the first members of the team had demonstrated their ability to build companies that succeed. In 2015 and 2016, eFounders raised two rounds of €5 million each: the first from Oleg Tscheltzoff, the second from 40 European business angels and family offices.

A new era was opening for the startup studio.

*

In 2015, Jordane Giuly was wandering through the aisles of B2B Rocks, a SaaS-focused conference held every year in Paris. He did not have much of a network, nor a clear idea in mind, but he was eager to embark on a new entrepreneurial adventure—his two previous attempts had not been great successes. Passing by one of the stages, he heard Didier Forest, then a Design Partner at eFounders, recount the successes of Mailjet and Mention within the startup studio, and explain how to build a “cool” B2B SaaS product.

Intrigued by what he heard, Jordane went to LinkedIn to learn more about eFounders and came across the profile of Thibaud Elzière, with whom he shared a few connections—and, at the time, you didn’t have two hundred mutual contacts on LinkedIn with someone you had never heard of. An introduction and a few messages later, Jordane found himself in eFounders’ offices, on rue Ambroise Thomas in Paris, for an initial conversation with Thibaud.

Brimming with ideas as ever, Thibaud presented Jordane with a project centered on virtual corporate cards to manage company spending. It was an idea a team was already working on. Jordane was immediately enthusiastic and, enjoying coding himself, put himself forward as a potential Chief Product Officer. A few days later, he met Rodolphe Ardant and Guilhem Bellion, the project’s founders, and went through technical interviews with Amaury Sepulchre, the studio’s COO, and Axel Le Pennec, Product Manager and Partner. He was accepted.

At the time, there were two ways to join eFounders. The first was to come in at the ideation stage and work alongside the studio’s Partners to shape the vision. The second was to join a project as a late founder, once the vision had already been drafted and execution was the priority. Jordane belonged to this second wave.

Every week, the founding team of Spendesk had two one-hour meetings with Thibaud Elzière, Quentin Nickmans, and Amaury Sepulchre. The first focused on go-to-market strategy: how to secure the first 50 customers, then the next 100, and so on. The second was devoted to the product, a meeting Jordane was particularly invested in given his role as CPO.

Seated apart, in the back room of the office, everyone sat on couches facing a large screen projecting product mockups. Spendesk was then working on a new feature for multi-entity companies. As Jordane walked through the mock-ups outlining his product vision, he was frequently interrupted by Thibaud, who offered feedback on details that, at first glance, seemed insignificant. It was a reflection of both the level of rigor and the depth of involvement and commitment the studio’s founding team brought to its startups.

“These two recurring meetings force you to work on the fundamentals, especially at the beginning,” Jordane told me. “When you’re at the seed stage, your obsession is figuring out how to land your first 50 customers and what MVP you’re going to ship. Creating accountability around these two core topics means you’re forced to work on them. You don’t want to look like an idiot in those meetings.”

In 2016, there were very few pre-seed funds in Europe, and the investment made by eFounders acted as a powerful accelerator for the studio’s young startups—enough to justify the large equity stake eFounders took at the time, a decision none of the founders I spoke to regretted. But the value eFounders brought did not stop there. From day one, each startup benefited from a cheat code: its network.

Despite the early French tech success stories of the mid-2010s, BlaBlaCar and Veepee among others, the tech ecosystem had not yet fully caught its stride. Hiring was difficult. Talking to journalists was difficult. Raising capital was difficult. The eFounders brand made all of this easier—and still does. Entrepreneurs orbiting the studio were also potential beta testers for the products eFounders was building, and even potential investors.

When Spendesk began its seed round—its first raise after eFounders—many venture capital firms shut the door. The decision was therefore made to start with a round led by business angels. Thibaud and Quentin personally reached out to their network to present the opportunity. Three weeks later, 50 business angels were interested in investing. In January 2017, the fintech raised €2 million.

Today, Jordane is the co-founder and CEO of Defacto, and that same network—journalists, investors, entrepreneurs across the ecosystem—continues to work in his favor. Defacto raised a pre-seed round from GFC and Headline, alongside around 20 business angels, including Thibaud Elzière, and has made the front page of TechCrunch on several occasions.

*

In 2018, the startup studio crossed a symbolic threshold: €100 million raised by six of its startups—Spendesk, Aircall, Forest, Front, Slite, and Station. These funding rounds were led by venture capital firms with global reputations, such as Index Ventures, Accel, and Sequoia Capital.

As the net asset value of the studio’s holdings increased, eFounders made use of financial instruments that allowed it to bridge periods of cash flow and smooth its treasury without diluting its capital. This was a kind of temporary liquidity pump, designed to buy time ahead of larger realizations, which came that very year when TextMaster was acquired.

Buoyed by its success and a growing reputation across the continent, the startup studio began receiving an increasing number of applications from people eager to join eFounders’ core team, responsible for supporting startup launches within the studio. Legal, design, product, engineering, marketing, communications, finance, every profile had a role to play in accompanying the young companies, and around a dozen people joined the studio.

Applications from talented entrepreneurs multiplied as well. Everyone wanted a chance to be launched within the eFounders cocoon. But very few were chosen.

*

In 2018, Alexandre Louisy was attending a dinner hosted by The Family. He was part of one of the Paris accelerator’s cohorts and was working on a startup project aimed at transforming how small and mid-sized businesses were financed. Alexandre was not particularly familiar with the tech ecosystem and did not know how to code. His background was more financial than technical, and he was actively looking for a CTO.

That evening, Alexandre noticed, from across the room, a man in his sixties—an arresting contrast amid the crowd of young tech entrepreneurs, baseball caps pulled low and white sneakers on their feet. After ten minutes spent discussing books and 13th-century illuminated manuscripts, the man was soon joined by his son, who turned out to be… Thibaud Elzière. Fate, it seemed, had a sense of timing. Alexandre shared his project, and the two agreed to continue the conversation over coffee the following week. eFounders was already thinking through a problem related to cash collection, and after two months of challenging one another on the vision, Upflow—initially called InvoiceX—was born within eFounders, with a new mantra: before financing a business, it needs to be paid properly.

By the time Upflow joined eFounders, Spendesk had just left the premises following a record Series B, and the studio’s first companies, such as Front, were accelerating in the United States—a path Upflow would take in 2020. Lunches surrounded by other entrepreneurs became a source of inspiration and motivation for Alexandre. More importantly, they proved to be a powerful lever for getting the startup off the ground.

“At the time, I didn’t have a cofounder, no money, not much of anything,” Alexandre told me. “eFounders gave me a kind of cocoon, a structure that lets you put all the right ingredients in place to start fast and strong. It allowed me to move ten times faster at launch. I met my cofounder through them, and he didn’t come for me; he came for eFounders. It’s the same with our first employee, who’s still with us today. He didn’t join Alex from Upflow; he joined because it was an eFounders company.”

That year, eFounders had reduced its equity stake in startups to 30% post-seed—a move that made room for larger investors, particularly from the United States—and offered founders a first salary, office space, and a dedicated team. Alexandre never regretted the decision, even though Upflow’s time at eFounders lasted just six months, as the startup raised funding unusually fast. That is how it works. After the first funding round, the startup has to leave the nest and take flight. That year, everything happened far faster than expected. Alexandre had never raised a single euro in his life. Thanks to eFounders and its network of business angels, he raised a €2.5 million seed round in just three hours.

Among the lasting habits Alexandre carried over from his time at eFounders was the cadence of product meetings. Today, the startup based in Paris and New York runs a product sprint every two weeks, on Fridays, and the sprints are still numbered from the very first one at eFounders. That rhythm, that early insistence on rigor, remains one of Alexandre’s most valuable lessons. In a company’s earliest months, direction can drift in any number of ways, and choosing the wrong one can lead you astray for good, or even prove fatal. Having the eFounders team around him is something Alexandre remains deeply grateful for, even today.

*

In 2019, eFounders surprised its ecosystem by venturing beyond its usual perimeter for the first time. Five years earlier, Quentin and Thibaud had come up with the idea of launching a company in electronic signature, a project that fit squarely within their Future of Work thesis. Yousign, based in Caen, had been founded a year earlier, and the studio’s team met Luc Pallavidino and Antoine Louiset, the founders of the Normandy-based startup, to discuss a potential collaboration. The idea of moving forward together was raised, but proved difficult to execute at the time. It was set aside, though never entirely forgotten.

By 2019, eFounders had generated liquidity through a number of partial exits, notably from Front. These transactions helped simplify complex legacy arrangements, distribute a larger-than-expected dividend to shareholders, and strengthen Hexa’s balance sheet. It was then that the idea of electronic signature resurfaced.

A lunch was organized with the Yousign team. Seeing the company’s potential, and for financial reasons as well, Quentin and Thibaud proposed buying out the startup’s investors, along with the shares of one associate whose path was about to diverge. The goal was not merely to invest, but to adapt the studio’s early-stage playbooks to more mature technology companies in need of renewed momentum. At the time of eFounders’ investment, Yousign was generating €1.8 million in annual revenue. Today, it generates more than €35 million.

This move marked the early signs of a broader reorganization and an ambitious expansion.

*

In 2020, Camille Tyan had left Payplug, the payments company he had co-founded, with the ambition of launching his own fintech-focused startup studio. He met with the Hexa team to discuss the idea and proposed that they become investors. Quentin and Thibaud had already experimented with a similar arrangement in the past, and it had not worked, creating conflicts of interest with their own model. A counterproposal was therefore made to Camille: to create his startup studio within eFounders. He would choose and run his own projects, benefit from the studio’s infrastructure, and share equity with eFounders and the founders of each venture. Logic Founders, eFounders’ fintech startup studio, was born.

The principle behind Logic Founders mirrored that of eFounders. Camille had encountered numerous challenges in payments during his time at Payplug and saw this studio as the ideal opportunity to address them—a kind of laboratory for experimenting with the future of finance. “I needed a system to connect to SEPA payments for transfers and direct debits, and we had built that ourselves, which was extremely complex. So, I created Numeral with Edouard and Hichem. The second was that we had developed a transaction scoring engine to fight fraud and money laundering, and that’s why we created Marble with Arnaud and Pascal.”

For every project he embarked on, Camille followed a simple rule, at least on paper: don’t reinvent the wheel. “We’re not inventing something new. We’re fixing something that doesn’t work well in a world of giants generating huge profits. We didn’t invent online card payments with Payplug. There were plenty of financial institutions handling transfers and SEPA direct debits before Numeral, and many ways to fight fraud before Marble. What we’ve always focused on, across these three companies, is customer experience, ease of use, and ease of integration.” Less than four years later, and before Logic Founders closed its doors, Numeral was acquired by Mambu, the Dutch core banking specialist.

For Quentin and Thibaud, the success of this first verticalized studio was a moment of realization. eFounders would no longer be just an “artisanal” studio, but a platform capable of hosting partners and verticals.

A parent entity emerged in 2022: Hexa. After a decade as COO, Amaury Sepulchre joined as a co-founder. The eFounders brand remained dedicated to the Future of Work, while new verticals took shape in Web3 with 3Founders, artificial intelligence with Hexa AI, and healthcare with Hexa Health.

*

In 2023, Hexa completed a new €20 million funding round. The stated objective was to launch 30 new startups per year by the end of the decade through its Start program. As with its first raise in 2015, the round was backed by entrepreneurs and family offices. On that occasion, Hexa also announced its move into new Paris headquarters: La Cristallerie, located in the lively Strasbourg-Saint-Denis district of Paris’s 10th arrondissement.

That same year, Hexa Scale was launched, an initiative designed to support more mature startups financially, strategically, and operationally. Much like what the startup studio had done with Yousign four years earlier, Hexa takes majority stakes and becomes directly involved in day-to-day operations. The companies typically generate between €2 million and €10 million in ARR, and the goal is to trigger a new phase of growth by rethinking the product, the brand, the GTM and the vision. The program runs for twelve to eighteen months, during which founders may sell part of their equity and a late cofounder will join the leadership team. Exit horizons are shorter within Scale, with a model closer to private equity.

In parallel, Hexa structured its Start activity around a first dedicated fund: Hexa Build 1. The aim is to finance startup launches through an investment vehicle rather than directly from the company’s balance sheet, allowing investments to be pooled. Where Hexa previously committed an average of €800,000 per project on its own, capital is now provided jointly by Hexa, the Build fund, and, when relevant, additional co-investors. This structure enables Hexa to launch more projects while reducing the cash outlay per startup. The equity stake taken in startups was again reduced in 2025 to 25% post-seed.

The most recent program launched by the studio is Hexa Sprint, introduced a few months ago—a Hexa-style accelerator with a vertical focus. Each partner is responsible for one vertical and oversees the acceleration of ten to twelve companies per year. €500,000 is invested for a 10% equity stake. Just as eFounders differed from Rocket Internet, Sprint differs from Y Combinator with a longer support period of six to nine months, and deeply verticalized expertise.

To support this transformation, Matthieu Gombeaud was appointed CEO of Hexa in September 2025. That same year, five companies were launched within Hexa’s historical Start activity, two within Hexa Scale, its micro private-equity arm, and three within Hexa Sprint. A three-month immersion in the Bay Area is also offered as part of the Start program, allowing founders to confront the most dynamic tech ecosystem in the world.

*

Liquidity has always been a central issue in the life of the startup studio—and, more broadly, in the venture-capital model itself. For Hexa, it is not a peripheral financial concern, but a condition of prosperity. The studio ties up capital, teams, and energy for many years, often with no short-term prospect of returns. And yet, the economic context has changed profoundly.

The companies built today are more ambitious, more complex, and far more capital-intensive. Where an initial public offering once occurred around €100 million in revenue, the threshold is now well above €500 million. In 2025, when Klarna went public, the fintech founded in 2005 was generating more than two billion dollars in revenue. Decade-old companies like Stripe or Revolut, whose revenues have surpassed one billion dollars, have still not taken that step.

Exit horizons have lengthened. Profitability requirements have intensified, sometimes at the expense of growth. Capital duration is stretching, even as the system has not fully adapted to this new time frame. “Duration is too long,” Quentin Nickmans told me. “Between the moment funds raise capital, commit it, and the time it takes to create value, we end up with 15-year cycles. It’s a DPI crisis for early-stage investing. This increase in duration should force liquidity onto the cap table. I sit on the boards of many companies, and we simply don’t talk about it.”

Hexa’s reorganization into a platform, the creation of new investment vehicles, and the broader thinking led by Quentin all stem from this logic: making liquidity a normal, structural, and recurring mechanism. Not the end of the entrepreneurial journey, but its fuel. The condition that makes it possible to endure, to start again, and to keep financing entrepreneurs over the long term.

