Not by failure. Not by market forces. But by some people around them.

I see them walking on eggshells around a colleague, a family member, a former friend or partner. I see them silencing their own thoughts because someone else is too sensitive to hear them. I see them absorbing passive-aggressive remarks, manipulative narratives, and a constant, low-grade negativity that settles in their bones.

And it makes me angry. A deep, protective anger. A frustration. A sadness. Because I see these bright souls shrinking, contorting themselves to avoid an argument, to keep a fragile peace that was never real in the first place.

They are being eaten alive by a little monster, named Guilt. He is the Nicotine of the Soul. When I quit smoking, I read Allen Carr’s The Easy Way to Stop Smoking. He talks about the little nicotine monster inside you, the one that whispers for another cigarette. The metaphor resonated deeply. It wasn’t about willpower against a habit; it was about starving a parasite.

Guilt is the same.

It’s a parasite fed by others. The person who needs to control you. The one who subtly makes you feel small with a look or a comment. The one so hypersensitive, so bossy, so undermining, so mansplaining that you can’t even tell them how they make you feel, because you’re terrified of their reaction.

So you stay silent. You retreat. You absorb. You tell yourself it’s your fault sometimes. You tell yourself you should be more patient, more understanding. You convince yourself that confrontation would be cruel. You convince yourself to let it go.

That’s the monster talking. This absence of action is an act of self-destruction. And worse, it’s an act that enables the poison to spread.

The Ricochet of Pain.

Here’s the hard part to admit. When you absorb that negativity, that frustration, that unspoken anger… it doesn’t just disappear. It builds up inside you like pressure in a sealed tank. It sours. It makes you bitter. It makes you sharp. And eventually, it has to come out.

But it doesn’t come out at the person who caused it. No. It sprays out sideways. At people who don’t deserve it. Your team. Your partner. Your children. People who are actually safe. You misdirect the poison.

This is the ultimate tragedy. By failing to confront the source, you become a conduit for their toxicity. You take the hatred meant for you and, by ricochet, you pass it on. You become the person you hate. You must not let the monster do this to you. You must not let it feed.

Starve the Monster.

The answer is not retaliation. An eye for an eye just leaves everyone blind and feeds a different kind of monster.

The first step is what I’ve always called Positive Honesty. It’s the courage to say what you think, frankly and without detours, but always with benevolence. It’s the constructive conflict Patrick Lencioni writes about in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, the kind that can only happen when there’s a foundation of trust and vulnerability.

You can try this. Once. Maybe twice. You can say… When you do this, it makes me feel this way. And I don’t want that anymore. I don’t accept it.

But some people are not interested in Positive Honesty. They are interested in control. Their system depends on your silence. In those cases, there is only one solution. You have to get them out of your system.

A toxic element in your system will remain toxic to your system. No matter how much you wish it were different. You cannot fix them. You cannot manage them. You can only remove them.

To stop the addiction, you stop taking the drug. To kill the monster, you cut off its food source. You. This means separation. Distance. An end. It’s not a negotiation. It is a boundary. It is an amputation to save the body. And you’re not only saving yourself, you may be saving them as well.

And don’t get fooled by their passive presence... That person who once said horrible things about you, words that cut deeply, and yet they still orbit your life. You see their name appear on your screen. You notice they watched your story. Again. And again. You don’t speak anymore. The relationship is over. And yet their presence remains. And presence is not neutral. Presence is seeing their name. Presence is knowing they are watching. Presence is feeling that quiet shadow of someone who hurt you still standing at the edge of your life.

Sometimes, starving the monster is as simple as this: You remove the presence.

Surrender. Forgive. Love.

This sounds brutal. It sounds unkind. But it is the most spiritually sound thing you can do. Because the act of separation is not about hate. It is the prerequisite for something much higher.

Surrender.

Surrender to the reality that you cannot change them. Surrender the ego’s need to be right, to win the argument, to have the final word. Surrender the fantasy that one day they will see the light and understand the pain they cause. They won’t. Let it go.

Forgive.

Forgive them. Not for them. For you. Forgiveness is not about absolving them of their actions. It is about dissolving the power their actions have over you. It is the act of taking your hand off a hot coal. The coal doesn’t change, but you stop getting burned.

Love.

This is the hardest part. Love them. From a great, unbridgeable distance. Love them by wishing them a peace you know they will never find as long as they operate this way. Love them enough to release them from your life, so they no longer have the opportunity to harm you or be harmed by your inevitable resentment.

This is not the weakness of turning the other cheek to be hit again. This is the strength of turning the other cheek as you walk away for good.

Become who you are.

That’s the entire point. The things that are most important are also the most fragile. They are fragile because we care about them so much. And because they are fragile, we must approach them with a fierce tenderness. With a generosity of the heart.

You cannot become who you are if your energy is spent managing the emotional instability of others. You cannot build your temple if you are constantly being handed bricks of guilt or deranged and deranging presence.

You have the right to choose your circle. You are free to do this. Surround yourself with people who lift you up. People who accept you, fully. People who don’t judge you, who don’t throw little barbs to make themselves feel bigger. People who see the best in you and want to help you set it free.

They are out there. Find them.
And let the little monster starve.

I’ve always got one of these with me…

So this one takes its time.

First, an announcement: 2LR is now live on iOS via TestFlight. It’s still a work in progress but it gathers everything. My content, searchable by semantics. My book in its original English version, the raw one, almost untouched since it first came out. My digital AI twin, continuously updated. Office hour slots. And through notifications, deal updates and other announcements.

Building this small app forced me to confront something I had kept slightly blurred by omission: What kind of investor am I?

Of course, I like to be the first to commit. I like to write a check when intuition beats data. I enjoy helping you thrive in your fundraising or thinking through the next inflection point.

But strip all of that away, and what’s left is simpler. And honestly, a bit uncomfortable to admit.

I am at my best one-on-one. In depth, not in surface. In tension, not in theater. I thrive in the messy middle of a conversation where there is no audience and no script. I am not a cocktail-party networker trading proximity for access. I don’t desire a board seat for the sake of the title.

I prefer being useful in the early moments that matter… intense, high-conviction… then stepping back and letting you build.

I care less about signaling and more about sensing. Less about being right in public and more about being useful in private. Less about dominating a room and more about understanding the person who’s quietly doubting themselves at 11:47 PM the night before payroll.

That’s not the loudest archetype in venture. It doesn’t trend well. It doesn’t show up cleanly in a quarterly report. It is harder to quantify, and harder still to explain.

For a long time, I thought that meant it was weaker. I was wrong. It’s just different.

My edge isn’t performance. It’s presence.

The Training

I grew up introverted. Hyper-sensitive. Vulnerable in a way that felt dangerous.

School wasn’t a place where I felt strong. I struggled to understand the instructions. I had trouble concentrating. I was often somewhere else in my head, drifting. I didn’t take notes, not out of rebellion or indifference, I was just lost.

So, the safest strategy was invisibility. Don’t raise your hand. Don’t make noise. Don’t attract attention.

I stayed in the background. And over time, the background becomes an identity. You stop expecting to be central; you start assuming you are secondary.

When you grow up doubting yourself, you develop a constant internal question: Am I enough? That doubt can shrink you. It can make you cautious.

But it also sharpens you.

If you’re not the one speaking, you’re the one observing. If you’re not performing, you’re listening. You start noticing tone shifts before words change. You pick up hesitation in a sentence. You sense what’s being avoided as much as what’s being said. You learn to read the room without trying to win it.

For a long time, I framed that as fragility. Today, I see it as training.

Yet, invisibility has a cost. When you repeatedly position yourself on the margins, you internalize the role. You become the secondary character in your own story.

But after years of that, a quiet drive emerges: the need to matter. Not to be admired, but to be essential. To be the person who counts when the lights are off.

Because when you grow up hiding, there’s a strange paradox: you want help, but you make sure no one sees that you need it. You struggle quietly. You are lost, but invisible. And if no one steps in, it’s partly because you’ve mastered the art of not being noticed.

You learn to handle it alone.

At some point, that turns into an instinct. It’s as if you couldn’t quite save yourself back then, so now you develop an obsession with being present for others in a way you never experienced.

To notice when someone is drifting. To feel when a founder is spiraling internally while keeping a composed exterior. To sit with them when things are heavy instead of retreating into analysis.

That instinct never left me.

The Identity

Writing a check is easy. Pattern recognition is easy. The investor job can be done in a thousand technically competent ways. But when we hire at Kima, I always say: Find your edge. Find what makes you identifiable. Not better. Identifiable.

For a while, I wasn’t sure mine was strong enough. It wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t a bullet point. But it’s real.

What moves me is not just markets, it’s the people. I feel founders. Their doubt. Their ambition. Their contradictions. I can sit on a one-hour call and be genuinely transported by the tension between who they are and what they’re trying to build.

That sensitivity, the one I used to hide, is my edge.

It allows me to be steady when conviction fades. It allows me to listen without trying to control the room. It doesn’t always click; you don’t connect with everyone. But when it does, it’s powerful.

2LR is simply a way to make that DNA a bit accessible. You can search the content. You can read the book. You can interact with the digital twin, an AI trained on my meetings, my frameworks, my patterns. It won’t replace human connection, but it can challenge assumptions and cut through the noise.

And I’m opening office hour slots for portfolio founders of course, and for other entrepreneurs and operators in the arena who just need fifteen minutes of clarity.

2LR is an interface. The real subject is identity.

For years, I thought my introversion and my vulnerability were flaws to be neutralized with visibility. So I became visible. I spoke on stages. I leaned into presence. From the outside, it looked like confidence.

But visibility can be armor. Performance can be protection. You can be very public and still very concealed.

Building this forced me to stop performing and start owning. My hypersensitivity is not fragility. It is a structural advantage. It is the reason I can sit in discomfort without rushing to fill the silence. It is the reason founders open up beyond the deck, beyond the metrics, beyond the narrative.

For years, I made sure that if I was seen, it was on my terms, through a layer of control.

Today, I choose something different. I choose to be seen without armor. Exactly as I am.

I’ve seen this happen over and over. Even with warnings, conversations, and proof, founders hesitate or act weakly, afraid of discomfort, afraid of judgment, whether they admit it or not.