Main sources and references:

I would first like to thank Quentin Nickmans, Sarah Barron, Alexandre Louisy, and Jordane Giuly for the time they generously gave me. Our conversations form the backbone of this piece. Reconstructing Hexa’s story was also made easier thanks to Thibaud Elzière’s Medium, the startup studio’s own blog, and the podcasts Billions and Donne le Rythme. Finally, for broader context on the state of venture capital and liquidity challenges, I recommend the State of European Tech report and Quentin’s Substack, Liquid.

Most entrepreneurs sell what they build, but the best ones sell what it means. Access my one-page memo to learn why and how to craft your story.

TY

The sun hadn’t risen yet that Monday morning when my alarm went off. Still half-asleep, I get out of bed and grab my phone from the wooden bedside table next to me. It takes only a few seconds before my thumb swipes up and I start skimming through the notifications already competing for my attention. A bad habit. As I walk toward the living room, one icon catches my eye. The Gmail logo, offset on the left of a notification. I tap. “Really enjoyed reading this one, Thomas. (It’s rare for me to finish an entire email like this.) You have a gift for writing.” A rather pleasant way to start the day.

The day before, I had sent out in this newsletter a profile of Jack Zhang, the founder and CEO of Airwallex. A journey shaped by audacity, resilience, and persistence. I had spent hours listening to podcasts, watching interviews, reading articles, trying to reconstruct his story as faithfully as possible. Receiving this message, and then seeing how widely that edition was shared, was a huge encouragement. But more than that, it was a confirmation. A confirmation of the direction I wanted to take with this newsletter: telling stories rather than dry, purely informational content.

After four years of creating content, I feel, for the first time, that I’ve found the way I truly enjoy writing. Reading played a major role in that. I immersed myself in the profiles published by Colossus, in the narrative journalism of The New Yorker or Nick Bilton, and in novels that sit at the boundary between fiction and reality, such as La guerre par d’autres moyens by Karine Tuil, in the original French.

Wrapping lessons and information inside stories and anecdotes, that’s what I enjoy. Not just to embellish, but because it’s often the details—a habit, a sentence, an obsession—that reveal the most about a person. And, through them, about power, money, and the systems they help shape. That’s the lens through which I approached the second and third editions of the year that you enjoyed the most: an essay on the Collison brothers’ passion for reading, and a narrative account of the race to profitability at the French unicorn Spendesk.

My curiosity continues to pull me toward profiles, narratives, and essays at the intersection of tech, money, and culture. Looking ahead to 2026, two editions are already in the works. The first will be a long-form story about the startup studio behind some of Europe’s largest unicorns. The second will explore the increasingly close relationship between fintech companies and the world of sports. Interviews are currently underway, with unicorn founders and heads of brand from some of today’s most prominent startups.

Each of these pieces will be accompanied by an illustration, like the one in today’s edition. I’m taking more and more pleasure in imagining and creating them with the help of AI.

I’m formalizing this new trajectory by renaming the newsletter simply Thomas’ Notes, a space that reflects my curiosity and my work as a ghostwriter, which has had a record year.

For someone who was still a banker just a few years ago, who would have thought.

Enjoy the holiday season.

Thomas

Two worlds seem to collide on the stage of the New York Times DealBook Summit. You could sense it the second both guests take their seats. On one side, Brian Armstrong, black sweater, black pants, white sneakers, both feet planted firmly on the ground. The Coinbase founder has the look of someone building the future from a MacBook. On the other, Larry Fink. Navy suit, black loafers, legs crossed with the ease of a man who has been running the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, for thirty years. A living embodiment of Wall Street. The contrast is sharp, the caricature too perfect. Appearances, that day, are deceiving.

*

“You famously, in 2017, called crypto an index for money laundering. You now have the largest Bitcoin ETF. What happened?” Andrew Ross Sorkin, journalist, author, and moderator for the day, opens the conversation without pulling any punches. It’s true that in 2017, Larry Fink portrayed Bitcoin as a tool for money laundering and thieves. That year, Bitcoin surged from $1,000 to over $15,000. The market was young, chaotic, poorly regulated. At the time, it took a good dose of imagination, faith, or foresight to see any broader potential in it.

Fink, with Olympian calm, acknowledges having changed his mind. “During Covid, we had a little more time. I actually took it upon myself to visit and talk to a lot of people who were advocates for it. I wanted to understand what I am missing, why do I have that belief. I was testing myself. Around 2021, 2022, I began to evolve those views [...] My thought process always evolves, this is a very glaring public example of a big shift in my opinion.” It’s rare to see a leader of this stature admit to being wrong. Even more so publicly.

That said, Fink hasn’t become a crypto enthusiast. Although BlackRock’s ETF holds more than 3% of Bitcoin’s total supply, it’s not Bitcoin—which he still considers an asset of fear—that excites him most. It’s tokenization.

In an op-ed published the same week in The Economist, he explains why. In a world fragmented between London, New York, Tokyo and their staggered time zones, tokenization enables the seamless functioning of global financial markets. The elimination of paperwork in favor of code, particularly in private markets still mired in PDFs, signatures, and lengthy administrative processes, also means less friction, lower costs, and greater efficiency.

Brian Armstrong sums up this idea, but in four lines, in a tweet posted after the conference: “Tokenization is going to reinvent finance. Everything that can be tokenized, will be. It’s much better for the end user. Real-time settlement (eliminates counterparty risk); Improved liquidity/accessibility; Higher efficiency by reducing bureaucracy/friction.”

*

If the big banks are embracing blockchain today, it’s not just out of technological fascination. It’s also because the political and regulatory balance of power has shifted. In the United States, Trump’s arrival in Washington opened a breach that Coinbase rushed into: a more conciliatory administration, certainly driven more by political than societal interest, a more receptive Congress, and crypto lobbying now openly embraced. For years, Coinbase worked to play an institutional role, sometimes criticized by purists, by advocating for a clear framework, engaging with regulators, and occupying the space left vacant by more radical players. This strategy eventually paid off.

When banks realized that the lines were shifting in Washington, that blockchain no longer threatened their legitimacy but could strengthen their infrastructure. They stopped viewing crypto as a counterculture and started examining it as a technological opportunity. Last November, JPMorgan announced it was partnering with Coinbase to enable its institutional clients to transfer funds on-chain, 24/7, almost instantaneously. A month earlier, Citi announced the same initiative. These announcements are the most visible signs of a silent convergence, unimaginable just five years ago.

However, don’t speak of “crypto” with a banker just yet. Stick to “token”, “blockchain”, or “stablecoin.” Words matter. Traditional finance may be adopting crypto technology, but it’s not adopting the narrative. Armstrong speaks of Bitcoin, stablecoins, and tokenization as a societal lever. As a tool for economic freedom, a way to redistribute power. Fink speaks of infrastructure. Of efficiency. Of more reliable, more liquid, more transparent markets. These are two very different visions. But somewhere between the two, a line is emerging. Old money and new money are no longer at odds. Much to the dismay of purists, these two currents are learning, each in their own way, to move in the same direction.

Main sources and references:

I encourage you to watch the discussion between Armstrong and Fink in its entirety, as many other topics are addressed. Fink and Goldstein’s op-ed in The Economist also offers a clear view of the broader vision for tokenization.

Most entrepreneurs sell what they build, but the best ones sell what it means. As a ghostwriter, I help you shape and share that narrative.

Access my one-page memo to learn why and how to craft your story.

TY

“Can we even build this business here?” George Davis asked himself in 2023, standing over a printer in his office in Dubai Internet City. He wasn’t printing a contract or compliance paperwork. He was printing payment orders, one by one, because his bank required each instruction to be printed, signed, and physically couriered for processing.

Dubai had a certain image to the outside world. Glass skyscrapers, Lamborghinis on Sheikh Zayed Road, and a fintech boom waiting to happen. But up close, some fundamentals were still missing: deep financial plumbing, reliable bank integrations, modern APIs.

This tension, a futuristic skyline built on top of unfinished plumbing, is the thread that runs through George’s journey. And it’s the perfect answer to the broader topic of this article.

The Middle East is not the new fintech eldorado because everything is ready, but precisely because so much remains to be built.

*

George had spent years working in global payments and crypto infrastructure at BVNK, which he co-founded. He was familiar with the complexities of regulated products in both Europe and the US. He understood legacy systems and the slow, predictable way they evolve. The Middle East was something else entirely.

“You have to be excessively local to get anything done here,” he tells me. Not because people resist innovation. Quite the opposite. But because the financial infrastructure is still emerging. Every founder has to build, negotiate, and push the system forward from scratch.

In Europe, you plug into banks through standardized APIs. SEPA Instant works the same way in more than 30 countries. The plumbing is stable enough to build entire industries on top of it. In the Middle East, that predictability has not arrived yet.

That gap is the reason George left BVNK to build Lorum (ex Fuse). It is not a company designed to operate on top of the infrastructure. It is a company meant to become part of it.

Lorum provides correspondent clearing accounts and cross-border payment rails tailored for Middle East and North Africa (MENA). If a company needs USD virtual accounts for global operations and AED local IBANs for regional payouts, Lorum can supply both. The mission is simple to state and hard to execute: to act as the single technical bridge that unifies these fragmented markets, making moving money across MENA feel as seamless as a local transfer in Europe.

*

Lorum is backed by Shorooq Partners in Abu Dhabi, Northzone in Europe, Flourish Ventures in the US, and regional operators including the former President of Morgan Stanley Middle East. Together, they offer a useful snapshot of the venture landscape in and around the region. The mix says a lot about how the regional venture ecosystem is taking shape.

Early-stage capital in the region moves fast. The Middle East now produces two to three billion dollars a year in fintech funding, yet most of it concentrates in the first stages. Pre-seed, seed, Series A. The investors shaping this tier include VentureSouq, Shorooq Partners, Global Ventures, or Wamda Capital.

Beyond that, the landscape changes.

Series B becomes difficult without a global footprint. There is still no deep bench of late-stage VC firms in the region and European or American investors rarely lead a large round unless the company is already expanding outside the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).

Sovereign wealth funds like ADIA, PIF, or Mubadala deploy tens of billions every year, yet most of this money goes into American and European late-stage companies. Mubadala’s investment in Revolut during a $500 million share sale is one example among others.

*

George lives in Dubai Hills. Villas, pools, long days of sun, weekends in the desert or by the beach, golf courses, mountains a few hours away. “It’s not the Instagram version of Dubai,” he tells me. “You’ve seen a big exodus of millionaires, but you also see a huge influx of professionals who want to earn more, enjoy life more. I spend less money here than I did in London.”

90% of the city is expatriate. That creates an enormous pool of commercial talent. If a company needs account executives or partnership managers, Dubai is one of the easiest places in the world to hire. The market is international, fluid, and people move fast.

Engineering is different.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) now counts more than 200 fintech companies, but the technical ecosystem is still young. There is not yet the same depth of senior engineers or infrastructure specialists found in London or the Valley. Talent can be imported and often is, yet the region does not produce enough of its own technical workforce.

Dubai gives startups commercial firepower on day one. Engineering strength still requires going abroad, convincing people to relocate—and it’s not that hard, George tells me—, or hiring remotely.

*

In June 2024, Lorum obtained a licence from the Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA) through the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC). It took seven weeks. Seven.

This is what a young regulatory environment looks like. Regulators in the UAE are not rewriting decades of rules. They are creating new frameworks inspired by London, Singapore, and Hong Kong, shaped for a market that expects speed.

The speed, however, comes with fragmentation.

Dubai has DIFC and its regulator DFSA. The free zone has its own courts, its own registry, and its own legal system. A short drive away, Abu Dhabi has Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) and its regulator Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA), built on the same model. Outside the free zones, the entire country is supervised by the Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE).

For years, the UAE behaved like a three-regulator market. Today it is moving toward a more unified, CBUAE-led system. The free zones remain innovation hubs, but national licensing is becoming the anchor for fintech. “Consolidating all the regulations into the CBUAE is a very important step” George tells me.

But the moment you cross the borders, fragmentation returns.

In Saudi Arabia the gatekeeper is SAMA, renamed the Saudi Central Bank in 2020 though everyone still calls it SAMA. Each country wants to become the region’s fintech hub. Each wants companies to incorporate locally, hire locally. It is not a coordinated network. It is a competition.

And the competition is heating up.

Over the last two years, local companies have quietly started to shift and expand from Dubai to Riyadh. Tabby relocated its HQ to Saudi Arabia. Alaan launched in Saudi Arabia. The gravitational pull of the Kingdom is getting stronger.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia are now racing to become the financial capital of the Middle East.

Musaab Hakami has a clear idea of who will win.

***

In 2020, Musaab Hakami had just come back to Riyadh after a year in San Francisco. He had absorbed the Valley’s rhythms, its way of building, its instinct to move early when a shift is coming. Before Covid hit, he noticed something few people saw at the time. Saudi Arabia was preparing to compress decades of tech adoption into a handful of years.

So he did what people in the Valley do when they sense momentum. He invested heavily and continues to do so.

Today, Musaab has made more than 140 angel investments, with almost 80% in GCC markets. He is not a passive allocator. He is part of a generation of Saudis who saw the window opening and stepped through it. He also serves as a Venture Partner in Fintech and LP at VentureSouq. More recently, he co-founded Mala, the first procure-now-pay-later platform for businesses in the country.

He moves easily between Saudi, the UAE, and the broader region. His story embodies a larger question. If the Middle East becomes the world’s next financial hub, which city will sit at its centre.

*

“Riyadh is going to be the New York of this side of the world” Musaab told me. He did not say it as a prediction. He said it as a certainty.

One number captures the scale of the shift. 70% of the Saudi population is under 35. A country this young does not move incrementally. It leaps. This youth is mobile first, financially active, globally connected, and comfortable with digital products. You rarely see demographic forces this strong. Not in Europe, not in the United States, not even in other GCC countries.

You also rarely see government initiatives moving at this pace.

When Musaab talks about public services in Saudi Arabia, he does it with genuine enthusiasm. “You can get a passport in less than 12 hours. You can sell a car or an apartment very easily. Everything is digital and the standard keeps rising.” Saudi Arabia is building state capacity at a speed usually associated with tech companies. The public sector performs like a world-class operator and the private fintech ecosystem races to keep up.

This acceleration, however, comes with a challenge of its own.

*

The same talent that could build the next generation of tech companies often works in government ministries and national projects. These roles are ambitious, well-funded, and mission driven. For young Saudis, they are highly attractive. For startups, this creates a paradox. Incredible talent exists in the country, yet only a fraction flows into venture-backed companies.

The second necessary evolution for Musaab is regulatory. Not more constraints, but a shift toward frameworks that enable experimentation. “De-re-gu-la-tion” as he emphasizes. Saudi Arabia wants to become a global financial hub. It wants infrastructure companies, deep fintech, world-class platforms. To unlock that, regulation must encourage innovation rather than protect legacy structures.

In practice, SAMA opted for a collaborative approach. Its open banking programme sits under the National Fintech Strategy, one of the pillars of the Financial Sector Development Programme within Vision 2030. The regulatory sandbox allows fintechs to test products under supervision. The impact is easy to quantify. The number of fintech companies in Saudi Arabia grew from around 80 in 2022 to more than 280 in 2025.

*

The UAE built a remarkable platform with CBUAE, its free zones, its global brand, its international talent, and its quality of life. Dubai became the region’s financial launchpad and in many ways achieved exactly what it set out to do. Revolut chose the UAE as its first GCC entry point. Many others did the same. But Dubai’s strength is also its limitation, according to Musaab. It is a cosmopolitan magnet, a business-friendly environment, but not a capital city. “Dubai is like Monaco” he tells me.

The shift is already visible. Global fintechs are expanding into Saudi Arabia—Checkout.com operates in the country, Binance has described Saudi Arabia as a major opportunity and is actively working with its regulators. The government continues to introduce incentives for companies to move their regional headquarters.

Dubai remains a few steps ahead in maturity. Yet the race is undeniably underway.

*

George is building the rails. Musaab is investing in the ecosystem that will run on them.

The Middle East is shaping the conditions for fintech to thrive. In the UAE and Saudi Arabia, the energy is unmistakable. You can feel the market pushing forward. Together, their stories form the answer at the heart of this piece.

The Middle East is not the new eldorado because it is easy. It is the new eldorado because the opportunity is structural, unfinished, and wide open.

Main sources and references:

First, my thanks to George, Lorum’s team, and Musaab for taking the time to speak with me. I also want to share two sources that helped me understand the broader context: Simon Taylor’s piece The next big fintech ecosystem will be MENA and a McKinsey report on fintech in the MENA region.

Most entrepreneurs sell what they build, but the best ones sell what it means. As a ghostwriter, I help you shape and share that narrative.

Access my one-page memo to learn why and how to craft your story.

TY

It was nearly ten in the morning when music began to echo through the main hall of Riyadh’s King Abdulaziz International Conference Center. The violins played with intensity. Their sharp notes filled the space with a near-palpable tension. The ninth edition of the Future Investment Initiative, better known as the “Davos in the Desert”, was about to open its first session.

Like a boxing ring, a large round table stood on a raised platform at the center of the room. The front rows were reserved for distinguished guests: Donald Trump Jr., Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, or Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, among others. Ten men and one woman took their seats around the table. The first Board of Changemakers, titled Geo-Economics, was about to begin—with an all-star panel.

David Rubenstein, co-founder and co-chairman of the American asset-management group Carlyle, was in charge of moderating. The discussion opened with carefully prepared remarks from each guest. A chance to promote their companies, but also to share reflections on the future of the global economy.

*

“Right now, the most interesting area is data centers and AI complexes, with particular emphasis on power,” declared Stephen A. Schwarzman, co-founder, Chairman & CEO of The Blackstone Group.

AI is not just about research and algorithms, though the talent war is raging in Silicon Valley. It’s also about infrastructure. Behind every model we use daily lie astronomical quantities of GPUs hosted in data centers spanning hundreds of thousands of square meters. Without these facilities, training or running large-scale models would be impossible. But these data centers consume massive amounts of electricity. Globally, their energy use accounts for about 1.5% of total electricity consumption, according to the IEA. A figure that could nearly double by 2030. This means we must invest heavily in energy, which powers the data centers, which in turn host the GPUs.

Larry Fink, Chairman & CEO of BlackRock, shared this view. In his eyes, America’s economic dominance has always rested on its ability to invest massively in critical technologies. “If you look at the make up of the second quarter of the US economy, over 40% of the economic growth was Capex for technology. You don’t see that in other places in the world. [...] You’re not seeing that as much in Europe, and that’s one of the reasons for the huge gap between the US GDP and the European GDP”. If there is ever a time to channel capital into new technologies, it’s now.

Countries that build their infrastructure gain a lasting structural advantage, because all future innovations will depend on these foundations. AI is already reshaping defense, cybersecurity, intelligence, or healthcare. Losing this race means giving up part of one’s sovereignty and missing out on AI’s growth potential. IMF simulations illustrate the gap: with rapid AI adoption, global GDP could be 4% higher in ten years compared to a slow-adoption scenario, while partial adoption would yield only about 1% growth.

*

Figma, Circle, Klarna… 2025 was a busy year for major tech IPOs. And for M&A, too.

This new cycle marks the return of major venture capital payoffs—long awaited after years of drought. But for the cycle to continue, the framework must be clear and the outlook promising. As David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, reminded the audience, “No matter where you operate in the world, if you want to do large, interesting, strategic things, the first question is ‘Can we?’ The question was generally ‘No’. We’re now in an environment where the answer is generally ‘maybe’, to potentially yes. That’s leading CEOs to be much more strategically focused”.

In Europe, “regulatory burden” continues to slow down the pace. Klarna, though Swedish, chose New York for its listing. The size of the U.S. market and the growth opportunities across the Atlantic ultimately outweighed the appeal of a European IPO.

An IPO is a gateway to more aggressive international expansion. George Elhedery, the Libyan CEO of HSBC, is well placed to describe the challenges of building a strong global presence: “It’s very important to realize you bring connectivity through trust, relationships, and historical understanding of local needs and cultures.” An IPO also brings structural transformation, with heavier legal requirements that can constrain the agility so essential to tech companies. Lip-Bu Tan, the Chinese CEO of Intel, faced that challenge when he took over the company last March: “We started to have too many layers of management, so I decided to come in, clean up, and refocus the company to be an engineering focused company .”

*

The conversation also brought out several striking takeaways.

Just a month after JPMorgan inaugurated its new offices in New York, Jamie Dimon, the bank’s CEO and a vocal critic of remote work, defended in-person collaboration as a key driver of cohesion, creativity, and social life. Especially for younger people, who are “being left behind” as real-world interactions become increasingly rare.

Private equity, meanwhile, is going through a tougher period. Scott Nuttall, co-CEO of KKR, reminded the audience that not all asset classes move in the same cycle. In private equity, “parts of the industry probably over deployed in years like 2021, and maybe under deployed in years like 2020. There’s a bit of a dynamic where some assets were purchased for valuation a bit too high and it will take a little bit longer to walk out of that”.

Saudi Arabia, for its part, continues to attract investors. Investments in the country are growing at a rate of 24% per year, driven by a simpler and more open business environment. Finally, several speakers highlighted the role of gold in times of economic uncertainty, as well as the growing opportunities across Africa, where the challenge now is to establish the continent as a major destination for international capital.

*

The session ended with two broader questions addressed to all the guests, though only a few took the spotlight.

“The US government has roughly $38 trillion of debt, and we’re adding about $2 trillion every year. Does it bother any of you that we have this much debt, or do you think it’s manageable?” asked Rubenstein.

The question was immediately put into perspective by the guests, who linked it to economic growth and the deficit. Larry Fink replied: “If we continue to grow at 2% a year, the deficit to a percentage of GDP is going to overwhelm us. But if we unlock private capital and we can grow at 3%, debt to GDP will fall […] It’s not about higher or lower taxes—it’s about unlocking private capital. If we get more and more people that move that money from savings accounts to investment accounts, we’ll be fine.” Indeed, without context, the size of public debt mean little. That’s why it’s compared to GDP: What’s the relative share? How do both evolve over time? And above all, does this new debt finance growth or losses? “It’s a global issue. Around the world, deficits are too high. A lot of money is being paid for consumption and not for future growth,” added Jamie Dimon. This is precisely why AI was on everyone’s mind. It already is—and will continue to be—the key to unlocking tomorrow’s growth.

The second question followed: “Should I be buying cryptocurrencies or should I avoid them?”

A few years ago, that question might have shocked the room. Or perhaps not even been asked. But in 2025, the institutionalization of crypto is stronger than ever. Visa and Mastercard are multiplying initiatives through partnerships and acquisitions. JPMorgan and Citi are forming alliances with Coinbase. Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs now hold more than $175 billion in assets on-chain. Despite BlackRock’s many initiatives in the space, Fink didn’t hesitate to call cryptocurrencies—like gold—“assets of fear [...] a good hedge against optimism.” What truly excites him, though, is tokenization: “We’re not spending enough time talking about how quickly we’re gonna tokenize every financial asset, and the opportunity we’ll have to have a digital wallet and moving ETFs and other things through a digital wallet. That’s gonna arrive worldwide very rapidly and most countries are unprepared for that”. Dimon, long a critic of crypto, closed the conference by admitting that “crypto is real” and that it will be used by all of us to facilitate better transactions.

As the session closed, quiet thanks drifted in the background, barely audible over the setup for the next discussion. But beneath that soft noise, a few questions still hung in the air. Who controls the compute? Who controls the capital? Who controls the rails of the digital economy? AI, tokenization, and crypto aren’t just technologies. They define power. The countries and companies that understand this are already moving to shape the next economic cycle.

Main sources and recommendations:

First of all, I recommend taking a full look at this Board of Changemakers. An IEA report will give you deeper data on energy and AI, while the latest a16z crypto report offers an excellent overview of the crypto industry.

Most entrepreneurs sell what they build, but the best ones sell what it means. As a ghostwriter, I help you shape and share that narrative.

Access my one-page memo to learn why and how to craft your story.

TY

ICE had just invested two billion dollars in Polymarket—the largest fundraising ever for a crypto company—valuing it at nine billion. Overnight, it made Coplan one of the youngest self-made billionaires in history. The wind had shifted quite a bit since November 14, 2024, the day the FBI raided the young entrepreneur’s apartment.

Would you have bet on that?

***

Shayne Coplan, born and raised in New York, was no insider to the world of traditional finance. He was studying computer science at New York University when, in 2020, he decided to drop out early to launch Polymarket. Since his teenage years, he had nurtured a deep fascination for cryptocurrencies. He was also inspired by the works of Friedrich Hayek and Robin Hanson.

Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist who received the Nobel Prize in 1974, believed that no individual and no government could ever know everything. He urged his peers, even then, to show a little more humility. A reminder that feels just as relevant today. In his view, information is scattered. Each person holds a fragment of it, and markets serve to coordinate these fragments. A market, therefore, is a decentralized information system.

Robin Hanson, an American economist, took the idea further. He agreed that markets reveal collective knowledge and applied it to forecasting. If you create a market where people can bet on an event, the price of that bet reflects the crowd’s perceived probability that it will occur. That’s what we call a prediction market.

Today, prediction markets take the form of online platforms where users can wager on future events. Politics, sports, tech, culture, everything. Polymarket is the most prominent of these, alongside Kalshi, another American startup that recently raised $300 million from Sequoia, a16z, and Paradigm. Robinhood has also recently joined the race.

From a user perspective, the basic idea is similar to online betting: you stake money on a future event. If it happens, you win. If it doesn’t, you lose. But there are important differences.

A prediction market runs on blockchain technology. Polymarket, for instance, is built on Polygon. All transactions are denominated in USDC, and to participate, you must either connect a crypto wallet or purchase crypto directly on the platform.

Polymarket creates individual markets—the events—on its platform. For example: Who will be the next mayor of New York? The probability ranges from 0% to 100%, and the market price from $0 to $1. The market price represents the implied probability. At the time of writing, Mamdani’s chances are priced at 93%. Cuomo’s at 7%. If you believe Mamdani’s odds are higher than 93%, you can buy at 93 cents. If he wins, you’ll earn $1.07 for every dollar invested. If he loses, you lose your stake.

You can buy shares at any time, without limit, up until the event takes place. You can also sell them earlier if another user is willing to pay your asking price. Each market has a predefined resolution process that specifies the conditions under which the outcome will be determined.

It was on this vision that Polymarket raised its first $4 million in October 2020, in a round led by Polychain Capital. Three months after launching its beta, over a million dollars had already been traded on the platform. The first major spike came during the 2020 U.S. presidential election, with a total volume of $10 million.

Polymarket quickly found itself under the watch of regulators. In January 2022, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) fined the startup $1.4 million for operating event markets without being registered as a derivatives platform. The company was forced to shut down its operations in the United States and implement stronger compliance measures. Shortly after, Polymarket appointed Christopher Giancarlo, former chairman of the CFTC, as head of its advisory board.

Things took a very different turn on November 13, 2024. At dawn, FBI agents entered Coplan’s apartment to conduct a search. Federal officers seized his phone and electronic devices, though the young founder was not arrested. The reason: suspicions that U.S. users were still accessing Polymarket. Coplan and his team, however, saw it differently, as political retaliation, following a series of clear predictions on the platform showing Trump favored to win against the Democrats.

Prediction markets operate on a thin line. Online betting is heavily regulated and considered gambling. Betting on politics? Forbidden. But when it comes to prediction markets, the boundary is blurrier. Is it gambling or investing? After all, isn’t investing just another form of betting?

Polymarket doesn’t define itself as a broker, nor as a house. It takes no fees on transactions. The company describes itself simply as “an interface for visualizing and sending transactions on the blockchain.”

For now, Polymarket is banned in many countries, including France, and VPN use is prohibited. This summer, the company acquired CQX, a licensed U.S. exchange and clearinghouse, for $112 million. The move should allow Polymarket to operate legally in the U.S. again within months; a beta version is already in the works. Its main rival, Kalshi, has taken a different route, securing a Designated Contract Market license from the CFTC, which already allows it to operate in the country.

Polymarket’s theory, and that of prediction markets more broadly, rests on a simple premise: money on the line makes participants more likely to give the most accurate answer possible. It makes sense. But is it enough? What about the number of participants, or the depth of their knowledge about the event?

In markets with limited liquidity, a handful of large traders—called whales—can heavily influence prices. By placing big bets, they can shift the implied probability of an outcome by several points. When informed, whales make markets more accurate by incorporating new information. But when biased or speculative, they distort the signal.

The risk of insider trading is another concern. That’s precisely what investigators suspect happened during this year’s Nobel Peace Prize selection. The odds of Venezuelan activist María Corina Machado’s victory shot up from 4% to 75% within two hours the night before the announcement. Someone with advance knowledge may have placed a large bet and pocketed a significant profit. An investigation is ongoing.

And then comes the moral question: is it ethical to bet on the outcome of a war?

These questions haven’t stopped investors from piling in. In 2024, Polymarket raised $55 million in a round led by Blockchain Capital. History repeated itself earlier this year with a $150 million round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. A roster of well-known angels also joined the cap table, including entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant, music producer Rick Rubin, Figma founder Dylan Field, or Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong.

***

What’s essential to understand is that Polymarket operates on two layers. The first is technology: a blockchain that allows users to interact through smart contracts. The second is content: the information displayed on the site itself.