You already know the hire doesn’t work. You already know this advisor or investor is misleading you but confronting them would create friction. You already know this decision is necessary. None of this is ambiguous. The only question is whether you’re willing to deal with the consequences of acting on what matters.

As a founder, you face a real choice. You can fully embrace the journey, the life path, the doubts, the existential tension that comes with it or you can let others take over. People inside or outside the company for whom this business carries no existential weight. You already gave up equity. Sometimes governance. The real question is whether you’re also willing to give up the implicit part of the role, the part where you are truly in charge, and where that responsibility deserves respect.

Sometimes, you tell yourself it’s about timing, or context, or being thoughtful. You rationalize. But what you’re really doing is negotiating with yourself. While you wait, something subtle changes: you stop being the place where decisions come from. You start explaining choices instead of making them. You justify instead of choosing. You’re slowly giving up authority over your own judgment.

And without noticing, you stop respecting yourself.

You stop treating your own intuition as something that deserves action. You start asking for validation where none is needed. You explain decisions before making them. You apologize for choosing. And the more you do that, the more space you create for other people to take control against your inner will.

Employees fill it. Advisors fill it. Investors sometimes fill it. Everyone believes they’re helping. And maybe they are, in their own way. But what they’re really responding to is the fact that the center is no longer firm.

This is the part nobody likes to say out loud: control in a startup is almost never taken from a founder. It’s handed over, piece by piece, in moments of self-doubt disguised as collaboration.

You don’t lose control because you were wrong. You lose it because you didn’t back yourself when you were right but uncomfortable.

And the longer you wait, the worse it gets. Decisions made late are always harsher than decisions made early. Conversations avoided turn into explosions. Clean separations turn into messy exits.

Too little too late.

I’ve seen founders burn out not because the job was too hard, but because they spent months negotiating with themselves instead of leading. Because they knew exactly what needed to happen and kept choosing temporary peace over courage and clarity.

At some point, the job of the founder becomes very simple, and very lonely: you have to decide whether you respect yourself enough to act.

Respecting yourself doesn’t mean being stubborn. It doesn’t mean being right all the time. It means accepting that your role is to choose, not to please.

A startup doesn’t die from one bad move… Or even several. It dies from the small things you chose not to confront, from a series of renunciations left unexamined, from everything you kept telling yourself you’d deal with later.

That’s how not to build a startup.

And that’s how you wake up if it’s not already too late.

There is a form of loneliness we rarely name, yet many carry it quietly, especially entrepreneurs. Not the loneliness of being alone, but the one that comes from responsibility. From knowing that, in the end, decisions stop with you.

That outcomes, good or bad, will disproportionately be yours to carry.

This solitude is not an accident.
It is not something to fix.
It is a condition.

And it never fully disappears.
But what do you lean on when it shows up?

You could try the most sophisticated personal development methods and still miss the point. Not because the intention is wrong, but because the direction often is. The more we dissect who we are, the further we drift from simply being. Meaning is not found in constant introspection or frameworks, but in returning to the simplest expression of things. Silence, acceptance, and what is already there.

Sometimes, the way forward is not to go deeper into ourselves,
but to let go of the need to search altogether.

Because when pressure accumulates, when clarity fades, when fatigue sets in, what saves us is not another method or framework. It is what remains when everything unnecessary falls away.

And what remains, before anything else, is the soul.

The forgotten foundation

We rarely start here.

We usually try to fix endlessly the body and the mind
(and don’t get me wrong, it’s necessary too).

Yet everything else depends on it.

The soul is not complex.
It is radically simple.

At its core lies a truth we resist for a long time:
I am infinitely small.

And paradoxically, this is not a limitation, it is liberation.
What is infinitely small cannot be crushed.

Much of our suffering comes from the pressure to be enough. Enough for others. Enough for expectations. Enough for the image we believe we must embody.

Accepting our smallness releases that weight.

This is where the deepest triptych appears:
Surrender. Love. Forgive.

Surrender

Surrender is often misunderstood.
It is not resignation. It is not passivity.

It is the acceptance of our condition.

To love others, we must first accept ourselves,
as we are, not as we wish to present ourselves.
With flaws, contradictions, moods, limits.

Surrender is cultivated through silence.
Through meditation.
Through prayer.

Inner peace is fragile when it connects only to the self.
Personally, I believe it requires connection to something greater.

I am Catholic, and I surrender myself to God.
This is not a prescription, nor a sermon.

It is an invitation. Observe those who have found peace, their simplicity, humility, and steadiness. Walk with them. Share their rituals. Listen with an open heart.

Your own path may reveal itself there.

Love

Love is often treated as a transaction.

We expect reassurance, recognition, security, return.

But love begins as an act of giving.

To a partner.
To children.
To friends.
To strangers we cross every day.

A love that expects nothing back is strangely freeing.

Sometimes it is returned. Sometimes it is not.
Giving protects us from becoming dependent on what others reflect back to us.

There is a paradox here:
We receive by giving.
We grow by offering.

And love does not stop with those who resemble us.
It extends to difference and even to those who have hurt us.

Forgive

Forgiveness is not reconciliation.
It does not erase harm or rewrite history.

It releases the soul from captivity.

It begins with forgiving oneself.
Without that, forgiving others remains theoretical.

Nothing constructive grows from resentment, hatred, or self-imposed pressure.
Forgiveness clears space.

This trinity : surrender, love, forgiveness is to me the missing piece by which we should all start. The bond that remains when everything else collapses.

My wish for you this year is simple

Find your soul again.
In a world overwhelmed by noise and speed.

If you do, the rest will follow.

I wish you peaceful holidays.
Surround yourself with those who lift you up.
Distance yourself, without hatred, from what does not.

Surrender to your smallness, to what you are and what you are not.
Let go of the pressure to be enough, to be everything, to be in control.

From there, Love becomes possible. Not as a transaction, not as an expectation, but as a gift, to yourself first, and then to others.

And finally, Forgive. Forgive yourself for what you couldn’t carry. Forgive others for what they couldn’t give.

Surrender, so you may love.
Love, so you may forgive.
And forgive, so you may finally be free.

Happy New year !

It’s also a reminder of an uncomfortable truth: sometimes the need is obvious, the founder is talented, the work ethic is impeccable, the ambition is real… and yet it still takes time to click, often far more time than any mortal would ever hope for. And when it finally does, when everything suddenly looks obvious in hindsight, one question becomes impossible to avoid: why?

The first unlock: Break the boundaries, move faster

For him, the turning point started when he left for the United States.

Same product. Same team. Same founder.
But suddenly a different rhythm, a different ambition, a different mindset.

America has that effect. It forces a founder to discard the small version of themselves. You arrive thinking you’re ambitious; you realize you were operating at 30% of what you could be. You meet people who go twice as fast, twice as hard, without apologizing for wanting something big. And sometimes, that shock, that brutal contrast, is exactly the oxygen a company or a founder needs.

But let me be clear: I’m not saying the U.S. is the answer. That would be far too simple. What I’m saying is that immersing yourself in a different referential, different rules, different ethos, different ways of thinking and building, stretches your mind in ways your existing environment simply can’t. It’s not a magic solution; it’s a way to break out, look around, and decide what you actually want next.

Maybe you discover you don’t want to run your company in such a brutal system. But at least you can say: I’ve seen it. I’ve understood it. And now I choose my way forward with open eyes.

The second unlock: Remove the wrong people

He also made a hard choice: he separated from a cofounder.

Not out of anger. Not from ego.
But because he eventually understood something most founders refuse to see:

A team member can love you and still block you.
A person can create a second center of gravity that drags the company sideways, diluting every decision, muddying every direction.

And when you try to please everyone, you end up choosing nothing.

Letting go is hard.
But not letting go is worse for both sides.
Ending a partnership is not a punishment. It’s a release.
And if you don’t cut the rope when needed, no one gets to move forward. not you, not them.

The real unlock: The test of time

Every great founder shows two qualities through time and struggle: Determination and Discernment.

Determination is the ability to keep going when everything in your head screams to stop.

Discernment is the ability to make the uncomfortable decision that needs to be made, clearly, quickly, and without flinching.

One without the other doesn’t work.

Determination without discernment becomes chaos.
Discernment without determination becomes theory.

Put them together, and a founder becomes dangerous in the best possible way.

Your secret weapon : The entourage

There is something I’ve seen again and again: founders rise or fall based on their environment.

Your entourage shapes your optimism or poisons it.
It gives you courage or steals it.
It creates a space where you can be vulnerable or traps you behind a mask.
It sharpens your decisions or erodes them.

The best founders are the ones who learn to trust their instinct about people. Not the loudest people. Not the most impressive on paper. The ones who amplify them. The ones who remove friction instead of adding it. The ones who make them more themselves.

A founder I’ll remember

Today’s founder reminded me why I love this job.
There is something powerful in him… Ambition, heart, clarity… but also realism. There is no delusion, no posturing, no fake crushing it. Just a person who is crossing the desert and will come back with a sharper mind and a steadier soul.

And he is not alone.

Our portfolio is full of founders like him. People who feel lost, inadequate, behind… when in reality, they are becoming exactly who they need to be.

Celebrate the people who survive the journey

Everyone wants the poneycorn-that-transformed-into-unicorn-that-became-a-decacorn. But that pony who drank the magic potion with all the right ingredients… It’s an exception, not a blueprint.

The real heroes are the founders who keep going when nothing works.
Who wake up every day and push the rock up the mountain again.
Who evolve, who learn, who cut what must be cut, who fight their own limitations and win slowly, painfully, relentlessly.

People look at entrepreneurs with that strange, involuntary contempt.

Give them one day in the life of the people I work with.
One day of pressure, sacrifice, risk, loneliness, responsibility.
They wouldn’t get up again.

To all the founders out there

You’re not crazy.
You’re not late.
You’re not behind.

You are becoming.

Through time, through difficulty, through the decisions you make when no one is watching. And by the way… no one is watching anyway, or just the fall, for like a minute.

If you stay determined…
If you stay discerning…
If you surround yourself with the right people…

You’ll get there. One way or another !