Prediction markets are more than just betting or investing platforms. They’re tools for gathering information and building real-time public sentiment. A kind of live polling mechanism. Coplan summed it up in a tweet during the last elections: “Trust the market, not the polls.”

Prediction markets fit squarely within a broader movement of distrust toward traditional media and so-called scientific polls, often seen as skewed by the private interests of individuals or organizations. In contrast, prediction markets promise transparency and immutability. Every transaction is recorded on the blockchain, making the data verifiable and tamper-proof.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin is both an investor in Polymarket and one of its most vocal supporters. He sees prediction markets as a new way to stay informed and offers a telling example. During the last Venezuelan election, the market estimated a 23% probability that Maduro would fall, a strong signal that “something was really happening.” Without that data point, Buterin said, he might never have paid attention to the story.

Prediction markets, he argues, can act as an information compass. A complement to traditional journalism. If a sensational headline breaks but the market doesn’t move, is anything truly happening? Conversely, when a market shifts dramatically, there may be real insight to uncover behind it.

In one of his essays, Buterin expands this idea into what he calls info finance, the deliberate design of markets to extract useful information, or truth, rather than to speculate. These can take the form of prediction markets (which event will happen?) or decision markets (which decision will yield the best outcome?).

The growing mistrust of mainstream media and institutions, combined with advances in blockchain scalability and AI—which could soon participate in these markets—explains the renewed excitement around prediction markets. In October, Polymarket counted 386,000 active traders and more than two billion dollars in monthly trading volume. The platform is increasingly cited as a data source by major outlets like CNBC, and every major event offers another chance to bring prediction markets into the spotlight.

It’s hard to foresee how these two layers—technology and content—will evolve together, or whether prediction markets will endure in their current form. Yet their potential applications are vast. Finance, of course, comes first to mind. Market movements have always revolved around information. Buyers and sellers agree on prices based largely on expectations of the future. Tesla’s next quarterly earnings, or the central bank’s next rate cut. Prediction markets help quantify that.

The Intercontinental Exchange’s investment was no coincidence. The American company will become a global distributor of Polymarket’s event-driven data, and the two are also planning to collaborate on future tokenization initiatives.

So what is this, exactly? Gambling? Investing? Information? Some see it as a gateway to addiction, others as a leap forward in how information circulates. When it comes to prediction markets, opinions rarely fall in between.

Main sources and references:

For the broader story, I relied on Fortune’s profile of Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan. For French readers, Cryptoast’s overview offers a clear summary of the history and challenges of prediction markets. I also drew insights from Vitalik Buterin’s essay on info finance, used Dune Analytics for data, and referred to Gallup’s latest poll on declining trust in media to illustrate the shifting landscape of information. Finally, Polymarket’s own documentation provided valuable context on the platform’s functioning and peer-to-peer market structure.

Most entrepreneurs sell what they build, but the best ones sell what it means. As a ghostwriter, I help you shape and share that narrative.

Access my one-page memo to learn why and how to craft your story.

TY

“Well, you sold us one thing. You gave us a business plan. We want you to stick to the plan. If you don’t do that, then we want the money back. And you can carry on, you can do what you want. But you’re not going to do it with our money” Philip was told point-blank.

***

When he was in middle school, Philip wasn’t the kind of teenager who looked forward to two months of summer break just to take it easy. Two weeks of that, maybe. But what he really enjoyed, curious and passionate about technology as he was, was building projects, making things. When he discovered the game Snake on his Nokia 3310, his first thought wasn’t to play until his fingers cramped, but to figure out how he could build the same thing himself. That was the moment his passion for “mobile tech” was born. Unlike his computer, Philip could take his phone anywhere. To him, that felt like a real revolution. So, together with his father Serge Belamant, also an entrepreneur and technology enthusiast, Philip spent his holidays and weekends developing apps and mobile games.

It was only natural that, a few years later, Philip enrolled at the University of Johannesburg to study computer science, mobile technology, and AI. Until then, his interest in mobile tech had never been about money or entrepreneurship. But in 2006, after completing his degree, he decided to start his own company, born from an idea he had during the completion of his final university thesis. Online PC games were booming — maybe you remember those heated matches on Counter-Strike’s pixelated maps — and Philip wanted to bring that same experience to mobile phones.

He managed to convince a few friends from university to join the project. The business model was simple: the games were free, and players could use mobile credits to buy items. It was a huge task, since the code had to be adapted to each phone format. The iPhone had just come out and its market share was nowhere near what it is today. While the young team spent their days sketching storyboards and designing characters for their games, they realized most users weren’t just playing the games. They were using the platform to transfer airtime credits or submit entries in competitions for prizes.

PBel pivoted, much to the dismay of its investors. But Philip wasn’t discouraged. After repaying them and taking out a new $12,000 loan, he stepped into the world of fintech. A world he would never leave.

It turned out to be a smart choice. Within a few months, the young fintech was generating tens of thousands of dollars in revenue from its Namibian partnership with Moola Mobile. One of its former investors didn’t take it very well. “A few months later, all of a sudden, we had this investor who had initially come in, forced us to pay their money back because they didn’t like the pivot, and then got upset with us afterward because the pivot was doing well and now they were no longer involved. It was such a strange thing to manage” Philip explains.

It was his first big lesson as an entrepreneur: how you take on people’s money, and how you set expectations for those investors.

***

One evening, Philip was having dinner with his father in Johannesburg. Serge Belamant was the co-founder and CEO of Net1, a Nasdaq-listed company developing technologies for secure electronic transactions.

— Mobile payment is gonna be the future, Philip said in passing.

— What does that mean? his father replied.

The meaning was clear.

Since its pivot, PBel had been a success, expanding into some twenty countries across Africa. On one side, the fintech company enabled payments via airtime minutes and was experimenting with the issuing of virtual cards and lending products. On the other, Net1 enabled offline payments. The synergies were obvious. In 2012, PBel merged with Net1, and Philip took the helm of Net1 Mobile Solutions.

Net1 kept growing at an impressive pace, reaching a $2.2 billion valuation a few years later. But by 2017, change was on the horizon. During a board meeting at Net1, Philip and the rest of the room failed to agree on the company’s strategy. Philip wanted to explore opportunities to expand into developed European markets. The board, however, preferred to double down on consolidating the business in emerging markets.

After five years leading Net1’s mobile payments division, and as his father was preparing to retire, Philip exited the group. His drive to innovate, however, never left him.

***

Philip and Sean O’Connor had arranged to meet in a Mayfair bar in London. Over a hot chocolate, the two entrepreneurs met for the first time. They had been introduced by a mutual acquaintance. At the time, Philip, then leading the development of Net1 Mobile Solutions, was scanning for investment opportunities, and one of Sean’s portfolio companies may have been a credible option. The discussion didn’t lead to a deal, but it did mark the start of a friendship. The two entrepreneurs kept meeting on different occasions to talk about their respective projects.

When Philip moved to London in 2014, looking to start a new business, their relationship took on a new dimension. Despite his track record, Philip struggled to get a credit card. That triggered a series of other complications and an idea started to take shape in his mind. Once again, it wasn’t about building a business for its own sake. It was about solving a real problem.

He had heard plenty about Klarna in Europe and Affirm in the US. Long before, he had even worked on a Buy Now Pay Later model in Africa. Philip spent hours working on patents and technology schematics with his father Serge in a small office in Guildford. With Sean joining them, the three set out to take on the industry. But not quite in the same way as others.

In the BNPL model as we know it, providers integrate their solution into the merchant’s checkout. Their clients, therefore, are the merchants. Not the consumers. Zilch, by contrast, goes straight to consumers, giving them a payment card and a mobile app to make their purchases.

The core idea was akin to the Googlisation of payments. Brands pay to appear in the app and they finance the service for consumers. In this case, not a free search, but installment payments. The result: users don’t pay interest on their credit, merchants gain visibility and enjoy much higher conversion rates, and Zilch turns advertising budgets into affordable credit for consumers. That’s what’s called an Ad-Subsidised Payments Network (ASPN).

This ASPN is redefining how consumers pay and how brands grow by combining payments, advertising, and data into one intelligent commerce platform. Unlike traditional credit or BNPL models, Zilch lets people pay over time anywhere, while earning instant rewards and savings. On the other side, retailers and brands use Zilch’s AI-driven Intelligent Commerce platform to target and track real customer purchases with 100% transparency and zero wasted ad spend. The result is a value-loop that connects consumers and merchants directly, turning every payment into a measurable growth opportunity.

The strength of this model is that it opened up an entirely new market — a TAM, for the purists — at the intersection of payments and advertising.

All that was left was to convince investors.

***

During the first quarter of 2020, Zilch had secured a term sheet from a major VC, along with a £100 million debt facility. In just three months, the fintech had built an MVP, joined the FCA’s sandbox program, and after six months of successful beta testing, the investors were convinced of the startup’s potential. But one Friday afternoon, as Philip sat in his office, the phone rang. “We’re not sure. We’re going to wait and see” his investor told him. Covid had just hit — the world, and Zilch.

That didn’t stop Philip from chasing the idea of raising funds, which is where his co-founder Sean’s strength lay. He and Sean spent days back-to-back on calls with investors, trying to close the deal that would allow them to pick up speed. After more than 250 calls, Zilch raised a $10 million Series A in September 2020, followed by a pre-Series B — or Series A extension, call it what you will — of $30 million.

From that moment, growth was exponential. Securing a consumer credit license only strengthened the confidence of customers, and of the wider ecosystem, in Zilch. The leadership team faced a major challenge: hiring at speed, over Zoom. Philip quickly parted ways with the two agencies he had brought in and focused instead on building an in-house recruiting team. By 2021, back in the WeWork office in Victoria, London, the atmosphere was completely different. The 20 employees of the pre-Covid days now found themselves surrounded by 120 people. A few months later, that number hit 250, as Zilch opened an office in Miami and a tech hub in Krakow.

Zilch became a “double unicorn” in 2021 after raising a $110 million Series B. In 2022, the fintech claimed 2.5 million customers. 3.5 million in 2023. 4.5 million in 2024 and over 5 million in 2025. This year, the company was recognised by Deloitte as the fastest growing revenue tech unicorn in Europe Middle East & Africa (EMEA).

More importantly, Zilch has saved customers £750 million in fees and interest, while merchants and brands have seen over £5 billion in sales through Zilch in just five years. By the end of March 2025, its annual revenue reached just over £110 million. As a bonus, Zilch announced its first profitable quarter that same year. Quite something when you think it posted less than £50K of revenue in March 2020.

Last year, Philip sat down for an interview. White shirt tucked into dark jeans, black leather sneakers on his feet. Two grey Scandinavian chairs facing each other in front of a wide bay window that opened onto a terrace, itself overlooking the London skyline. No less than Julia Hoggett, CEO of the London Stock Exchange, was leading the interview, showcasing Zilch’s achievements. Earlier this year, fresh off the stage at the must-attend Money 20/20, Philip gave another interview. This time for the NYSE.

Zilch’s IPO ambitions are clear, and could materialize within the next 12 to 24 months. London or New York, the choice will decide not just Zilch’s valuation, but the script for its next act.

Main sources and references:

I explored the concept of googlisation of payments in this Zilch article. I drew many insights from Philip’s journey by listening to The Riding Unicorns Podcast, Founder’s Hack, and Simon Squibb’s interview. Finally, thank you to Philip Belamant and the Zilch comms team for reviewing this article.

Behind every entrepreneur lies a collection of defining moments and hard-earned lessons. As a ghostwriter, I help you shape these stories into social media posts and long-form essays people remember, share, and trust. Let’s talk.

TY

In 2005, a 16-year-old Irishman named Patrick Collison found himself in Boston for the first time. Passionate about computers, he had sent an email to Paul Graham, Y Combinator’s founder, proposing a meeting. Graham accepted, and they arranged to meet at Café Algiers on Brattle Street at 2 p.m. While Patrick was waiting in the café, he saw Graham arrive, looking rushed. “Patrick, I’m so sorry but something’s come up. Can you wait here and I’ll come back?” Graham said, before hurrying out. Patrick spent the next two hours reading his book until Graham finally returned.

He could have felt impatient. Instead, he opened his book and read. It was another chance to learn. That quiet habit would define the Collison brothers: an insatiable appetite for reading to prepare for what comes next.

*

Patrick Collison and his younger brother John grew up in Dromineer, a small village on the eastern shore of Lough Derg in County Tipperary. Remote and poorly connected, the place had little to offer in terms of technology. Until their mid-teens, the Internet at home was so unreliable it was almost useless. So instead of spending their days behind a screen, the brothers used to play outside and immerse themselves in books.

Their scientist parents filled the house with books and encouraged curiosity without ever pushing a set path. Reading became a daily ritual. Physics, biology, history, biographies, novels, they read it all. After school, the two kids would go straight to the library in nearby Nenagh and spend hours among the shelves. It was in those stacks that Patrick and John first read about computers and the Internet.

For years, books were their only access to it. When the family finally installed a dial-up connection, Patrick quickly dived into programming. But the line was so slow that he always kept a book open next to the computer. “You could read a page of your book, look up to see if the page had loaded, and chances are it hadn’t, so you went back to your book,” he remembered during a talk at Startup Grind.

That curiosity soon found a stage. At fifteen, Patrick entered Ireland’s Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition with an artificial intelligence project that won him second prize. The following year, he came back with something even more ambitious: a programming language he had built from scratch, which earned him the competition’s top award and national recognition. John, just two years younger, was no less precocious. By the time he finished secondary school, he had achieved the highest-ever score in the Irish Leaving Certificate exams, a record that made headlines across the country.

Their passion for computers carried them into entrepreneurship before either had reached twenty. In 2007, still teenagers, Patrick and John launched their first company, Shuppa, from their family home. The idea was to build tools for online sellers, but the project quickly evolved when they were accepted into Y Combinator. There, they merged with another team to create Auctomatic, a software platform for eBay power-sellers. Within a year, the startup was acquired by the Canadian firm Live Current Media for about $5 million, making the Collisons millionaires at just 19 and 17.

The two brothers who had discovered the Internet through books were now shaping its future.

In 2011, Patrick and John Collison met Peter Thiel after a Y Combinator dinner. At the time, the brothers had been working on Stripe for about a year, and the PayPal founder shared lessons from building one of the world’s most renowned payment companies. Soon after, he invested in Stripe’s $2 million seed round, joined by Silicon Valley heavyweights such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Elon Musk, or Sam Altman.

Yet, just a few months earlier, things hadn’t been going so well for the two brothers. As they went from meeting to meeting with banks and card networks, the feedback was almost always the same: this will never work.

It’s in part thanks to books that the brothers found the willingness to persevere, and Charlie Munger’s Poor Charlie’s Almanack is perhaps the clearest influence here. John Collison read the book during the early days of Stripe and describes it as “an ode to thinking for yourself”, giving him the confidence to question received wisdom. The book’s emphasis on multidisciplinary thinking and multiple mental models — Munger’s hallmark — has been very useful to him in evaluating Stripe. By drawing on models from economics, psychology, physics, and history, he could choose the framework that fit the problem rather than forcing every problem through the same lens.

After their official launch in September 2011, growth came out quickly, with a surprising level of word of mouth for a financial infrastructure business. During this phase of early growth, another title particularly stood out: The Dream Machine, by M. Mitchell Waldrop. The book retrace the history of computing and the story of how J.C.R. Licklider imagined an “intergalactic computer network” long before the internet existed. Patrick Collison was so enthusiastic about this book that after finishing it, he went and bought a whole bunch of copies to give away to people at Stripe, quickly exhausting Amazon’s supply.

That reverence for reading translated into a distinctive writing culture inside Stripe. The brothers insisted on long-form memos and carefully argued proposals. “The first emails I saw from our CEO literally had footnotes,” recalled a former Head of Docs at Stripe in a blog post. “He structured his emails to be like research papers and put the peripheral information at the bottom so as not to detract from the core information.”

This commitment extended to Stripe’s meetings. While many companies default to slide decks, Stripe borrowed from Amazon’s practice of written narratives. In another blog post, a Stripe employee explains that a typical meeting begins with the organizer sharing a Google Doc. Cameras go off, and everyone spends 10–15 minutes reading silently, leaving comments in the document. Only then does discussion begin.

Writing forces you to slow down and structure your thinking in a way that speaking or unexamined reflection doesn’t. When ideas are only in your head, they can stay vague or contradictory. Putting thoughts into sentences requires choosing precise words, organizing them logically, and making connections explicit, which naturally sharpens reasoning.

You can find books absolutely everywhere in Patrick Collison’s home: in the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom. He reads in the morning and at night, while eating alone, while waiting for a meeting like that day of 2005, and even while walking.

When choosing what to read, Patrick Collison looks at what has inspired the people he admires. He often favors older, time-tested works over the latest releases. He believes readers “should be much more biased towards older books” than they typically are. By letting books prove themselves over decades or centuries, he increases the odds of picking up enduring classics rather than fleeting trends.

Patrick Collison looks for the intersection between books that are worth reading and books that are enjoyable to read. Usually, he’d open a book in the middle, read a few pages, and ask himself: do I want to arrive here? If not, he sets it aside, though he keeps it visible, ready to catch his eye again later. If yes, he starts over from the beginning. And sometimes he abandons one book halfway only to jump into another that happens to be lying around. That’s why he loves physical books. Their presence invites serendipity. By his estimate, he starts one out of every two books he buys, and finishes one out of three. But that doesn’t stop him from reading one or two books per week.

Once immersed in a book, Patrick Collison annotates heavily. He writes notes in the margins, and keeps a quick index of page numbers at the end of the book — usually thirty or so — marking the passages he found most striking. He rarely rereads a book cover to cover, but often dips back into specific sections he’s annotated.

On rare occasions, if he has particularly enjoyed a book, he’ll take the time to summarize it in a Google Doc or an email to friends. The act of writing a summary, he says, helps with synthesis and recollection. That’s what he did, for example, with Joel Mokyr’s A Culture of Growth. He also shares thoughts on books from time to time on X. He recently tweeted that Fragile by Design from Calomiris and Haber was one of the best books he had read on financial services regulation.

When you walked into Stripe’s former offices in San Francisco’s SoMa district, you would sit in a lobby where a coffee table was covered with reading material. You wouldn’t find the gossip magazines of a doctor’s waiting room, but instead engineering journals, issues of The Paris Review, novels, and the Twelve Tomorrows sci-fi anthology.

There was something deeply connected to the Collison brothers’ childhood in this room, and, more broadly, to Stripe’s culture: curiosity and openness. The two young Irishmen didn’t read only to learn about technology but to collect ideas from unexpected places, many of which later found their way into their work. This is likely why Charlie Munger’s concept of multidisciplinary thinking resonates so strongly with them.

To realize how large their horizon of lecture is, you just have to visit Patrick’s personal website. He shares a long list of 600 books he recommends, with a gigantic diversity. He often does the same on X. Want to read about business strategy? Find 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy. About progress? The Beginning Of Infinity. About science? Scientific Freedom. About venture capital? The Power Law. Or a novel? Try Middlemarch or Madame Bovary.

His little brother’s recommendations are just as eclectic. He often shares books he enjoyed reading on X, like The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard W. Hamming, American Kingpin by Nick Bilton, or Financial Shenanigans by Howard Schilit.

This breadth of knowledge not only shaped Stripe’s culture, but also its mission. The brothers are deeply interested in the history of scientific progress and economic growth, and they actively apply those interests to Stripe’s vision. Their mission is about more than just making money movement easy. It’s about “increasing the GDP of the internet”. That mission reflects the intellectual curiosity they nurtured through years of reading across disciplines.

It also explains why Stripe invests in publishing. Through Stripe Press, the company republishes overlooked or out-of-print books that the Collisons consider valuable for understanding progress. You can buy Poor Charlie’s Almanack, The Dream Machine, but also The Origins of Efficiency or Where Is My Flying Car? The books cost between $20 and $40, hardly moving the needle on their $4 billion revenue in 2024, but they offer a rare glimpse into the company’s culture. And there’s also Works in Progress, a quarterly magazine and newsletter which highlights essays and research on economic growth, science, technology, and culture.

Ultimately, John and Patrick Collison’s passion for books serves not only the culture and vision of their company, but also its brand. After all, which other financial company sells books about flying cars?

What is striking about the Collisons is not only that they make time to read, but that reading is inseparable from their work. Books help them step back, think broadly, and shape Stripe’s culture, vision and brand. And when you notice how many successful leaders share the same habit, it’s hard to ignore the signal that reading helps. The challenge lies in turning inspiration into execution.

Main sources and references:

I’ve drawn many insights about Patrick Collison’s reading habits from The Knowledge Project and The Tim Ferriss Show. Chris Atwood Zou and Dave Nunez in a Slab article shared valuable perspectives on Stripe’s culture. Wired, Startup Grind, and The Social Radars were also great sources of anecdotes. I recommend checking out Patrick Collison’s website and X account, as well as John Collison’s. Finally, thanks to Charles Delaville, Head of Communications at Stripe France, for reviewing this article.

Behind every entrepreneur lies a collection of defining moments and hard-earned lessons. As a ghostwriter, I help you shape these stories into social media posts and long-form essays people remember, share, and trust. Let’s talk.

TY

It was a mild summer evening when Rodolphe Ardant left Spendesk’s offices in the Saint-Lazare district of Paris. The neighborhood is known for hosting the headquarters of France’s and the world’s most prominent tech companies: Google, Deezer or Pennylane have all set up shop there. At lunchtime, thousands of employees crowd the foot of Haussmannian buildings in search of a takeaway salad or a coveted spot on a brasserie terrace. By nightfall, the same streets fill again, this time for happy hour.

That’s where Rodolphe was headed that evening of June 2024. He had a meeting with Axel Demazy. The two had been seeing each other regularly for four months. Spendesk was no longer a promising young startup but an established European scale-up, and the job of CEO at a 50-person startup has little in common with leading a company of 500. Axel, with a decade of experience driving transformation at BCG and the American unicorn Jellysmack, had been sharing his insights with Rodolphe on a regular basis.

They settled down over a beer in a bar on the corner, not far from Spendesk’s offices. Axel expected their usual conversation, but Rodolphe surprised him. “Listen, I’ve spoken about this quite a bit with my board. I’d like you to become CEO of Spendesk.” For Rodolphe, the choice was obvious. For some time, he had been wanting to return to what he truly loved doing, what he did best. “I’d be delighted,” Axel replied without hesitation, before raising his glass. A new chapter at Spendesk was about to begin.

***

On June 10, 2015, a new notification appeared in Rodolphe’s inbox. It was an introduction to Thibaud Elzière, founder of the Paris-based startup studio eFounders, the birthplace of success stories like Mailjet, Front, or Aircall. After a few conversations, Rodolphe and Thibaud spotted an opportunity: to reinvent how companies managed their spend. And so Spendesk was born at eFounders. Rodolphe took the helm as CEO, soon joined by Guilhem Bellion and Jordane Giuly.

From the very beginning, the vision was clear. The goal wasn’t to score a quick win. It wasn’t to sell in three years. The goal was to build an ambitious company for the long haul, a company that would one day turn a profit. But building a business with big ambitions, especially pioneering a brand-new category, meant growing fast, investing heavily, and accepting losses at first.

***

The market wasn’t expecting much from Spendesk in the early days. It wasn’t a replacement tool. It was something entirely new. Corporate digital transformation was still hesitant, which meant there was no relying on a nice website and slick marketing strategy to find customers. Instead, the team set up a costly outbound strategy with one goal: test, learn quickly, and understand what works and what doesn't.

For the first few months, Spendesk’s offices looked more like a makeshift call center. Picking up the phone to call prospects, asking about their needs, sitting down next to them to demo the product. That was the sales team’s daily routine, while the product and engineering team were busy building the new standard for spending at work, experimenting with OCR as well as the nascent AI space. In January 2016, the first test expense went through the platform: a bottle of champagne was bought at an Auchan supermarket. The machine was running, and the volumes grew fast. Within twelve months, 600 companies were using the platform, spending €40 million through it. Clear proof that a real need had been found. At the same time, an unusual discipline for such a young startup took root. Even though there were only eight people, everything was documented. In the evenings, the small team would take time to write down what they’d learned in a shared Google Doc. And in English, to force themselves to think international from day one. This helped them grow while structuring at the same time, a subtle balance that turned essential to keep pace with the next phase.

Once product-market fit was clear, the question wasn’t just about selling anymore, but about building a predictable model. That became the focus of Spendesk’s second growth phase, backed by an €8 million Series A raised in January 2018. The round was led by Index Ventures, a prestigious investor who had recently backed Adyen, Slack, or Revolut. Spendesk had just reached €1 million in ARR and a team of about thirty people. It was now time to industrialize the early hypotheses. A new operations team was created. Playbooks for growth, processes and recruitment — thanks to the early documentation — were set up. Roles became specialized, and the team grew to 120 people. Spendesk expanded in Europe and opened offices in London and Berlin. At last, the acquisition and growth model had become predictable. One day, in a board meeting, Rodolphe Ardant shared his thoughts: “We don’t need additional money right now, but if we want to accelerate, maybe we should consider another round.” Spendesk had impressive traction, but not yet the classic indicators for a Series B. The board encouraged him to prepare a deck and tell the story. A few weeks later, he found himself in Index Ventures’ London offices. After his presentation, he asked if the opportunity seemed convincing. The answer came immediately: “Actually, you don’t need to look elsewhere. We want to reinvest. Here are our terms.” The meeting ended with a generous term sheet on the table. Index Ventures committed €35 million to Spendesk’s Series B.

A new phase began, scaling, with the challenge to strengthen the management structure and industrialize systems. On the acquisition side, the Spendesk brand started making noise, and the fintech doubled down on content creation. To boost this, the company launched CFO Connect, a community of finance leaders that became the largest CFO community in Europe with 11,500 members, and a powerful acquisition channel. This visibility also opened doors to new market segments. Spendesk moved upmarket to larger SMEs. AI — or rather machine learning, as it was called then — was now being doubled down on to build new features. By 2021, Spendesk was processing more than €3 billion in spend on the platform. To sustain this pace, two more rounds followed: €100 million in July 2021 led by General Atlantic, and another €100 million in January 2022 led by Tiger Global. Spendesk had become a unicorn.

Of course, hypergrowth came with losses. But that didn’t mean disorder. “You can lose money without having bad unit economics. If they started to drift, we stopped investing. We weren’t profitable, but structurally the business was healthy. If a customer brings you €10,000 over their lifetime and you need to invest €3,000 to acquire them, that customer is profitable. But you need to spend the €3,000 first,” Rodolphe told me.

But starting in 2022, the global context shifted. Interest rates rose, capital became scarce. The money from the last round would no longer fund new commercial offensives that led to losses, but instead finance the path to profitability. For Rodolphe, the shift also marked something personal. He knew his role was changing, and would change even more after this new turn. For some time, he no longer had the space to focus on what he truly loved and where he felt he was strongest: thinking about the long-term direction of the product. His days were filled with building systems, and when he first met Axel in March 2024, he realized Axel was simply better suited for that. After all, a founder’s role is to find the best people for the organization. Putting ego aside, it’s a question every entrepreneur must face.

At first, the plan was for Rodolphe’s successor to step in as COO or General Manager. But after several meetings with Axel, it was obvious: he had the shoulders to take on the CEO’s role directly.

***

In October 2024, after meeting Spendesk’s board and executive committee, newly appointed CEO Axel set off on a tour of Europe to meet the teams. He started in Paris, then flew to London, Berlin, and Madrid. His message was optimistic, and above all, deeply ambitious, with one bold target in sight: to bring Spendesk to profitability the following year.

Rodolphe had already set this transition in motion two years earlier. He leaned heavily on the rise of AI, particularly with the arrival of generative AI, but also by creating Spendesk Financial Services, the company’s own licensed payment institution. Axel carried this momentum forward, first as Rodolphe’s “informal advisor,” then as CEO, leading a transformation on three levels.

Back in 2016, Spendesk had created a brand-new category. But a few years later, the landscape looked very different. New entrants had multiplied, driving prices down across the market. To remain competitive, Spendesk broadened its scope. The product became richer, gradually evolving into a more complete platform for spend management. The acquisition of Okko, another eFounders company specialized in modern procurement, was a clear example. It made Spendesk the first European solution to fully integrate procurement and spend management for mid-sized businesses. This shift also changed the target customer. Where Spendesk had mostly appealed to scale-ups and SMEs seeking efficiency, it now spoke to more mature organizations of up to 1,000 people, with complex needs and established processes. The product evolved not only in depth of features, but also in market positioning.

The second level of transformation was infrastructure. From day one, Spendesk had relied on a provider — a BaaS, or Banking-as-a-Service partner — to issue its cards and process transactions. That setup worked well in the beginning, but Spendesk reached a critical size where it was more interesting from an innovation and economic point of view to own the entire value chain. The full migration of clients to Spendesk Financial Services, now led by Stephane Dehaies, was completed in September 2024, enabling a few things: more flexibility, better customer experience, responsiveness to adapt the product to client needs, and stronger unit economics, since Spendesk could now capture part of the value creation previously shared with its BaaS.

Finally, the organization itself had to evolve. Like many scale-ups that had gone through hypergrowth, encouraged by abundant capital, Spendesk needed to reduce the size of its team, and a reorganization was announced in September 2024.