When Jesus walked into the Temple and saw the merchants, the currency tables, the noise, the transactions…

He didn’t walk out quietly.
He overturned the whole thing.
He drove them out.

Because the Temple had become something it was never meant to be:
a place where people traded with God, instead of meeting Him.

And maybe that’s still the risk today.

That we walk into a church on Sunday like we’re entering a shop.
We bring our sins, pay the price, one hour, a confession, a communion and then we walk out, receipt in hand.
Debt cleared. Business done.
But that’s not the point.

The Church is not a vending machine for grace.
It’s not a ritualized transaction.
It’s a sacred place.
A place of prayer.
Of humility.
Of realignment.

When you step into Church, like really step in, it should de‑armor you.

You don’t enter to prove.
You enter to receive.
To kneel. To breathe. To listen. To repent.
And most importantly:
To remember what holiness feels like,
So you can carry it with you when you walk back into the world.

Because the real test of your time in Church is how you act once you’ve left it.

If someone frustrates you at work,
Would you speak to them the same way if you’d just seen them at the foot of the altar?

If someone cuts you off, ignores you, disrespects you,
What if your instinct wasn’t defense, but the humility you carried from Sunday?

Don’t treat the Church like a sanctuary for one hour and forget it the moment you close the door behind you.
Let it echo into your Monday.
Let it linger in your voice, in your replies, in your glances.
Let the humility follow you.
Because you are the temple now.
Not made of stone, but of flesh and soul.

Come to Church humbly.
Leave Church humbly.
And live as if you never left it.

Amen.

Gospel (John 2:13‑22, ESV)

13 The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
14 In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money‑changers sitting there.
15 And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money‑changers and overturned their tables.
16 And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; you shall not make my Father’s house a house of trade.”
17 His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.”
18 So the Jews said to him, “What sign do you show us for doing these things?”
19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”
20 The Jews then said, “It has taken forty‑six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?”
21 But he was speaking about the temple of his body.
22 When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

France and the U.S. are both extreme countries. That’s why they fascinate. America is the land of full-risk and full-reward. It’s the amplifier of ambition. Everything there is built to make you dream bigger, spend bigger, fall harder. You get chewed and celebrated at the same time. The air smells like competition, caffeine, and litigation. When you’re there, you dream big because the country itself is big. From day one, they told you America rules the world, and you believed it. You’re supposed to believe it. It’s not arrogance; it’s fuel.

And France? France is different. France is romantic. It’s poetic. It’s revolutionary. It’s meticulous. It’s the land where the word craft still means something. We don’t dream big; we perfect small. We don’t scale; we sculpt. We don’t pitch; we argue. The first quality of a French entrepreneur has always been craftsmanship. We don’t create to conquer. We create to master. There are no better artisans in the world… Look around: restaurants, fashion houses, perfumes, wines, software, architecture, even mathematical elegance. Craftsmanship isn’t a niche here; it’s the baseline. It’s a national religion.

Its not a war. America and France are two extremes of the same entrepreneurial DNA. One builds with adrenaline. The other builds with obsession. One measures in billions. The other measures in precision. And that’s fine. You don’t need to pick a side. You can breathe with both lungs.

I meet founders who dream of conquering the U.S. but have never set foot there. I tell them: go. You have to go. Not because the U.S. is better, but because it’s a rite of passage. You need to understand what big looks like. You need to feel that friction between what you thought was impossible and what they call Tuesday. You need to see ambition in its natural habitat. When you go there, you realize how far the frontier actually is. Then, you choose your fight. But at least you’ll be choosing it consciously.

This morning, I was with a founder from the north of France building a social consumer app. First market? The U.S. Never been there. I told him: buy a ticket. Go walk a campus. Meet users. Eat the culture. You’ll come back changed. Maybe you’ll move there. Maybe you won’t. But either way, you’ll have grown ten years in ten days (Ok I am maybe exaggerating). That’s what happens when you expose yourself to scale. You start understanding the physics of ambition. It’s not a place, it’s a mindset.

When I tell founders to go to the U.S., it’s not because I fetishize it. It’s because it calibrates you. It reveals how small your fears are and how big your excuses have become. YC does that too. It’s a washing machine. It strips you down to your raw material and spins you until you either break or harden. And if you come out alive, you can build anywhere… Paris, San Francisco, whatever. You’ve internalized the tempo.

I love the founders who stay in France and build here anyway. The ones who look at the system and say: I’ll make it work. Because that’s courage. That’s rebellion of the most French kind. You think Americans are risk-takers? Try starting a company in France without being crushed by paperwork, taxes, or cynicism. It’s gladiator school with croissants. But those who survive, they build with a depth Americans envy. They build companies that mean something. They don’t just chase valuations. They chase mastery. And when it clicks, when a French team finally cracks something global, it’s magnificent.

So yes, if you’re French and your first market is the U.S., go. Don’t think twice. You’ll find capital, talent, density. You’ll see what it means to be surrounded by people who talk in outcomes, not opinions. But don’t go there to escape France. Go there to understand yourself. To stretch. To accelerate. And when you come back, bring that ambition home. Inject it into the culture. Build bridges, not walls.

Because the truth is, it’s easy to criticize what you don’t understand. The French love to hate success. The Americans love to celebrate it until you fail. Both sides are hypocritical in their own way. But if you’ve walked both streets, you learn to laugh at it. You learn tolerance. You learn that “French rigor + American scale” is not a contradiction. It’s a formula.

And you learn that entrepreneurship is not a career. It’s a crisis, a continuous existential crisis where every decision is a bet on who you’re becoming. You don’t build to win. You build to progress. Success is just a side effect of that progress. The satisfaction of your customers is the real metric. The byproduct is your bank account. That’s it.

So stop choosing sides. Love the U.S. for its speed, its hunger, its lack of shame. Love France for its craft, its thoughtfulness, its refusal to settle. Love both, learn from both, and build something worthy of both.

Because at the end of the day, the point isn’t to be French or American.
The point is to build something that makes you proud to be alive.

Yesterday’s Gospel used a different image: the narrow door. People will come from east and west, north and south, to take their place at the feast of God. The banquet is wide, generous, and open. But the door is narrow. Not everyone gets in, not because they’re excluded, but because many won’t make the effort to walk the road that leads there.

The narrow door offers a different wisdom. Stop trying to guarantee outcomes. Focus instead on how you walk. Because the path itself is the preparation. The narrow door demands that you travel light. You can’t squeeze through carrying ego, resentment, or inflated expectations. It requires patience, resilience, and humility.

That’s what challenges really are. Not punishments, but training. As Hebrews puts it: “When God loves someone, He gives them good lessons.” Struggles are not detours from life, they are life. They strip us of illusions, teach us gratitude, make joy deeper when it finally arrives. They prepare us to fit through the door.

The key is simple: showing up.
That’s how life feels at 42.

We often build expectations around outcomes. The career we should have by now, the recognition, the picture-perfect family, the big goals we set. And when reality doesn’t match the script, frustration grows. The higher the expectations, the harder the fall. Happiness works the same way. It's fragile, temporary, easily broken if we demand too much of it.

But the answer is not to stop dreaming. It’s to move the focus from results to process. To stop asking “What will I get?” and start asking “How will I show up?”

Because showing up changes everything.

It’s true in work. Founders don’t succeed because they guess every outcome right, they succeed because they keep showing up with clarity when things get tough, when deals fall apart, when others would quit. Progress is the reward of showing up consistently, not perfectly.

It’s true in personal growth. Discipline is nothing more than showing up for yourself. Whether to train, to learn, to build something. The effort compounds. The person you become along the way matters more than the finish line.

And it’s especially true in love. Relationships are not built on spectacular moments but on repeated presence. Being there not only when it’s easy, but when it’s messy. Not only when it’s convenient, but when it costs you something.

The friend who picks up the phone at midnight.

The parent who reads one more story even when exhausted.

The partner who stays patient in a hard season.

The colleague who quietly steps in to support when you’re overwhelmed.

Love is showing up. Again and again.

This doesn’t mean outcomes don’t matter. They do. But they’re not what give life its meaning. It’s the process. The way you walk the road, the way you keep showing up, the way you condition yourself to find beauty even in ordinary days.

At 42, maybe that’s the real “answer.” Not a grand secret, not a final destination, but a practice. To embrace challenges as lessons. To stop tying peace of mind to outcomes. To show up with energy, optimism, and intent. And above all, to show up with love for the people who matter, for the work that matters, for the life that unfolds, imperfect but beautiful, one day at a time.

The road is narrow, yes. But it leads to the feast. And 42 is the reminder that the answer isn’t something we find. The answer is something we live.

But the soul alone won’t run your business. Now we need to walk into the engine room, where it’s hot, noisy, and everything is in motion: people, data, time, accountability, habits, flow… and the solitude of the person in charge.

This is where leadership stops being theory and starts being lived reality.

1. People & Data: Your Two Relentless Bosses

People and Data are the two most demanding “managers” you’ll ever have.

• People bring complexity. They have feelings, egos, blind spots, and personal histories that walk into work with them every morning.

• Data brings clarity, but only if you collect it properly, interpret it correctly, and actually use it.

You can’t pick one. You need to master both.

Data: The Mirror That Doesn’t Lie (Unless You Let It)

Data is like a mirror in harsh lighting: it shows you exactly what’s there, not what you wish was there.

The danger? Many CEOs either avoid the mirror when they suspect they won’t like the reflection, or they decorate it with vanity metrics until it flatters them.

If you want data to serve you, strip it to its essentials:

1. Collect what matters, not just what’s easy to measure.
   Traffic, followers, topline revenue, easy to track, comforting to see. But the real game lives in harder metrics: retention in your best customer segment, lead-to-close times, contribution margin by product line.

2. Create one source of truth.
   If Sales, Marketing, and Finance each have slightly different numbers, you don’t have “data”, you have three competing realities.

3. Make it universally understandable.
   If only you and the CFO can read the dashboard without a translator, you’ve created a bottleneck. Data’s power lies in democratizing insight.

4. Tie every metric to a decision.
   If a number changes and nothing in your priorities, resource allocation, or execution changes, that number is trivia, cut it.

The test is simple: does this metric make us act? If not, it’s decoration.