In this transition toward profitability, big bets were made on the product, with a six-to-twelve month vision broken down into concrete first steps. Governance was set up around these priorities. Every month, Axel met with the finance and product managers to review the numbers and make decisions together. “The goal wasn’t only to manage, but also to change the culture. For example, I wanted product managers to be real business owners, responsible for their own P&L. In France, this mindset isn’t very common yet, especially compared to our American peers. Product managers own their business. They’re not just here to coordinate a team of developers. They’re here to have a business impact,” Axel told me.

***

In March 2025, Axel was sitting in front of his computer. As he did every month since arriving, he was waiting eagerly for the report from the CFO. Axel tracks Spendesk’s key metrics on a daily or weekly basis, and he receives once a month a “soft closing.” The trend had been taking shape for weeks, but this time, when he opened the file, it was written in black and white. Spendesk had just recorded its first profitable month. He called Rodolphe. From now on, Spendesk would no longer depend on external funding to survive. This is the success a CEO and founder hope for.

It’s now been six months in the black, and the challenge is to stay on that path. The first profitable month is a milestone, but the real test is repeating the performance quarter after quarter without losing sight of growth. The vision to achieve this is clear.

First, continue adding value through AI investment. On the customer side, Spendesk already automates and simplifies tedious processes. But tomorrow, its agents will independently flag and resolve off-track budgets, find new suppliers and negotiate pricing, book start-to-finish travel from a simple prompt, and more. Within Spendesk, the goal is to spread intelligence so everyone can make informed decisions and not depend on a central function in an ivory tower.

Second, maintain strong growth. Spendesk has 5,000 clients today, processed €20 billion in spend in 2024, and counts 200,000 users. But thousands of European SMEs are still not equipped. The fintech’s focus is to deepen its presence in the European countries where it already operates.

Nine years after the company was launched in the studios of eFounders, the ambition to build a sustainable company with big, long-term goals has taken one step closer to reality. A new chapter is now open, led by a duo at the top. Rodolphe Ardant, as President, and Axel Demazy, as CEO, now share one mission: leading the agentic AI wave in spend management.

Tom Blomfield was ready. He stood in front of his screen. On the other side, 1,500 people were waiting for him. The co-founder and CEO of Monzo had an important announcement to make to his team.

For over a year, his mental health had been declining. The pressure, the pace, the responsibilities. He couldn’t take it anymore. He had tried to talk about it with those around him. His investors, his board, who were always understanding. But the answer was often the same: “Come on, just hang in there for a few more years, you’ll be fine.” At some point, it was no longer about years, or even months, but weeks.

On May 20, 2020, Tom had made his decision and was about to announce it publicly: after five years leading the British neobank, he would step down as CEO and take on the newly created role of President.

That way, he could focus on what truly drove him. The community, talking to customers, working on the company’s vision. Most of all, he could step back and recover from five years of incredible intensity.

***

Monzo wasn’t the first successful fintech Tom launched. In January 2011, he and two of his Oxford friends, Hiroki Takeuchi and Matt Robinson, met in a North London pub to discuss business ideas. At the time, all three were working as consultants. Tom’s first suggestion was a dating app — Tinder didn’t exist yet, so it could have been a good move — but his two friends turned it down. One idea, however, quickly caught their interest: making it easier to manage shared expenses.

They dug into the idea and, a few weeks later, flew to San Francisco. Their goal was to join the famous Californian accelerator Y Combinator. The interview didn’t go as planned, as the three co-founders gave contradictory answers throughout. But the panel believed in the market and saw huge potential. A few hours later, the news came in: GrouPay had been accepted into the three-month program and granted $150,000 in funding.

In Silicon Valley, the three young Brits discovered a completely different world. The level was several notches higher than they had expected. Ideas, execution, everything moved faster. You could bump into Mark Zuckerberg giving a talk in a YC hallway. “When we were in London, we were play-acting at launching a startup,” Tom admits. Before long, the young fintech pivoted to B2B and became GoCardless, with the ambition of making it easier for businesses to collect payments.

By summer 2011, GoCardless had obtained its payment institution licence. Just one week before demo day. It was the perfect timing to secure investment, and it worked: Accel led the company’s first funding round. Shortly after, GoCardless signed its first customer.

Back in London, growth was slow. In its very first month, the startup processed just £360 in payments. The goal of reaching £1 million within nine months was missed. Growth eventually took off a few months later, but after three years, Tom began to question things. Payments weren’t his passion, and he couldn’t see himself doing this for the next decade.

In 2014, he decided to move on.

Gocardless kept going and was valued at $2.2 billion in its latest funding round in 2022.

***

As a nod to his abandoned dating app idea, Tom joined Grouper in New York for a year as VP Growth. But it’s in 2014 that things would take a decisive turning point.

Anne Boden, co-founder and CEO of Starling Bank, had met Tom a few years earlier at a dinner. The former banker, in the process of building a team to revolutionise the industry, invited Tom to join as CTO. He accepted. I doubt either of them expected things to descend into chaos so quickly.

“Spying, defections and regrets: Inside the bitter feud between Starling Bank and Monzo” — the Telegraph was still running such headlines five years later. I won’t go into the details of the clash between the CEO and CTO that kept the media buzzing for years. Quite simply because I don’t know what really happened — very few people do I guess — and I dislike the bad habit of making claims without knowing the facts. In this case, the two sides tell different stories: one speaks of a resignation followed by unfair dismissal of the team, the other of an attempted coup. I’m not in a position to take sides. What I can tell you, however, is how it ended.

In 2014, Starling Bank was in talks with Passion Capital, a European VC, to raise its first funding round. This was crucial to, first, hire top talent, and second, secure a banking licence. But after disagreements between Anne and Tom, things took a different turn.

Tom persuaded Passion Capital and the Starling Bank employees who had been dismissed alongside him to join him in a new venture. He now had both the funds and an experienced team to go after a banking licence.

In 2015, Tom Blomfield, Jonas Huckestein, Jason Bates, Paul Rippon and Gary Dolman launched Mondo.

***

Mondo, renamed Monzo a year later, didn’t join Y Combinator. But the spirit of the Californian accelerator was there when the five co-founders set out on their journey. Tom went back to all his notes from his days on the West Coast: “launch early,” “talk to users,” “do things that don’t scale.” In less than four months, the first prototype of the bank was launched with a prepaid debit card. Success came quickly, unlike the early days of GoCardless, and in February 2016, Monzo pulled off the fastest crowdfunding in history: £1 million in 96 seconds on Crowdcube.

Choosing crowdfunding perfectly reflected the neobank’s strategy: build a community and take the opposite stance to traditional banks. It was bold. When I talk to many fintechs in the banking sector, the message is often cautious. They want to disrupt, but not in a way that feels too modern, too different. They’re afraid of “not looking serious.” Back in 2015, 2016, 2017, fintech was just starting to be seen as credible, and technology was just beginning to disrupt banking. More transparent, simpler, more fun with a coral-coloured debit card. That was the Monzo spirit, and it was all the more courageous to take that path so early. And guess what? People loved it. In October 2018, the neobank, which had obtained its banking licence the previous year, reached one million users. Without spending a penny on marketing, simply through word of mouth.

Tom credits Monzo’s success partly to its huge ambition of building a bank from scratch: “It’s somewhat counterintuitive, but taking on a really hard problem actually makes some things easier. The smartest, most ambitious people want to come and work with you because they know that’s where they’ll find other smart, ambitious people. The press wants to write about you because you’re doing something so big. And customers want to sign up because you’ve got this bold, ambitious vision and they’re excited to be part of it.”

But with success, especially in a regulated industry, comes great responsibility.

***

On October 17, 2019, something unusual was happening in front of Monzo’s headquarters. A film crew arrived, cameras were set up, and a mysterious one-metre-high object was placed in the middle of the street, covered with a black sheet. A man in grey jeans and a green parka — no, not Liam Gallagher — appeared. After a few seconds, he whipped the sheet away. Revealed was a giant block of ice, inside which a Monzo card had been carved. “What’s going onzo, Monzo?” exclaimed the journalist. The video quickly went viral across the country. It was the BBC.

In recent months, Monzo, following regulatory requirements, had stepped up its monitoring of illegal activities such as financial crime and money laundering taking place on its accounts. When suspicious activity was detected, the account would be frozen — hence the ice sculpture — and no transactions could be made by the user. It reminded me of my years at HSBC, where a single suspicious transaction could get an account blocked. Sometimes it was justified, sometimes not, and regulatory processes, often long and far from modern, didn’t help. Take it from me: customers don’t like it.

As expected, the backlash was intense. Some people threatened to throw acid on employees in the office. A Facebook group was created to find Tom’s home address. He had to change his phone number and email address. And, as Tom put it, “It was only problem number seven in the stack rank of all the things I was worried about.”

The heaviest burden for the young entrepreneur was responsibility. The neobank was processing billions in payments, and even the smallest glitch could throw the whole system off. An outage lasting only seconds could have a major impact on people’s lives. And of course, those outages did happen.

Despite the challenges, Monzo’s growth kept climbing. Its revenue reached £3.5 million in 2018 and rose to £19.7 million in 2019. Profitability, however, moved in the opposite direction, with losses widening from £30 million to £47 million. Still, the company had raised significant capital. It sparked a lot of debate, but it’s a common pattern and one that has proven successful for many fintechs that are profitable today.

***

In early 2020, Tom had just spent the past nine months travelling the world to convince investors. Some funding rounds had been quick, like the one that made Monzo a unicorn. Others took much longer, like this one, where Tom was told “no” 96 times. It had taken months to negotiate a £100 million round, but two Canadian pension funds had finally agreed to lead it. It was an important one, given the company was burning through £100 million in cash per year. The paperwork was ready. The meeting was set for Monday morning. But over the weekend, the unexpected happened: the world went into lockdown. Tom’s phone rang. “The investment committee said ‘every investment on hold’. We’re not doing the investment. We’re out.”

The blow was double. Not only was this cash, vital for the company, gone, but Covid also hit the neobank hard. A large part of Monzo’s revenue came from customers using their cards overseas, and revenue dropped by 50%.

The regulator advised Tom and his leadership team to prepare for the company to shut down. But through determination, the hard work of the teams, and securing funding a month later from existing investors causing a significant down round, the company gained some breathing room to bounce back.

Tom was exhausted. For several years, he had been sounding the alarm about his health. This time, the moment had come. In May 2020, he handed over the CEO role to TS Anil, then CEO of Monzo US, and took the role of President. He could finally breathe again, though not without a certain sadness and guilt.

He left Monzo for good a year later with one powerful lesson: “Showing your emotion, your vulnerability, your screwups, is such a powerful way to inspire followship.”

***

Ten years on, the neobank is still growing at a rapid pace. Monzo now has over 13 million customers: 12.5 million are personal banking clients, that’s 20% of the UK population, and 700,000 are businesses. Its revenue stands at £1.2 billion, up 48% from the previous year.

As for Tom, he has moved on to new pursuits. After a year spent recharging and refocusing, one of his former investors reached out in 2022. The firm had just invested in a fintech and wanted to bring Tom into the round. He also suggested Tom speak with the founder of that fintech. Everything Tom had experienced at GoCardless and Monzo was an incredible source of insight. During that conversation, Tom’s entrepreneurial mind came alive again and he decided to embrace this new hobby. He became an angel investor and made 75 investments in the following nine months.

Tom is now a General Partner at Y Combinator, back to doing what he loves. No, not running all-hands meetings in front of 1,500 people, but solving big problems alongside talented entrepreneurs.

Credit to my main sources:

• YC

• The Diary of a CEO

• Sifted

• Monito

• 20VC

• Monzo reports

Behind every founder is a collection of defining moments and hard-earned lessons. As a ghostwriter, I help you shape them into stories people remember, share, and trust. Let’s talk.

Thomas

Anton Osika had just woken up. He glanced at his phone and saw chaos in his notifications. He could have scrolled endlessly, the X alerts just wouldn’t stop. A pretty effective wake-up call. You know that feeling, when you’re barely awake and get hit with a jolt, the kind that makes you go “shit, what’s happening?” It wakes you right up.

The day before, Anton had posted a video on X about the project he’d been working on for a few weeks: GPT Engineer. The video showed Anton typing into the app he had just built. His prompt: build a snake game. Within seconds, the code came to life, as if by magic. I can’t say what he was expecting when he posted it, but clearly, his “plain English to working app” concept had an effect overnight. The app, open-source, had also been published on GitHub. Within a few weeks, it had hundreds of thousands of users. Anton’s inbox was overflowing. Not just with messages from developers, but also from people who had never really coded, and who had just built their first app.

It was a revolution. All that creativity locked in people’s minds by a lack of technical knowledge could finally be unleashed. The need and the product still needed refining, of course. But such enthusiasm couldn’t be ignored. For Anton, it was an opportunity he couldn’t miss.

It all started with a 6 a.m phone call.

***

Above all, Anton Osika is a scientist. He had always been passionate about technology, science, and physics. He had been coding since middle school and graduated in Engineering Physics from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. His first professional experiences were dedicated to research.

He embraced his first startup adventure in 2017, two years after finishing his studies, when he became the first employee and Founding Engineer at Sana Labs, a Swedish AI startup focused on learning. Three years later, he launched his own startup, Depict.ai, and took on the role of CTO. The company, which worked on product recommendations for e-commerce sites using AI, joined Y Combinator and raised $20 million from Garry Tan’s Initialized Capital, EQT Ventures, Tiger Global, and Northzone.

The company went through significant growth. One of the most impressive for a Swedish startup — spoiler alert, the record has since been broken. Anton faced, for the first time, the challenges of hiring, scaling, and managing rapid growth. But that first entrepreneurial experience came to an end four years later, the day Anton released GPT Engineer.

That’s when he realized there was likely something much bigger to build. Once he had found a replacement, he jumped headfirst into his new adventure.

***

Everything was moving too fast. Day after day, messages kept flooding Anton’s inbox. The number of users kept rising. GitHub stars were multiplying. He had to act quickly, seize the opportunity while it was still there.

It was six in the morning — don’t ask why so early, probably the sense of urgency — when Anton decided to call Fabian Hedin. Fabian had been part of the technical team at Depict.ai in 2022, which is how the two knew each other.

– Hi Fabian, let’s go for a walk, I have an idea.

– When?

– I’m outside.

Ten minutes later, Anton met Fabian at his doorstep. The sun was barely rising as the two set off on a long walk through the streets of Stockholm.

Two hours later, the AI startup was born.

***

The first two versions of the app were failures.