People: Your Real Leverage (or Your Drag)

People are your biggest multiplier or your slowest leak. And pretending otherwise is expensive. In every team, you’ll find:

• Strongest Links – You trust them with complexity, they deliver without drama. Give them autonomy and fuel.

• Reliable B-Players – They’re steady, consistent, the foundation. Make sure they know they matter.

• Busy Bees – Always in motion, rarely producing impact. They get one round of coaching with clear targets. If they don’t change, they go, because they drain energy and attention.

• Defenders – More focused on protecting their turf than on advancing the mission. They either shift their stance or leave.

• Pretenders – All optics, no substance. The hiring mistake you fix as soon as you realize it.

Leverage comes from investing in Strongest Links, valuing B-Players, fixing or exiting Busy Bees and Defenders, and clearing Pretenders.

Anything less, and you’re running the company with the brakes half-on.

2. The A-Team Myth

Forget the “only hire A-players” slogan. Real life needs a balanced A-Team:

• A few stars who raise the game for everyone.

• Solid, reliable players who keep the ship steady.

• Zero tolerance for subprime hires, the ones who slow progress, erode morale, or create friction, even unintentionally.

It’s not about assembling the perfect roster. It’s about keeping the ratio right and moving decisively when someone isn’t adding to the team’s velocity.

3. Meetings: The Good, the Bad, and the Endless

Meetings aren’t evil. Bad meetings are.

A good meeting is like a good pit stop in Formula 1: everyone knows their role, it’s lightning fast, and when it’s over, the car, your team, is back on track and faster.

A bad meeting is like a pit stop where no one has the right tools, three people are arguing about which tire to change first, and someone’s still looking for the jack. You lose time, momentum, and probably the race.

The rules for meetings that work:

• No agenda = no meeting.

• Timebox everything – if a pit crew can change four tires in under 10 seconds, you can cover your agenda in under 30 minutes.

• Finish with a green light – clear decisions, clear owners, clear deadlines.

Once a quarter, audit your calendar. If a meeting exists only because “we’ve always had it,” it’s gone.

4. Walking in the Flow: Responsive ≠ Permanently ON

I’m a fan of Inbox Zero. I like being responsive.

But there’s a difference between being responsive and being permanently available. Too many CEOs blur the line, turning themselves into human notification centers.

The cost of “always ON”:

• You train your team to expect firefighting, not leadership.

• You destroy deep work with constant context-switching.

• You confuse speed with quality.

Reactivity doesn’t mean “answer in 30 seconds.” It can mean an hour. It can mean a few hours. That’s still responsive without sacrificing focus.

How to walk in the flow:

• Batch responses.

• Block deep work time like a board meeting.

• Teach urgency vs. importance.

• Model it, show your team that thoughtful beats instant.

5. Habits Over Heroics

Heroics look good in interviews: “We pulled three all-nighters and shipped!” But if heroics are your operating system, you’ve built a machine that runs on burnout.

Habits are boring, and unbeatable. They make your performance consistent, your execution reliable, and your progress compounding.

How to build them:

• One habit at a time, give it 6–7 weeks to stick.

• Start small, make it impossible to skip.

• Anchor it to something that already happens.

• Track it, humans love streaks.

Heroics are for rare sprints. Habits are for the marathon.

6. Accountability: Making Excuses Impossible

Accountability isn’t micromanagement, it’s removing ambiguity.

If something matters, it has:

1. A clear objective.

2. A deadline.

3. One owner.

And you create a culture where these escape routes don’t exist:

“I didn’t know.”
“I thought someone else had it.”
“I told you so.”
“We talked about it.”

If it’s not written, it doesn’t exist. If it’s not assigned, it’s optional. If it has no deadline, it’s a wish.

7. The CEO’s Blind Spot: Assuming They Think Like You

Great CEOs have three reflexes most people don’t share:

• They live the big picture daily.

• They can handle urgent issues without losing the long game.

• They anticipate and prioritize instinctively.

Your mistake? Assuming your team operates with the same instincts. They don’t. Even your best people need objectives, deadlines, and follow-up spelled out.

If you want something done, define it clearly and enforce it. Hope is not a system.

8. The Solitude of the CEO (and the Art of Taming Chaos)

This is the part nobody fully understands until they sit in the chair.

You can be surrounded by people, a big team, loyal co-founders, supportive investors, and still be alone. Not “alone” as in “no one to have lunch with.” Alone in the existential sense.

Because your crisis is yours. Your name. Your risk. Your vision.
Your people don’t live it like you do. They can’t.

Some of them will push hard every single day. They take nothing for granted, they bring energy, they move the business forward, and you feed off that.

Some will be competent enough, steady, maybe not lightning-fast, but they get things done and you can count on them.

Some will frustrate you, not because they’re terrible, but because they refuse to evolve, cling to comfort, and resist change, even passively. And a few will slow the team down so much that it’s sabotage, even if they don’t mean it that way.

And here’s the truth: unconscious sabotage is still sabotage.

It doesn’t matter that someone “once scored a decisive goal” in the past. That doesn’t make them indispensable today. In sports, yes, you might have had a big win once, but if nine out of ten times you’re slowing the team, hurting morale, and killing velocity, that one moment of glory doesn’t save you.

It’s the same with suppliers and clients. They will disappoint you. Not always because they’re bad, but because it’s your baby, your project, your standard, and you see the gaps.

Sometimes the issue is them. Sometimes the issue is you, the process you set, the expectations you didn’t make explicit. You have to be able to tell the difference and fix your side of the equation.

In the middle of all that, you are constantly judging, adjusting, and deciding:

• Who stays.

• Who goes.

• What gets pushed harder.

• What gets dropped entirely.

And you do it while carrying a constant swirl of inputs, clients, suppliers, employees, market shifts, financial realities, all colliding into each other, all triggering emotions. Sometimes thrilling you. Sometimes draining you. Sometimes both at once.

That’s why I call the CEO a dompteur, a tamer.

You tame your time. Your agenda. Your own impulses and neuroses.

You tame clients, suppliers, employees, partners, even friends who think they know your business better than you do.

You tame an environment that refuses to be tamed.

And you have to do it with versatility, firmness, fairness, lucidity, and a good heart.
Because success isn’t about removing the chaos, it’s about being so good at handling it that no one else even sees it as chaos.

9. Killing the Repeat Failure Patterns

If there’s one thing that quietly kills companies, it’s not “the one big mistake.” It’s the failure pattern, the same problem, showing up again and again, unchallenged, like a bad movie stuck on loop.

We convince ourselves that it will get better with a few changes here and there, nothing dramatic. spoiler alert : it almost never works. And the longer we wait, the more it embeds itself into the company’s DNA.

Three examples you’ll recognize:

• The person you think will improve but doesn’t, and who, on their own, quietly sabotages a chunk of the business.

• The hiring pattern that keeps bringing in the wrong people, and no one can explain why. It’s absurd we’re still here, repeating the same bad hires while watching other companies attract the talent we can’t seem to land.

• The product you stay obsessed with despite no product–market fit, because you don’t have the courage to cut it, pivot it, or simplify it. So you keep pouring time, money, and morale into a hole in the ground.

These aren’t “one-off mistakes.” They’re recurring loops. And if you don’t kill them, they will kill you.

I’ve seen more companies die from recurring, ignored failure loops than from any catastrophic blow-up. And they don’t die because the patterns are invisible, they die because nobody had the courage, clarity, or discipline to end them.

Your job as CEO is to spot these loops early and end them permanently. Not patch them. Not hope they’ll fade. Eradicate them.

Because if you don’t, they will quietly, methodically, and inevitably drain the life out of your business until there’s nothing left to save.

Final Thought

A summer reset isn’t a holiday from leadership, it’s a pit stop. You use it to recalibrate your people, your data, your habits, your time, and your own state of mind.

You can’t erase the chaos. But you can get better at taming it. And when you do, it stops looking like chaos to everyone else.

And most importantly, stop putting off the hard calls. If you see a pattern of failure, kill it now. Because it won’t go away by itself. And the longer it stays, the more it becomes the quiet, invisible reason your company eventually fails.

That’s leadership. That’s the job. And that’s why, even surrounded by people, you’ll sometimes still feel alone.

P.S. Some people will probably say I’m being too harsh here. And maybe I am, if you measure “harsh” by how much I’m willing to let comfort and politeness dilute the truth.

But my job isn’t to sugarcoat. My job is to save the entrepreneur from sabotage, both self-inflicted and from others. That’s the mission. The only mission.

I can’t manage everyone’s moods: the employee’s, the supplier’s, the client’s, the investor’s. The only “state of mind” that matters to me is the entrepreneur’s. That existential crisis, the one that keeps you awake at night and makes you question everything, is what moves me.

Of course, there are rare cases where the entrepreneur is the one sabotaging the company, not progressing, and simply not having what it takes. In those situations, the company comes before the CEO. That’s a different kind of intervention.

But outside those exceptions, my energy, my focus, and my loyalty are to that entrepreneur’s fight. It’s what drives my passion for this work, every single day. Nothing else.

Well, my answer is simple: one doesn't exist without the other. Intensity feeds introspection, and introspection fuels intensity. That's the beauty of living consciously.

This delicate balance, the tension between pushing hard and pausing deeply, is exactly what inspired this post. When reflecting on it, I realized you need to be conscious of your actions and willing to face the discomfort of your own limitations.

And when it comes to that, three specific character traits stand directly in opposition. These traits define your detractors. The first might not seem problematic at first glance, it’s certainly the least damaging, but it still holds people back from real growth.

1. The Busy Bees

We all know someone permanently under the gun. Constantly swamped, perpetually buried in urgent tasks and firefighting crises. These people aren't busy because they're indispensable; No one really is. They’re mostly disorganized, undisciplined, or even slow.

They mistake frantic movement for meaningful progress. They're precisely the kind who, despite living in the age of AI, still send emails riddled with typos or stubbornly dismiss AI tools because "they make mistakes," "hallucinate," or "can’t fully replace human intuition." What's really happening here is deeper: unconsciously, they're terrified that if AI handles their work effectively, they'll have nothing left to keep them busy. And without that constant state of busy-ness, their lives lose all meaning.

If you're always busy but never consciously improving, you're just sprinting in place.

2. The Defensive Brigade

Then there are the defenders, the folks who shield their ego like it's a newborn child. Offer them constructive feedback, and they'll react as if you've declared war. They deflect criticism, answer with skepticism, or worse, retaliate by critiquing you in return.

This defensive posture is exhausting and counterproductive. They spend so much time protecting their fragile egos that they remain blind to their own flaws. No flaws detected, no growth possible. It's that simple.

If you're too defensive to receive criticism, you're effectively locking yourself in an echo chamber where improvement isn't invited.

3. The Pretenders

Lastly, we have the pretenders. These folks talk a great game about working hard, hustling daily, and grinding endlessly. Yet when push comes to shove, they vanish behind screens, endlessly manufacturing excuses.

The problem with pretenders isn't just laziness, it's dishonesty. They create discomfort through deception instead of confronting the beneficial discomfort of genuine improvement.

Pretending effort is infinitely more exhausting than actually putting in the work.

The Uncomfortable Truth

These three types share a common trait: they actively avoid the productive discomfort. Real growth is inherently uncomfortable. It demands vulnerability, receptivity to feedback, and intentional action. Avoiding these will leave you stagnating at best, regressing at worst.

Who Should You Surround Yourself With?

Surround yourself with individuals committed to real growth. Whether they move quickly or slowly, operate intensely or calmly, what matters most is their intentional progress.

Some people are built for sprints; others excel at marathons. That's fine. Speed and style differ, but intentionality and continuous improvement are non-negotiable.

As a founder, your job isn't just to encourage growth, it's to ruthlessly eliminate the busy-for-nothing, the ego defenders, and the pretenders from your environment.

Improvement starts where ego shuts up.

Choose your team wisely.

On the other, the hustle bros pounding double espressos at 10pm, proudly tweeting that if you’re not bleeding from the eyes and ignoring your loved ones, you’re clearly not meant for greatness.

Both sound equally unhinged.

And yet, founders are stuck in the middle, trying to build something meaningful while being told to either meditate or die trying.

Let’s be clear, I believe in hard work. Nothing meaningful gets built without it.
But there’s a difference between hard work and working hard.

Hard work is about focus. About using your time with intent, cutting the noise, doing what actually moves the needle. It’s not about waking up early just to drown in Slack and back-to-backs until your brain melts.

Being busy is not a badge of honor.
Being efficient, decisive, and relentless on what matters — that’s hard work.

So no, I’m not against intensity. I’m against waste.

This being say, let’s get real, assuming that you want to do the hard work. If you’re building a company, not a side project, not a lifestyle gig, but a real, ambitious company, then yes, you’ll have to work like crazy sometimes. But if you only work like crazy, with no pause, no reset, no actual thinking… you’re not building anything. You’re just surviving your own calendar.

So here’s the deal.

Take the summer. Use it. But don’t use it just to rest, use it to realign.

You don’t need a break from work. You need a break from noise.

Most founders don’t burn out from effort, they burn out from chaos. From lack of direction. From saying yes to too many things that dilute the one thing that matters.

Summer is the mid-season break. Like Thanksgiving or Christmas, it’s one of the few moments in the year where the world slows down with you. No guilt. No pressure. No freaking fear of missing out.

So take it seriously. Not to get a tan. To get some clarity. As always, start with the simple questions from which everything derives.

• Do I actually know where my company is going?

• Do I know what role I’m supposed to play in getting it there?

• Does my team even understand what game we’re playing?

If the answer to any of these is not written somewhere already, congrats. You're normal. And this is your chance to fix it.

Start with the outside shell : Vision, Mission, Narrative, Primitive, Values.

Every company needs a compass. Not a vague sentence in size 8 font on the last slide of the pitch deck, a real compass. And it starts with five things:

Vision

What future do you believe in? Not in a vague, spiritual sense, but in a macro, decade-long, this-is-where-the-world-is-heading way.

And if your vision fits in a tweet, it’s probably bullshit. Don’t get me wrong, it should be inspirational. But only as the outer shell of a vision powered by a real, concrete, working engine underneath.

At Kima and Cassius, our vision starts from a simple truth: capital is abundant, judgment is rare.

Money moves faster than understanding. There’s more dry powder than discipline, more noise than conviction. Everyone has access to the same deals, the same data, the same founder memes, but very few know how to see beyond the surface. Hype masquerades as strategy. Consensus masquerades as insight.

That’s where we draw the line.

We believe the next era of venture capital will belong to those who can actually think, who can separate the signal from the noise, not with a hunch, but with precision, clarity, and courage.

Judgment is our craft. It’s not a gut feeling, it’s a skill. Built from repetition, sharpened by experience, powered by a relentless desire to understand not just what a company does, but why it will work. We’re artisans of decision-making in a world that often confuses activity for progress.

Our vision is not to follow the trend, it’s to shape the next generation of category-defining companies, by backing the founders who build with obsession, speed, and depth. Founders who don’t just chase opportunity, but who see something others missed, and who are willing to suffer a little to make it real.

Our role is to be early, to be right, and to be useful when we show up.

Mission

What do you want to become in that future? Not just what you do, who you are becoming. A startup builds a product. A company becomes something in the world. Don’t mix up where you’re starting with where you’re heading.

Our mission is to back European (and let’s admit it, a lot of french) founders who are building global companies and to be the partner that truly understands what that takes.

We do this not because it’s a positioning play, but because we’ve lived it. We know what it means to grow up in systems built for stability, not scale. To operate in cultures where ambition is often understated, where failure is feared, and where the first instinct is caution, not courage.

And yet, the most ambitious European founders break free from that. They choose discomfort. They leave behind what’s familiar. They land in places like the United States, fast, aggressive, unforgiving and they don’t flinch. They adapt. They outwork. They absorb the new rules. And then they rewrite them.

That’s who we back.

We believe that the best companies of the next decade will be born at the intersection of two worlds: the creative resilience of Europe, and the scale instincts of the U.S. Our mission is to be the bridge and the engine.

We don’t just write checks, we coach, pressure, support, and challenge. We show up where it hurts. We move fast when others hesitate. And we help our founders turn cultural discomfort into strategic advantage.

Because when a European founder makes it globally, it’s not by accident. It’s by grit, precision, and adaptability. And we know exactly what that journey requires, because we’ve been on it too.

Narrative

This one is subtle, but powerful. Your narrative is the emotional layer of your vision, it’s not what you say you do, it’s what people feel when they encounter your product, your team, your brand.

It’s the undercurrent that runs through everything… pitch decks, sales calls, tweets, press coverage… and leaves people with a sense of… I get it. And I want in.

It’s how your vision becomes human. If your vision is what you believe the world is becoming, your narrative is how that belief shows up in people’s lives, what it feels like to be a customer, a recruit, a user, a fan.

And the best narratives? They don’t need to be forced. They emerge from how people talk about you when you’re not in the room. It doesn’t need a tagline, it needs consistency.

I once ran a workshop at L’Oréal. I asked a room full of execs after explaining that concept: So what’s your company’s narrative? They quoted the CEO’s corporate line. I had to stop them. I told them: no. That’s fluff.

What you really do is far more simple, straightforward and universal as a brand of your magnitude. You bring well-being to the world. That’s the whole story. You’re not just making lipstick. You’re helping someone feel like herself before a job interview, a first date, or even a chemo session. That’s your narrative. And you should own it.

Primitive

If your narrative is what makes people feel something about your company, your primitive is what makes that feeling real.

It’s not your pitch. Not your tone of voice. Not your culture slide.

It’s the core feature, the single building block, the irrefutable concrete manifestation of everything you claim to be. It’s the part of your product or system that, if you removed it, the whole thing would fall apart.

It’s not about what’s visible, it’s about what’s foundational.

At L’Oréal, the narrative is beauty and well-being. But the primitive? It’s the care, by experts. Scientists formulating every product — that’s the backbone. Without them, it’s just lipstick.

At Bump by AMO, the primitive is the map, reliable & unique. The map is what keeps you coming back. It’s the feature that says: this is for people like me. You come for your friends, to record the places you’ve visited, to connect with your closed ones in a uniquely contextual way.

At WhatsApp, the primitive is obvious: the chat, live. Everything else is secondary. No chat with a sense of live activity, no WhatsApp.

A good primitive isn’t flashy, it’s indispensable. It’s the thing that quietly powers trust, loyalty, usability, scale.

You don’t need five. You need one.
You don’t need to market it. You need to build everything around it.

If narrative is what you promise, primitive is what you deliver. Tangibly, functionally, repeatably. And when it’s strong, the rest of the product becomes obvious. It cascades. It clarifies.

So if you’re lost in complexity, go back to the primitive.
What is the one feature, behavior, or mechanic that carries everything else?

Build that right, and your story writes itself.

Values

Values are not who you hope to be. They’re who you’re willing to be, especially when it’s hard.

They’re not decor. They’re not a wall poster in the kitchen. They’re your internal boundaries, the rules you don’t break, even when breaking them looks easier, faster, cheaper, or more popular.

They exist to protect your company’s soul when everything else feels blurry, when the vision is far, when the product is late, when the market turns, when the energy drops.

Your values are how your company behaves when no one’s watching. And the best values are not moral, they’re operational.

• If you say "clarity" is a value, then no meeting happens without a doc, and no doc ends without an action.

• If you say "care", then support tickets get answered with empathy, and customers feel like humans, not metrics.

• If you say "ambition", then you fire fast when someone’s coasting, even if they’re nice.

• If you say "inclusivity", then the first ten people you hire already reflect that. Not one day.

Values are only real when they cost you.

• Compassion costs speed.

• Excellence costs margin.

• Transparency costs comfort.

• Creativity costs predictability.

• Focus costs opportunity.

• Boldness costs consensus.

And that’s the point. Values are also selective. They help you say no. To the wrong investors. The wrong hires. The wrong shortcuts. You’re not supposed to be everything to everyone, values are how you decide who you are for.

• Vision gives you direction.

• Narrative gives you connection.

• Primitive gives you structure.

• Values give you backbone.