For a year, Anton, Fabian, and the small, talented team they had brought together struggled to turn their “fun tool” into a revolutionary product. Looking back, three factors held back GPT Engineer’s traction according to some early team members: first, the initial launches focused more on features than on validating a real user need. Then, the timing wasn’t ideal. The market wasn’t fully ready for a tool like this. And finally, the brand didn’t resonate. The name felt gimmicky and failed to reflect the full potential of what was under the hood.

It wasn’t until the third version, in December 2024, that product-market fit finally started to emerge. After a full rebrand — that’s when GPT Engineer became Lovable, because, at last, the tool had truly become lovable — the team learned from its mistakes and approached the launch differently: a user-centric product ; a focus on distribution, with a major Product Hunt launch and a well-crafted social media strategy (check out Anton’s LinkedIn and X profiles, they say it all) ; and a deep understanding of traction signals, like the number of mentions on social platforms, paired with a strong feedback culture.

It paid off.

Five weeks later, Lovable was generating $5.3 million in ARR. By January 2025, $10 million. By May, $50 million. And just a few weeks ago, following a record-breaking $200 million Series A at a $1.8 billion valuation, Anton proudly announced that Lovable had passed $100 million in ARR. In just eight months. Lovable became the fastest-growing startup ever, ahead of Cursor, Wiz, and even OpenAI, all of which took between one and two years to hit the $100 million mark.

Crazy.

***

A few years ago, the trend would have been to hire. Again and again. The first question people asked a startup CEO to gauge success was, “How much have you raised?” The second, “How big is your team?” Because, of course, managing a lot of people looked good. It seemed serious. But Lovable represents a new generation of startups. The kind building unicorns with as few team members as possible using AI as leverage. That’s their value proposition by the way: enabling small teams to achieve big things with AI. But it’s also what they embody. The company has just passed $100 million in ARR with only 45 employees.

Anton has a clear vision around hiring and it’s quite different from the usual narrative. You often hear people talk about experience, about bringing in seasoned specialists who’ve “been there, done that,” and can apply tried-and-tested playbooks. But Anton believes that “talent is worth ten times more than experience.” He prioritizes people who can wear multiple hats and adapt quickly.

One question that often comes up is about the company’s location: Stockholm. “Why don’t you move to the US? That’s where everything happens,” people ask. But Anton believes in Europe and its talent. He even turned down the opportunity to move to San Francisco and join Y Combinator to grow Lovable. He didn’t want to give up more equity and he feared that joining YC might distract him from building the product. He already knew the system.

Another sign of his commitment to Europe: the early funding rounds were led by European investors Hummingbird and byFounders. The latest round, however, was led by California-based Accel, a (recurring) signal of the lack of firepower in the European ecosystem when it comes to leading mega-rounds.

***

Lovable’s strength lies in having created an entirely new market. As Anton puts it, “Today, there are 47 million developers worldwide. Lovable is going to produce 1B potential builders.” Just like Canvas did brilliantly with design, the Swedish startup unlocks people’s creativity and ideas by removing technical barriers. If Lovable had focused solely on helping developers code more efficiently, its total addressable market would have remained at 47 million people. But by enabling any entrepreneur to build a product, the market becomes twenty times larger.

Anton makes this vision clear in the way he communicates. He regularly showcases Lovable users who built online businesses in just a few days and started generating thousands in MRR within weeks.

A new era is unfolding. Pretty exciting, isn’t it?

Credit to my main sources:

Anton’s X

Contrary Research

20VC

Forbes

Behind every founder is a collection of defining moments and hard-earned lessons. As a ghostwriter, I help you shape them into stories people remember, share, and trust. Let’s talk.

Thomas

Sebastian Siemiatkowski and his two school friends, Niklas Adalberth and Victor Jacobsson, have just stepped through the grand entrance of the Stockholm School of Economics. But this time, they’re not here for class. They’re here to pitch their new project, Kreditor.

The school’s incubator is hosting a pitch competition and it’s the perfect chance for the three friends to get noticed. The jury is impressive. Very impressive. Leading the panel: the chairman of H&M and a member of the Wallenberg family, one of the wealthiest and most influential families in the country. Even the King of Sweden is in the room. If there’s ever a time to deliver, it’s now.

The three friends are there to present something new: a “buy now, pay later” solution. They watch the other teams go before them when their turn comes. Heart pounding, they step on stage and deliver their pitch. Perfectly.

After a few minutes of deliberation, the jury shares its verdict: “It’ll never work… why can’t the banks just do it?” The feedback is harsh. Kreditor finishes last in the competition. It’s hard to stay motivated when such important figures dismiss your hopes in two short sentences. But as a sign of their character, instead of giving up, the young founders tell themselves, “We’ll show you.”

Twenty years later, Klarna is valued at $15 billion.

***

That strength of character, Sebastian Siemiatkowski got it from his childhood. Born in Sweden to Polish immigrant parents, he grew up in a precarious environment and found escape through books. Classic science fiction tomes like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but also biographies of entrepreneurs like the founder of IKEA or Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin. That’s when his interest in business started to take shape. Starting a company might be his way out of hardship.

At 15, Sebastian was hired at Burger King. He spent two years there, apron on, assembling burgers in the kitchen of the American fast-food giant. That’s where he learned discipline and developed a taste for well-oiled systems — no pun intended — but above all, that’s where he made a key encounter: Niklas Adalberth. You may have forgotten already, but his name appeared in the very first line of this story.

The two of them would stay close for quite some time. They studied together at the Stockholm School of Economics, and even embarked on a wild one-year adventure together. Between two academic years, the two friends travelled the world without ever taking a plane, spending an average of $10 a day. Enough to create some incredible memories.

Back in Stockholm, Sebastian found a job in a factoring company as a sales rep before returning to his studies. While he struggled to convince old-school business owners to buy his solution, a new generation of entrepreneurs showed real interest: e-commerce founders. At the time, there were still few of them, and e-commerce was a new industry. So when it came time to make a purchase, pulling out a debit card without having touched the product or spoken to a salesperson felt risky.

But what if you could place the order, receive the product, and pay later? Good idea, right?

***

Well, that wasn’t the jury’s opinion at the pitch session. But, as if fate wanted to send a small sign of encouragement, a stranger stopped the young entrepreneurs just as they stepped off stage: “Hey, I don't care what those guys said. Just go for it, and the banks will never understand what happened.”

It was Jane Walerud's opinion too. A few months later, she invested €60,000 and became Kreditor’s first angel investor. The problem now was that none of the three co-founders had a technical background. They needed developers and Jane helped with that too, introducing Sebastian to four engineers from her previous company. The team was hyped by the idea, and also the 40% equity they were offered to build the product.

The guys were good. It took them just four months to launch. On April 10, 2005 — easy date to remember since I was born on April 10 — the first transaction went through. Everything worked perfectly. Now came the time to scale, fast. The concept was simple: Kreditor paid the merchant upfront and gave customers 30 days to settle their invoice. In exchange for taking on the risk and promising higher conversion rates, merchants gave a commission on each transaction to the young Swedish startup.

But things didn’t go as planned. A few months after the launch, the four engineers decided to leave. A contract had been signed without much attention to detail, and there had been a misunderstanding about how long they were expected to stay involved. In reality, it had never been clearly defined. “We thought these guys would stay on and help us build the company, but they left after only a year, taking their shares with them,” Sebastian says. “It was my first real learning as a founder: you have to make sure your employment contracts don’t leave any room for uncertainty.”

The shares were eventually bought back — probably a bit too quickly for the engineers, who might regret it now — and Klarna found a new CTO to take over.

***

Between 2006 and 2008, Kreditor experienced strong growth, driven by the rise of online commerce. The company expanded beyond Sweden’s borders and began offering its services in neighboring countries: Norway, Finland, and Denmark. At the time, the startup wasn’t fully technology-driven yet, and focused entirely on the service it provided to customers.

Things really picked up speed in 2010, when Kreditor set out to become a tech company. To build credibility and attract top tech talent, Sebastian wanted to raise funds from leading tech investors. He quickly had two names in mind: Atomico — the fund created by Skype founder Niklas Zennström — and Sequoia Capital. It was with the latter that Kreditor, renamed Klarna that same year, raised $9 million at a €100 million valuation.

Klarna’s growth in the following years was impressive. The fintech continued raising capital, including a $155 million Series C in 2011 from General Atlantic and DST Global, to fuel its expansion. Confident in its results, the company set a new goal: to become the go-to infrastructure for processing online payments. Two other young companies had already built solid reputations and seemed to be pulling ahead: Stripe and Adyen. The market was clearly moving fast, a sign there were opportunities to seize, right?

Klarna decided to enter the German market to kick off this new phase. But the teams struggled to release a solid first version of their payment product. Meanwhile, Adyen was expanding at breakneck speed across continents and outperforming expectations. Was Klarna aiming too high? The wake-up call came in 2015. Klarna and Adyen were both in the running to handle payments for the giant Spotify. It was a major blow when the streaming company chose Adyen. Ouch… the Swedish company picking the rival.

Two options were then laid on the table for Klarna’s future: Sell the company and walk away with a modest profit, or double down on what they did best, BNPL, and take on the massive US market.

Well… ten years later, Klarna still isn’t for sale.

***

The Swedish fintech entered the US market in 2015, opening offices in Columbus and New York. Affirm was already a well-established competitor in the US, and the Australian company AfterPay was also experiencing impressive growth in the land of Uncle Sam. Sebastian took on the role of first salesperson again, just like in Kreditor’s early days, and pitched the product again and again. But the company hit a wall. There was a structural problem inside the organization, which slowed down product launches.

Klarna was facing an issue I’ve often talked about in this newsletter — and with my clients for whom I write: silos had formed between teams as the headcount grew. Sales, engineering, and product were operating separately, with no shared responsibility or motivation, and it affected the company’s velocity.

To fix this internal organizational problem, Klarna took inspiration from Amazon and restructured everything into small, autonomous, cross-functional teams. “We started to feel a greater sense of momentum, to get products out at a higher pace, to launch more features. It wasn’t a daylong exercise, to be sure, and some employees weren’t sold on it, but in the end it was the best thing for the company,” Siemiatkowski says.

The benefits of the restructuring showed quickly and paved the way for continued growth. In 2017, Klarna obtained a banking license to expand its financial services offering. A few years later, COVID became a real accelerator for the fintech as people could no longer shop in stores. In 2021, Klarna processed $80 billion. The fintech also reached a record valuation of $45.6 billion, even as its losses multiplied fivefold compared to the previous year.

In July 2022, Klarna made headlines. But not for the right reasons. “Klarna valuation plunges 85% to $6.7 billion as ‘buy now, pay later’ hype fades,” CNBC reported. WSJ, TechCrunch, and all the major media outlets picked up the story. The macroeconomic context wasn’t great, coming out of the COVID crisis and with the war in Ukraine underway. Regulators were also starting to question the BNPL model, sometimes criticized for enabling painless over-indebtedness. And, of course, there was the 2020s tech bubble, which had inflated valuations far faster than revenues. “I was cautioning people that if your valuation grows faster than your revenue, there’s bound to be a correction,” Sebastian reminds.

The company faced its first major round of layoffs. 10% of the workforce, around 700 people at the time, were let go. Seventeen years after Klarna’s beginnings, its CEO was once again facing massive, unfamiliar challenges. It turned out to be a very difficult period, marked by countless sleepless nights.

***

In 2023, Klarna weathered the storm and cut its losses by 69%. In 2024, it returned to profitability for the first time since 2021 with a net profit of $21 million on $2.81 billion in revenue. It’s always striking to see that these fintech giants — the same goes for companies like Stripe or Revolut — continue to show strong growth, even with billion-dollar revenues and years of maturity behind them.

A holy grail for many entrepreneurs and a major hope for any investor seeking liquidity, Klarna was expected to go public last March. It was supposed to mark the beginning of a new cycle for the whole ecosystem. Everything was in place. The communication was sharp. Profitability had returned. But the economic context had other plans and just days before the IPO, Klarna pulled back. The listing would have to wait.

Klarna has been around since 2005… twenty years! I had no idea the company had been around that long. And yet, despite the years, the problems just keep piling up. We often see the successes, much less the dark sides. But Sebastian “prefers chaos over success” and thrives in the heat of action. Success bores him. And I get the sense that’s something many entrepreneurs have in common.

Credit to my main sources:

Sequoia’s Spotlight

TechCrunch

The Diary of a CEO

Oh and… If you want to boost your personal brand, you can check out my ghostwriting services. I’m behind the communication of fintech CEOs recognized by the FT, Mastercard, or Sifted.

And you know, investors, clients, talent... they’re all more moved by a good story than by technical jargon. I can help you tell yours. Just hit reply and let’s chat.

Thomas

Jack Zhang had just landed on the tarmac in Shanghai. He was here to meet Patrick Collison, the Irish co-founder and CEO of Stripe, the new giant in payments. A few weeks earlier, in September 2018, Jack had received a message from the Sequoia team — the investment fund is backing both companies. Stripe’s CFO, Will Gaybrick, wanted to discuss something important. They first spoke over the phone, and Will was clear about his intention: “We’re interested in acquiring Airwallex.” The offer on the table was $1.2 billion. It felt surreal to Jack. Airwallex had only been around for three years, had only started generating revenue a year ago, and already this kind of acquisition offer was coming through.

An introduction email was quickly sent between the two CEOs, and the conversation moved to WhatsApp, leading up to this first meeting in the Chinese megacity. It wouldn’t be the last. After that initial encounter, Jack, his co-founders, and Airwallex’s management team were invited to spend a week in San Francisco, home to Stripe’s headquarters. Jack and Patrick would also meet again in Singapore, just the two of them this time, and later in Melbourne.

A few weeks later, back in San Francisco, a formal offer was made. It was decision time. Jack hadn’t been sleeping for two weeks. Sequoia was in favor of the deal, but the founders couldn’t stop thinking about the potential of what they were building.

***

Nothing predestined Jack Zhang to become one of the world’s financial leaders. He grew up in Qingdao, China. A “small city,” as he says, with eight million people. His parents both worked in banking, weren’t home much, and Jack mostly lived with his grandparents. So he started to hate banking, this thing that kept him from spending time with his parents. And on top of that, what he really wanted was to work at Microsoft. He loved technique, was good at math and physics, and became one of the brightest students in the city.

But you know that comfort when everything’s going well, when you succeed, when you get good grades at school? And all the confidence that comes with it? Well, Jack lost all of that when, at 15, his parents sent him to study in Australia even though he barely spoke English. “I went from, academically, the top 100 in my school to some random student that didn’t speak English very well,” he remembers. Jack moved in with a host family. Adapting was hard. He discovered a new language, a new culture, a new city where he often got lost because he had no familiar landmarks. But he picked things up quickly, that part didn’t change, and he managed to get his diploma and was accepted into the University of Melbourne to study Computer Science.