They don’t make things easier, they make them clearer. So if you’re not sure what your values are, ask yourself:

• What do we refuse to compromise on, even when we’re tired?

• What gets someone fired here, not for incompetence, but for attitude?

• What do we praise, even if it didn’t move the metrics this week?

That’s where your real values live. Write them. Live them. And when in doubt, enforce them. Or let them go. Because values that aren’t enforced… are just vibes.

Then, go inside… Your Operating Principles

Once the vision is clear, the mission is real, the narrative is felt, the primitive is defined, and the values are set, you still need to build something that actually works.

That’s where Operating Principles come in.

These aren’t philosophies. They’re instructions.
They tell your team how to behave every day.
Not when things are perfect but when things are messy, fast, unfinished, hard.

Operating Principles are your company’s muscle memory. They guide decisions, shape habits, and prevent chaos. They’re what makes your culture repeatable at scale.

They are not how you think you work, they are how you want to work, consistently. And they’re only useful if they’re specific.

Vague: “We move fast.”
Precise: “We reply to every founder within 24 hours, even if it’s a no.”

Vague: “We communicate openly.”
Precise: “Every doc starts with what went wrong last time. No exceptions.”

Vague: “We care about quality.”
Precise: “No design goes live without two independent reviews. Ever.”

Great Operating Principles feel like constraints, and that’s intentional. If they don’t push back on your worst instincts, they’re not doing their job. Here are examples of principles that real teams live by…

• Don’t miss deadlines. Be organized.
  Everyone says they’re overwhelmed. Guess what, that’s not a personality trait, it’s a systems failure. Fix your habits.

• No meeting over 30 minutes without an agenda and action items.
  It’s not harsh, it’s respectful.

• Every meeting starts with a post-mortem.
  What did we fuck up last time? Say it. Write it. Own it. Otherwise, you’re just repeating mistakes on loop.

• You ship every 10 days, no matter fucking what.
  Yes, this is an actual principle. And it works. Don’t argue with momentum.

• In marketing, we pitch 3 fresh ideas every 2 weeks.
  Creativity is a muscle, not divine inspiration.

• Docs are read before the meeting. Phones off. Follow-ups within 12h.
  Common sense? Sure. But write it down, or it doesn’t happen.

And we can go on and on…

• “No silent disagreement. If you think it’s a bad idea, say it now or live with it.”

• “Asynchronous first. Meetings are for conflict, synthesis, or decisions.”

You’ll know your Operating Principles are working when:

• People start quoting them in Slack.

• New hires ramp faster because the rules are written.

• Decisions happen without asking the founders.

• Accountability is normalized, not personal.

If your values are the code, your Operating Principles are the protocol.

They make the whole system work. And here’s the golden rule:

If it’s not written, it doesn’t exist.
If it’s vague, it’ll be misinterpreted.
If it’s misinterpreted, it’ll be poorly executed.

So write them. Refine them. Test them. Enforce them.
And when they start to feel invisible, that’s when they’re doing their job.

Make them company-wide but also department wide if needed.

Do the work, properly

We’re doing this exercise internally. With Emmanuel at Cassius. With Alexis at Kima. It’s not a strategy offsite. It’s not an ego trip. It’s work. It takes time to prep, a full day to align, and then weeks to embody.

But it’s one of the few things that compound, like interest. Or trust.

Because once it’s done, everything runs through that lens and more importantly though the systems that are built to sustain them. You know who you are. You know how you behave. And your team knows it too.

So, no… This summer isn’t about balance. It’s about alignment.

Take the time. Rethink the story. Rewrite the rules.
Get your vision straight, your ops tight, your values lived, not just listed.

Then get back to work.
Clearer, sharper, lighter.
Ready for what’s next.

See you around for the second part on efficiency and delivery :)

It all started the night before. After a five-hour drive, we got to Toulouse around 9:30 p.m. and went straight to L’Entrecôte for dinner. The kind of deeply satisfying meal that feels like carb-loading before a competition, except it wasn’t carbs, just perfectly cooked steak and a mountain of fries. A little treat before the storm.

Then we checked in at the hotel. The room I had booked felt like a mix between a sauna and a preheated oven. The AC was dead. We came back down, gave up, and switched hotels.

At the second place, déjà vu… the AC had broken in part of the building. The guy at the front desk handed us six room keys and said, “Some still work — go see.”

So we played hotel roulette, testing room after room, until we found one that was functional. That night, I managed to sleep about 5 hours.

I woke up groggy, like when you’ve got a 6 a.m. flight and spend the night half-asleep, half-checking the time every 20 minutes.

At 9:00 a.m., the first pitch began.
Then the second.
Then ninety-eight more.

100 entrepreneurs.
5 minutes each.

No breaks.
No air conditioning.
No excuses.

By 11 in the morning, it was already 35°C (that’s 95°F for my American friends), and we were all glistening with ambition and actual sweat.

I had one big bottle of water, two Red Bulls, and a single goal:

Be just as focused for the 100th pitch as I was for the first.

Because these weren’t just pitches.

People had traveled from across France, Belgium, even Spain, all for those 5 minutes. And a few days earlier, I’d seen someone post online: Why are you wasting time pitching to Jean? You should be talking to your customers.

So yeah, I felt the pressure.

If they were going to spend their day with me, I had to show up for real.

Not to impress.
But to listen.
To help.
To be fully present.

And it was amazing.

– A startup building drone detection tech for mobile defense teams.

– Another making autonomous robots for intralogistic, ridiculously efficient and beautifully engineered.

– A synthesizer used by Hans Zimmer and Jean-Michel Jarre, with the soul of a Stradivarius and the design of a spaceship.

– And a world champion beatboxer who not only performed live (mind-blowing), but explained how he’s helping kids with dyslexia using rhythm and sound.

And 96 others…

Founders working on health, education, mental wellness, nutrition, reintegration, childcare. People solving real problems with heart and humility.

You could feel it.
No posturing.
Just clarity and fire.

At the very end of this 10-hour pitch marathon, just when I thought my brain was about to melt, Natacha walked in like an angel of mercy, holding a box of DeVilmar cookies.

Now, these aren’t just cookies. They’re handcrafted in Toulouse, and they look like gourmet Oreos, but when you bite into them, it’s pure indulgence. Sweet, unapologetic, kind of sinful, the kind of treat that says, you’ve earned this.

And the timing? Perfect. It felt like getting a trophy after a long, strange Ironman of attention. One bite in, and suddenly, the exhaustion turned into something softer like, maybe this whole thing was worth it.

That cookie brought me back to life.
I gave everything.
Energy.
Attention.
Feedback.
Presence.

And in return, I got 100 stories.
100 sparks of belief.
100 reasons to keep showing up for this.

Thank you to every single entrepreneur who pitched.
Thank you for your clarity, your courage, your conviction.
Thank you to La Mashine for creating the kind of day that matters.

Who’s in for next time ? :)

Tout a commencé par un email. Comme souvent. Un de ceux auxquels tu réponds un peu vite, entre deux rendez-vous et trois decks de startups qui veulent « réinventer la prise de rendez-vous médicaux avec de l’intelligence artificielle ».

Et puis ça devient un défi. Puis un vrai plan. Puis un gros bloc dans mon agenda, comme une session d’entrainement qui aurait mal tourné en Ironman. Et maintenant c’est une réalité : le 1er juillet, à Toulouse, je vais passer ma journée entière à donner du feedback à 100 entrepreneurs. Sans bouton “mute”.

Pourquoi 100 ? Parce que c’est symbolique. C’est à peu près le nombre de deals qu’on fait chaque année chez Kima. Sauf que cette fois, j’ai voulu le faire en version live, en public, sans Zoom, sans latence, sans excuses de micro qui marche pas. Une sorte de Ironman du feedback, mais sans combinaison moulante.

Le concept tient sur un post-it un peu froissé : tu viens, tu m’expliques ce que tu fais, tu me poses une ou deux vraies questions. Et moi, je te dis ce que j’en pense. Pour de vrai. Pas pour meubler. Pas pour être sympa. Pour t’aider à avancer. Et si t’as envie d’en reparler, tu repars avec mon email (et probablement un petit « tu m’enverras des nouvelles hein ? » que je dis à la fin comme un daron fier, parce que ça est je suis un yeuve et mon fils ainé me traite de boomer).

Évidemment, ce sera intense. Je vais probablement perdre ma voix, peut-être même ma foi en l’humanité si on me ressort une marketplace de NFT pour chiens gauchers, mais j’y crois. Mon poignet va chauffer à force de prendre des notes… Non, je déconne. Je prends jamais de notes.

Je vais finir cette journée vidé, comme après un Ironman, sauf que j’aurais pas payé 800 balles pour souffrir. Et surtout, je le ferai avec le sourire, parce que je sais qu’au milieu de ces 100 moments, il y aura des étincelles. Des pépites. Des trucs qui claquent. Des idées qui vont pivoter. Des projets qui vont changer de trajectoire. Peut-être même une ou deux boîtes qui vont naître. Et franchement, rien que pour ça, ça vaut le coup.

Et toi, dans tout ça ? Tu peux venir pitcher ton projet. Ou juste écouter. Tu peux venir en train, en voiture, en avion, ou à dos de chameau déguisé en licorne. Tout me va, tant que t’es curieux·se, sincère, et prêt·e à entendre un retour qui pique un peu mais qui fait du bien.

Ce sera où ? À Toulouse. Quand ? Le 1er juillet, toute la journée. Combien ça coûte ? Rien. Mais les places sont limitées, contrairement à ma capacité à boire du Redbull.

Pour t’inscrire, c’est ici 👉 Oui là !

Je ne promets pas de résoudre tous tes problèmes. Mais je promets de m’y pencher sérieusement. Comme si c’était les miens.

Il reste 42 jours.

À très vite,
Jean

It slows down. It weakens. It blinds. It kills.

It’s Financial Immaturity.

We give entrepreneurs millions. It marks the beginning of a new chapter, one focused on adoption, traction, or growth. But no matter who they are, or whether they’ve raised capital or not, every founder faces the same universal challenge: mastering two deceptively simple things, easy to understand yet hard to master :

Managing people and managing money.

And too often, it falls apart.