When Jack came back to China to see his family, his dad’s driver usually picked him up at the airport. But this time, no one was there. When he got home, he found his father smoking a cigarette, something he had never done before. He quickly understood something was wrong.

His father had just lost his job and could no longer pay for Jack’s studies in Australia.

***

From a young age, Jack had a knack for business. And boldness, that much is clear. At 13, while still just a school kid, he launched a video game magazine called Urban Exploration. He didn’t see it as a business at all, more like a hobby, the kind you dive into with teenage carefree energy. Still, the magazine ended up generating $100,000 in profit which he eventually gave back to his school.

So when he found out he’d lost his parents’ financial support, Jack didn’t hesitate to roll up his sleeves. During school breaks, he’d wake up every morning at 5 a.m. to catch a train heading inland, where he worked countless hours in a lemon factory. He picked up more jobs, in a computer store, at a petrol station supermarket. He spent all his time working and barely saw his friends. At that moment, he had only one goal: to get out of the situation he was stuck in. One day, while bartending at the Westin, he saw a group of bankers in sharp suits attending a seminar. For the first time, he considered working in banking.

Degree in hand, Jack flew to Europe and landed in London. He had obtained a job as a Software Engineer at Aviva, where he stayed for two years before heading back to Melbourne, still in banking, this time working on cross-border payments. But as you’ve probably guessed by now, banking wasn’t exactly Jack’s thing. So he started launching a whole series of side businesses alongside his day job.

Brace yourself, the list is long.

His biggest side business was property development, launched with his friend Max Li, an architect. On top of that, Jack started a burger chain, a wine and olive oil trading company, and a café in Melbourne. What’s striking, listening to him, is how simple he makes it all sound, things that would scare most people. “Nothing is that hard,” he says, like the time he decided to demolish and rebuild his own house just to get a better grip on how the real estate game worked.

After a few years, he was generating millions in revenue. All while keeping his day job in banking. He worked 15 hours a day and quickly became known for his relentless work ethic.

Jack’s situation at that point would satisfy most of us. But not him. He wanted more. He wanted to build a billion-dollar company, and as you’ve seen, long hours weren’t going to stop him. As a young father, he wanted to make his daughter proud, to have a real impact on the world. It was through his café business, where he had to import coffee, that he realized how complex cross-border payments are for a business. With his background in banking, he decided to take on the problem.

For the first time, he stepped away from the day-to-day of all his other projects to focus on just one: Airwallex.

***

Jack launched Airwallex in 2015 with friends from university and his old job: Max Li, his partner in the real estate business and the coffee shop, Jacob Dai, and Ki-Lok Wong. A fifth person would soon join them.

The coffee shop Jack and Max had opened was just downstairs from the bank where Jack worked. One Friday afternoon, while Jack was having a coffee, Lucy Liu, a friend of Max’s visiting from China walked in. She had just left her job at an investment bank, and she and Jack started chatting. They hit it off, and all decided to go out for dinner that evening.

— So, what do you do? Lucy asked later that night.

— I work at a bank, Jack replied, but I’m about to quit and start a company to revolutionize how money moves globally.

Curious, Lucy asked him what the plan was.

— We’re going to Hong Kong to raise money from VCs.

— Oh… how much are you looking to raise?

— A million or two to start.

— What if I gave you two million for 40% of the company?

Jack was taken aback. Was she serious? It didn’t look like some joke thrown around between bites of dinner. Lucy, in her twenties, was completely serious, and they all agreed to meet the next morning at the University of Melbourne library to talk more. 8 a.m. sharp.

By 11 a.m. the next day, a deal was struck. Lucy would invest $1 million — despite her husband’s refusal, the money was originally meant for real estate — in exchange for 20% of the company. The company didn’t even exist yet. Jack hadn’t quit his job. But by 11 a.m. Monday morning, $1,000,000 had landed in Jack’s account.

Looks like it was time to build.

***

Airwallex’s first two products were total failures. There were many ways to approach the topic of cross-border payments, and they didn’t pick the right ones to start. The first idea was to do peer-to-peer, but the volume needed to make the model work was way too high. A quarter of the money they’d raised was already gone (alongside Lucy’s investment, Airwallex had raised another $2 million from Hong Kong VC Gobi Partners). The second idea was to build an invoicing solution to help Australian e-commerce sellers get paid from China. Another failure.

Cash was starting to get tight, product-market fit still wasn’t showing up, and the team needed to raise again.

In September 2016, Jack was introduced to Sequoia by his Hong Kong investor. Then to Tencent, through friends of friends. Airwallex hadn’t yet found the right product, but the vision, reinventing how money moves around the world, was appealing. After a few conversations, Sequoia agreed to invest alongside Tencent but under one condition: Tencent had to lead the round. That’s when things went south. Pony Ma, Tencent’s founder, pulled the plug at the very last stage of approval — it wasn’t the first time Jack had seen a deal fall through. A year earlier, Matrix had offered $2 million for 20% of the company, then cancelled the offer at the last minute. Again, everything collapsed. But Jack didn’t give up. For three months, he tried every possible path to land another meeting with Tencent and convince them his vision was right. His persistence paid off and Airwallex raised a $13 million Series A from Tencent, Sequoia, and Mastercard.

That was close. There were only six weeks of cash left and no plan B.

With this new investment, the team could start iterating on a third product. The company spent 2017 building an API-product that allows businesses to send and receive international payments with lower fees and faster settlement than traditional banks. This time, they got it right.

In 2018, payment volumes took off, thanks in large part to SHEIN, which was growing rapidly at the time and became a key revenue driver for the fintech. Airwallex went from processing $0 in January to over $1 billion by the end of the year.

That’s when Stripe came in with an acquisition offer. Airwallex’s presence in Asia-Pacific was highly attractive for the California-based company, as was its deep expertise in cross-border payments and that promising vision of Global Banking. $1.2 billion, while Airwallex was only generating $2 million in revenue… it looks like an offer you can’t refuse. But it was so early. The potential was enormous.

Jack and his co-founders ultimately rejected the offer.

***

Airwallex kept going. In 2019, the fintech brought in $10 million in revenue. In 2020, $20 million. But in 2021, COVID hit and Airwallex’s revenue dropped. Money wasn’t moving around the world the way it used to. But the team had been working on a new product for a while, and the timing couldn’t have been better to launch it.

Recognizing that businesses needed more than just FX payments, Airwallex introduced multi-currency business accounts. It worked. The next step was a natural one: expanding the business banking offering to include spend management and embedded finance.

Imagine a business that started using Airwallex to pay overseas suppliers with lower FX fees. As it grew, it opened a multi-currency account to collect payments from international customers. Then came Airwallex’s corporate cards to handle travel expenses. Later, the company integrated Airwallex’s APIs into its own platform to automate payouts to vendors in multiple countries. Today, that business runs on a full suite of banking services, all from a single provider.

In June 2025, Airwallex surpassed $800 million in annualized revenue, up 90% from the previous year, and exceeded $130 billion in annualized global payment volume. The company is now valued at $6.2 billion, after a $300 million Series F in May, bringing total funding to over $1.2 billion. Airwallex now serves more than 150,000 businesses globally, with a team of 1,800+ people across 25 offices worldwide, and will be IPO-ready by 2026.

Drop everything to build a billion-dollar business? Bet won.

Credit to my main sources:

• HD in HD

• The Generalist

• Airwallex’s Team

Oh and… If you want to boost your personal brand, you can check out my ghostwriting services. I’m behind the communication of fintech CEOs recognized by the FT, Mastercard, or Sifted.

And you know, investors, clients, talent... they’re all more moved by a good story than by technical jargon. I can help you tell yours. Just hit reply and let’s chat.

Thomas

Prot is a well-known name in banking. Before Alexandre, the son, there was Baudouin, the father, who spent 30 years at BNP and served as its chairman from 2011 to 2014. And honestly, at first, everything seemed to point to the son eventually taking on the same kind of responsibilities as his father.

Alexandre earned a Master’s in Finance from HEC. As part of the program, he spent six months in China with Carrefour, followed by another six months at Goldman Sachs in London. His early career was just as prestigious, spending three years at McKinsey. But driven by a growing interest in entrepreneurship, Alexandre decided to head back to school for a year at INSEAD in Singapore, known for its strong entrepreneurial culture.

There, something clicked. Rather than advising, he wanted to lead, to operate, to build. That was his thing. After his time in the city-state, Alexandre returned to Paris with a new mindset: that of an operator. For a year and a half, he led the French expansion of German company Wimdu, an online marketplace for booking accommodations, where he learned fast and delivered with flair.

That was it. Alexandre had taken his first step into entrepreneurship, and now, he wanted to go all in.

At 31, he walked away from everything.

***

Alexandre's first move was to go to Silicon Valley for a month, alone. It’s the epicenter of global tech, and he wanted to see what was happening there. Being the good student he was, he planned his trip carefully. He rented a car, drove along the long highways from San Francisco to San Jose, and set up lunches with friends of friends and contacts he had made in the previous years. He attended conferences, and one in particular left a mark: a talk by Kevin Systrom, the founder of Instagram, who had just sold his startup to Facebook for a billion dollars when the company had only 11 employees. The story seemed unreal and deeply inspired Alexandre. He came back from the trip full of ideas — maybe too many — but one thing was certain: he was going to launch something.

A few weeks later, as he was heading to a friend’s 30th birthday party, Alexandre ran into an old buddy from high school: Steve Anavi. The two hadn’t seen each other in years.

— So, what are you up to these days?

— I just left Groupon. I’m thinking about starting my own company. And you?

— I just got back from a month in Silicon Valley. I’d like to launch something too.

There was clearly something to explore. So Alexandre and Steve decided to meet again to talk more. Soon, they were seeing each other several times a week, meeting over lunch or coffee in Parisian brasseries — in France, a brasserie is the kind of place where you can do just about anything. They bounced ideas around and challenged one another. The connection was there and it made sense to take the plunge.

In March 2013, after three months of intense brainstorming, the two friends agreed on one thing: at some point, you just have to go for it. That’s when they heard about a startup weekend organized by Microsoft in Paris. The concept was simple: you had one weekend to come up with an idea, build a first prototype, and present it. The jury was top-tier. Frédéric Mazzella, the founder of BlaBlaCar, was there. So were Oussama Ammar, who had just launched The Family, and Raffi Kamber, an investor at Alven.

At 5pm on Friday, Alexandre and Steve showed up at Microsoft’s accelerator, tucked away on a quiet street in the 2nd arrondissement, with the idea of Korner Space, an Airbnb for pop-up stores. With a small team, they spent the entire weekend, day and night, refining the project and designing a first version of the product.

On Sunday at 6pm, the results came in.

Korner Space was named the winner, and the two friends secured a one-hour meeting with Raffi Kamber. It was a huge boost. Not only were they reassured about their ability to deliver, but they also realized just how strong the chemistry between them really was.

***

A month later, Steve and Alexandre showed up for their meeting with Alven. It was a unique opportunity to secure their first investor, and Alven wasn’t just any fund. They had backed companies like Stripe, SeLoger, Captain Train, and many others. They had to make it count.

But the two friends didn’t come to pitch their winning project. They were here to present a brand-new connected e-cigarette brand.

It was far from the original idea, and at first glance, the new project could sound a bit out there. But the two friends brought so much energy and complementarity to the table — and the connected objects market was full of opportunity — that Alven decided to invest anyway. A clear reminder that VCs often back teams more than ideas.

That said, not everyone around Alexandre shared the same excitement. His inner circle struggled to understand his choice. He kept hearing things like, “Why would you bother with something like that?” But he had made up his mind and there was no turning back.

***

As if fate wanted to prove all the skeptics right, the early days of Smokio were chaotic.

The first production run was supposed to be ready for the Christmas season, a crucial time in retail, but it ended up arriving… in January. One month later, just as the young company had secured its biggest in-store distribution deal with Fnac, the retailer canceled it the very morning of the launch.

But the two young founders kept getting back up. They showed resilience at every turn and in the end, things worked out. Two years in, while part of the team was in London for a networking event, one conversation turned into an acquisition offer. Smokio was eventually sold to a major player in the industry.

The adventure flew by — maybe too fast — and the two friends had clearly caught the startup bug. They’d just made a decent exit but they weren’t about to stop there.

***

Like many entrepreneurs, Alexandre and Steve had faced their share of frustrations with traditional banks. Opening a business account had taken forever, the tools available were outdated, and getting someone on the phone was always a struggle. Remember these little plastic devices for validating transfers?

To validate their idea, the two friends turned to social media. “We were in Facebook groups. We’d identify people who were having issues with their banks and send them messages. They were really eager to talk with us. They genuinely wanted things to change.”

And that’s how Qonto was born, in April 2016.

For nine months, the two founders, along with a small team, tested an early version of their product with 150 beta testers. To launch quickly without needing a payment institution license, they partnered with a BaaS provider. At the same time, they began building their own banking infrastructure, one that customers would eventually migrate to in 2019 and 2020 — based on their payment institution license obtained in 2018, Qonto doesn’t have a banking license. They kept it simple at first. Early growth isn’t about scale, it’s about learning. By talking to users, gathering feedback, and meeting people in person, they uncovered what really mattered. The best move to do that? “Let me buy you a coffee while you tell me how you handle [insert pain point].”

It worked. The success was immediate. In its first two months, Qonto attracted 1,000 customers. A revolution was underway in the banking industry, it was the first time you could open a business account entirely online. To sustain that momentum, Qonto followed a pattern in building its growth team I’ve already shared in this newsletter: starting with generalists, then bringing in specialists. Early hires were agile and could handle everything from paid acquisition to content and PR. But as the company scaled and growth became more complex, they added subject matter experts to deepen technical capabilities and push performance to the next level.

That growth drew in customers, but also investors. In total, the fintech raised €622 million across five funding rounds from top-tier investors. Valar Ventures — Peter Thiel’s fund — and Alven, their long-time backer, were the first to invest. They were later joined by DST Global, Tencent, and Tiger Global. Its Series D in 2022, €486 million, remains the largest funding round ever for a French fintech, turning Qonto into a unicorn valued at €4.4 billion.

Since launching nine years ago, the startup has grown into a scale-up and shows no signs of slowing down. Qonto now serves over 500,000 clients across eight countries: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Portugal, and has a team of 1,600 people.

The challenge now is the same one all “first-generation” fintechs face after years of rapid growth: continue to scale without losing agility. That’s the mantra Alexandre and Steve now share with their teams: “become big and strong, not big and heavy.”

Oh and… If you want to boost your personal brand, you can check out my ghostwriting services. I’m behind the communication of fintech CEOs recognized by the FT, Mastercard, or Sifted.

And you know, investors, clients, talent... they’re all more moved by a good story than by technical jargon. I can help you tell yours. Just hit reply and let’s chat.

Thomas