It’s almost predictable. Most founders, especially first-timers, underestimate the difficulty of managing humans. Not just hiring, but leading real people. People with egos. With weaknesses. With resistance to change. With confusion over goals. Misaligned motivations. People who hear one thing when you say another. Who interpret your silences. Who mirror your insecurities.

And if you don’t take ownership of how your organization communicates, learns, and executes, you're done. It’s not a question of if, but when.

And if you survive, give credit to luck and karma, not precision of execution.

But here’s the kicker. As hard as managing people is, it’s not even the biggest failure point I see. The real killer, the slow-motion cliff jump, is how badly many founders handle money.

And it’s not just a knowledge gap. It’s a maturity gap.

Some founders treat capital like it’s not real money. They spend, they don’t invest. They scale without foundations. They grow headcount like it’s a proxy for momentum.

I’ve seen companies throw away millions like it was nothing:

Hiring C-levels they didn’t need. Keeping underperformers because they came early, became friends, or just stuck around. Growing too fast and slowing down too late. Overengineering products before product-market fit. Running ads that weren’t tracked. Expanding abroad before owning their home market. Contracting without understanding their sales motion or even their margins.

Money burned on the altar of bullshit.

And look, I get it. No one teaches this in school.

But when you raise €2M, €10M, €20M, €50M or more, you don’t get to plead ignorance. The startup game is ruthless. It doesn’t care about your intentions.

You either build a business that makes sense, or you don’t.

And when it falls apart? It’s devastating. Not because we lost money. We can live with financial loss… Well, not all of them, let’s be honest.

What I struggle with is the sense of failure. Our failure as investors to make it clear enough, early enough, loud enough that they were on the wrong track.

With people, we can help from the sidelines. We can offer perspective, flag patterns, hold up the mirror. But ultimately, it’s their call. And that’s fair. But Finance is visible. It’s trackable. It’s knowable. We see what’s happening in real time.

And yet, too often, we watch in silence.

Because we don’t want to be the asshole investor.
Because we still want to believe the founder will figure it out.
Because there’s still cash in the bank, therefore time.
Because the issues are buried in the fine print.
Because we tell ourselves it’s not our job to take the wheel.

But maybe it should be.

There are three options when we see it happening:

1 - Say something, but stay passive. Hope the founder hears you. Hope they take it seriously. Hope they don’t just nod along and go back to the mess.

2 - Intervene. Open the books with them. Challenge every line. Push. Not suggest. Push. Hard.

3 - Take control. But let’s be real: we’re not operators. That’s not the role of venture capital. Our job is to believe in people capable of becoming exceptional stewards of people, of capital, of time.

And that’s the heartbreak.

When someone had everything, the product, the market, the timing, and they fuck it up because they didn’t care enough to learn the basics.

Because they thought the CFO would fix it.
Because no one taught them that leadership is operational discipline.
Because they didn’t understand that nothing kills a startup faster than tolerating mediocrity in people, in data, in decision-making.

I’ve watched founders ignore underperformers because firing is hard. I’ve seen them let politics rot teams because confrontation is uncomfortable. I’ve watched them pretend the numbers were fine because facing the truth would mean facing themselves.

And every time, I told myself it wasn’t my place to push harder. That they had to learn. That failure was part of the journey.

But deep down, I knew.

This wasn’t failure. It was negligence. It was avoidable.

And when you see it up close, it’s gut-wrenching.

Thankfully, I’ve also seen the opposite.

I’ve seen founders cut their headcount in half, rebuild from the core, and come back with twice the growth and ten times the clarity.

I’ve seen teams who understand their numbers with absolute clarity. Who hire well, fire quickly, and build organizations that want to win, not just say they want to win.
Who are ruthless with focus, careful with burn, and obsessed with performance.

They feel like pros. Because they are.

I got an email this morning from one of them. A new deal we’re leading. Not a first-timer. A second-time founder. The kind who knows. The kind who doesn’t hide behind optimism. Who faces reality like a boxer.

I know we’ll build together for a decade.

He has that rare thing: real maturity.
Maturity with people. Maturity with numbers.

It’s irresistible. It’s what makes startups work.

But for every one like him, there are five who crash the plane because they didn’t read the altimeter. I can’t go through that again. Not like before.

I’ve been hurt by it. Personally.
I’ve felt like a fraud.
I’ve felt like a failure.
I’ve felt like I let them down.

And I did.

I didn’t say it loud enough.
I didn’t intervene early enough.
I thought they’d figure it out.

So this is me, saying it now. Loud and clear.

If you’re a founder, you don’t get to overlook these things.

You don’t get to ignore the warning signs.
You don’t get to say I’m not a finance person. You become one. Fast.
You don’t get to say I’ll fix it later. Later might not come.
You don’t get to tolerate the wrong people. They will kill your momentum.
You don’t get to overspend and call it growth. That’s not growth. It’s delusion.

You are building a high-performance machine with no safety net.
Mistakes are expensive. Time is limited. Nobody’s coming to save you.

So please. Get serious. About people. About data. About money.

Because the next time your startup dies from financial immaturity, I won’t feel bad for the cap table.

I’ll feel bad for you.

For what you could’ve built.

For what we all lost.

Or a reflection on a day that felt special like today. One of those days that remind me why I do what I do.

It started with a couple of bootstrappers, flying, who’ve found their pace without losing themselves. Yoline, Raph…

Then came another founder. Different stage, different story. I met him back when the product was just a Facebook Messenger bot. Now they’re doing $5M in ARR, something totally different, and a lot more ambitious. Dylan…

A few hours later, a founder who’s selling. Eight years of grind. Built a company that made people feel something. And now it’s time. Time to pass it on. He’s calm. Grateful. Ready. It’s not a finish line. It’s a partial handoff . He gets to breathe. We get to win. Everyone walks away proud. Luca…

I see it at home too with Natacha. And don’t just take my word for it. She has crafted a product so refined that people say “This is perfection. If I could only use one skincare product for the rest of my life, it would be this.”

And through all these moments, I see something that clicks.

What makes these founders so good, what sets them apart, is how right they are.

Right in alignment.

They’re doing the thing they were meant to do.

They see the field. They move with clarity.

They don't stop despite the struggle, the setbacks, the feedbacks and all the honest reflection that come with it.

And when they execute, it looks like instinct.

But it’s not.

It’s experience turned into reflex.

It’s in-depth connection turned into intuition.

It’s thousands of reps behind the scenes that make it look effortless on the surface.

And here’s something else I kept seeing today:

Most of them don’t realize how rare they are.

Yes, you.

Look at you.

You are rare.

You build.

You talk to users, all the time.

You erase, you rebuild.

You’re overseeing, deciding, doing.

Big things, small things, all the things.

You grind.

You never give up.

You never stop.

But wait…

Actually…

Just stop for a minute.

You are rare. But rarely do you stop, like to write it down for instance, to put it all down:

The principles.

The rules.

The culture.

Yours.

Because yes, it’s yours.

Don't let anyone take it from you.

Who you are, and how that translates into what you expect from people.

Not the polished fluff from a team meeting.

The real, in-the-trenches culture.

The expectations.

The way your company does things.

What gets celebrated. What gets shut down.

What gets tolerated. Or not.

What matters when no one’s watching.

And that’s a problem, because culture doesn’t scale on vibes.

It scales on clarity.

It must be written. And enforced.

The best founders I know build from the inside out.

Their values aren’t slogans. They’re behaviors.

And if they want their teams to carry that forward, especially as the company grows, they need to make it explicit.

Set the principles. Write the damn doc.

Share it. Show it. Make it non negotiable.

Don’t let your culture get diluted by default.

That was the thread of my day.

Founder after founder. Different products. Different stages.

But all of them locked in. Doing what they’re supposed to do.

No hesitation.

No performance.

Just realness.

And after a day like that?

I can’t help but feel fired up.

It’s why I do this job.

It’s what makes the slow weeks bearable.

It’s what balances out the hard news, the tough conversations, the days when nothing clicks.

I don’t celebrate those moments enough.

But today, I am.

To all the founders building with clarity, resilience, and heart.

You’re exactly where you’re meant to be.

As for me, before we break it down, I’ll make a long story short: I’m great at striking the right chord in a short period of time, but I will never be a great board member.

Most investors believe their money, experience, and questions add value. Sometimes they do. But more often than not, they just get in the way. There’s a fundamental difference between being an investor and being part of governance, if you don’t get that right, the company will suffer.

Investors : Your Job Is Not to Manage, It’s to Support

As an investor, you back a startup because you believe in the founders. You believe they have what it takes to execute, to learn, to adjust. Your money is a bet on their ability to figure it out, not an excuse to micromanage them or address your fears.

Your role…

• Stay informed: Read the updates, ask the right questions, challenge when necessary, but from a place of constructive curiosity, not control or fear.

• Be available: When a founder calls, you pick up. You help when asked, not when your ego tells you to.

• Know your limits: You don’t run the company. You don’t make the decisions. The founder does.

The best investors understand this instinctively. The worst ones don’t. They confuse access with authority and think writing a check gives them a seat at the decision-making table. It doesn’t.

Here’s a classic mistake: An investor gets excited about their portfolio company’s hiring plan. They start pushing for a big-name CFO, maybe a senior VP from a FAANG company. On paper, great. In reality? A disaster. The startup isn’t ready for that profile, and worse, the founder wastes three months trying to make it work just to keep the investor happy. That’s what bad investment behavior looks like, well-intentioned but totally off-track.

Governance : The Invisible Hand That Can Make or Break a Startup

Now, governance is a different beast. If you’re on the board, your job is not to run the company, it’s to make sure it can be run well.

That means:

1. Setting up the right structure: Who’s on the board? How often do you meet? How do you resolve conflicts?

2. Creating an environment where hard conversations happen: No politics, no bullshit. Just real talk.

3. Holding people accountable: The founder executes, the board supports, but when things go off the rails, the board needs to step in fast and effectively.

The best governance setups are boring. They’re efficient, clear, and low-maintenance. The worst ones are absolute chaos. Few people poorly selected just because they wrote the largest check in the company. Or too many people, endless debates, decisions stuck in limbo because no one wants to take responsibility.

Take an example from a startup I worked with. The board was a mess, four investors, all with different agendas. One wanted aggressive growth, another was obsessed with profitability, the third just wanted to protect their equity, and the fourth barely understood the business. Every board meeting was a war zone. The founder spent more time managing investor politics than running the company.

Eventually, they cleaned it up, cut the board down to three key people, put in clear decision-making rules, and changed the format of meetings to focus on clarity and action, not debate and drama. Suddenly, things moved again.

Board Governance ? Forget It Until You’re Big Enough

One of the biggest mistakes early-stage founders make is setting up formal governance too early. Let’s be real ! before you reach a certain size, a formal board is useless. It’s too slow, too rigid, and too bureaucratic for the speed at which a startup needs to operate.

Those get together every few weeks in order to keep a certain rhythm, mostly useless too if it’s not the right people around the table, the experts that really make things move.

At the seed or Series A stage, what you need is fluidity, fast decision-making, and direct conversations. You don’t need a structured board with committees, votes, or overcomplicated reporting. You need the right people around the table, at the right moments, helping you make the right calls.

When does formal governance start making sense ?

• When you have real revenues, a proper executive team, and a business that isn’t just running on sheer founder hustle.

• When decisions start affecting hundreds of people, not just a small core team.

• When the complexity of the company demands structured accountability.

Before that ? Governance should be a conversation, not a process.

Most Investors Are Terrible Board Members,

Another harsh truth: Most investors are not fit to be board members. Just because someone writes a big check doesn’t mean they belong in the governance of your company.

Why? Because they can’t manage their own inner conflict between:

1. What’s best for the company

2. What’s best for their return

3. what’s best for their ego

And let’s be honest, when things get tough, most of them will prioritize their own interest and act out of fears. That’s not even evil; it’s just human nature. But as a founder, you can’t afford to let people with split loyalties be the ones influencing your most critical decisions.

I’ve seen it happen too many times:

• A board member pushing for an acquisition because it de-risks their investment, even though the company could build something bigger.

• An investor insisting on a new funding round at inflated terms, just to mark up their portfolio, even if it puts the company in a fragile position later.

• An investor pushing to hire a profile or structure the company differently because they don’t trust the founders.

And the worst part? Most founders let it happen because they think they don’t have a choice. The Founder Decides Who Sits at the Board, Not the Bigger Fish in the Pond !

Here’s what too many founders forget: It’s YOU who decides who sits on the board. Not the biggest investor. Not the loudest voice. Not the guy with the flashiest resume. You.

When you raise money, you’re not just choosing capital, you’re choosing who gets power in your company. And that’s not a decision you should take lightly.

The best founders know how to push back. They set clear expectations from day one:

• “Money doesn’t buy you a board seat, value does.”

• “I don’t need a board full of people who just want to protect their own stake.”

• “This is my company. I decide who helps me run it.”

VCs love to act like board seats are part of the price of admission. They’re not. The best founders negotiate hard to keep control.

Governance Can Propel You, or Sink You

Good governance is like good refereeing, you barely notice it when it’s done right, but when it’s done wrong, the whole game falls apart.

As a founder, don’t let your board become a liability. Set the rules before the game starts. Keep it lean, pick people who add real value, and don’t let investors who can’t manage their own conflicts dictate how you run your company.

Because at the end of the day, investors invest, and founders execute. that’s the natural order. When everyone stays in their lane, companies move fast and break through. But the moment investors start meddling in execution or founders get distracted by managing investors, momentum stalls.

Governance should be the bridge, not the bottleneck.

Suppress the noise.

So I told him straight: What the fuck are you doing? The only thing that makes sense is to sit down with the founder, have an honest conversation, and reset the relationship. Get your information from the source, not from some someone else distorting it along the way.

As we continued discussing the company, I reminded him that founders already operate within enough chaos, the last thing they need is investors projecting their own anxieties onto them instead of engaging with humility and clarity.

He asked me what I meant by chaos, so here we are…

Chaos is the default state of any company. It’s like watching a master chef effortlessly execute a recipe, making it look easy. They hand you the instructions, and you assume you can replicate it, until you try and realize that without hundreds of attempts, you’re nowhere close.

Entrepreneurship is exactly that: an endless cycle of trial and error, where the comfort zone is being outside of it. Chaos takes many forms, and I want to break down some of the most important ones.

Emotional Chaos

The first type of chaos is within you.

One day, you feel unstoppable. The next, you want to quit. Between those extremes, you deal with loneliness, doubt, frustration, and the constant feeling that no matter how much you do, it’s never enough.

People say entrepreneurship is lonely. It’s not because you have no one around you, it’s because, in the end, all the responsibility falls on you. You’re the one who has to make the call, take the risk, and move forward.

Accepting this emotional chaos is step one. If you don’t, it will consume you.

Operational Chaos

The second form of chaos is execution.

At the beginning, you do everything yourself. And you have no choice. Then you start delegating. And that’s when the panic sets in. You realise no one does things exactly the way you would. So, you step back in, correct things, micromanage. And then comes the self-doubt: Am I a bad leader? Am I just incapable of trusting people?

Answer: No.

A great entrepreneur has to be a micromanager in the early days, not out of a need for control, but because without a deep understanding of how everything operates, growth and scale are impossible. Founders live in a paradox: they hold a grand vision of the future while simultaneously being in the trenches, obsessing over the smallest details.

They are the link between strategy and execution, ensuring that every moving part aligns. Their role isn’t just to manage the chaos, it’s to create harmony within it.

People Chaos

When it comes to people, chaos is inevitable.

Everyone operates with their own mindset, emotions, and pace, which makes alignment one of the hardest challenges in a company. That’s why first principles and values matter so much, they create a shared foundation in the middle of this unpredictability. Except that they’re rarely set from day one, they are formed as you progress, as an extension of your leadership.

Set those first principles and value because without them, decisions become arbitrary, execution loses consistency, and the team starts pulling in different directions. But when values are clear, they act as a stabilizing force. They don’t eliminate chaos, but they provide a framework to navigate it, ensuring that even in uncertainty, people are moving towards the same goal.

A startup is not a family. It’s not a group of friends. It’s a high-performance team. If someone slows the pace, it’s a problem.

And let’s drop the myth that a great entrepreneur is some ultra-compassionate, endlessly patient manager. A great entrepreneur is clear, fair, and demanding. Because in a startup, motion is everything. If someone is holding things back, something has to change.

Managing Chaos

The goal isn’t to eliminate chaos, it’s to manage it.

A company without chaos doesn’t exist. The best founders understand this and don’t waste time trying to create a perfectly ordered system. Instead, they build structures that absorb chaos without breaking.

Managing chaos is about control without controlling. It’s about setting clear principles so that even in uncertainty, teams know how to act. It’s about designing an organization that thrives in unpredictability rather than fighting against it.

Great founders don’t seek stability; they seek fluidity, a system where things move fast, where people make decisions without waiting for permission, and where uncertainty isn’t a blocker but a driver of momentum.

Embrace Chaos

Chaos isn’t your enemy, it’s your greatest ally.

The best founders don’t suffer through it; they use it. They know that within disorder lies opportunity, and within uncertainty lies speed. When managed correctly, chaos becomes a competitive advantage, forcing agility, pushing creativity, and filtering out those who can’t keep up.

But leveraging chaos is a mental game. It requires the ability to stay sharp when everything around you is unstable, to make high-stakes decisions with incomplete data, and to push forward even when nothing feels certain. The best founders master this mindset. They don’t chase comfort, they train themselves to operate at peak performance inside the storm.

Because in the end, chaos isn’t what slows you down. It’s what propels you forward, if you know how to handle it.

Today, 10 years after I started in venture, I’m joining force with Emmanuel Seugé as we build the next chapter of CASSIUS together.

Let me rewind. In 2015, Xavier Niel offered me the unique opportunity to join his venture capital arm. Shortly after, Alexis Robert joined us, and together we grew KIMA under a simple idea: every year, be the first check for 100 founders launching their startup. With the KIMA team we created a fast and straightforward discipline to investing cultivating trust, hard work and curiosity. Alexis, Chloé and I will continue to operate that way in the future.

To founders, we’re allies.

We have invested in more than 1,000 companies, a third of them based in the US, writing small checks ranging from $100K to $200K, alongside a select few larger commitments in the millions for founders we couldn’t resist supporting further. Companies like Zenly (sold to Snap), Payfit, IBanFirst, Alan, Side (sold to Randstad), Nabla, DICE, Doctrine (sold to Summit Partners), Sourced (which later became Poolside), and MWM, among others.

In 2021, we continued this momentum with a fund called New Wave, welcoming for the first time new investors alongside us. Over just four years, we invested in another 20 startups, including BeReal (sold to Voodoo), Lago, Mistral, Amo, and Sweep.

If the past 10 years in venture have taught me one thing, it is the importance of building with the right partners; those you respect deeply, who inspire shared values and offer complementary strengths. Much like the partnership built with Xavier or the one forged with Alexis Robert at Kima Ventures.

After years of working alongside Emmanuel Seugé, investing in his previous CASSIUS funds, sharing board seats, navigating the ups and downs, and exchanging our thoughts about the world of venture and how to win, the idea of partnering together felt inevitable. We were ready to join forces and build something that stands the test of time.

Together, we’re building on the foundation of the past decade and our shared experiences, doubling down on our commitment to founders who inspire us. Deploying together Cassius 3 marks the beginning of this new chapter, with Cassius 4 already on the horizon.

Emmanuel and I share love for European founders with a global ambition. CASSIUS was an early investor in Sorare, Brut, Kings’ League, Dice or MWM to name a few. All companies started in Europe by entrepreneurs with a global ambition.

As a US based fund ran by Europeans, we will continue to back those founders who draw from the strengths of both worlds. Those who combine Europe’s creativity, ingenuity, and diversity with the US’s unmatched ambition and scale. We will continue to help them navigate this journey, bridging continents, breaking barriers, and empowering them to dream bigger, aim higher, and win globally.

Here’s to this next chapter.

To the founders we’re supporting with KIMA and CASSIUS, thank you for trusting us with your dreams. To the friends and partners who’ve walked alongside us, we’re grateful for your belief in what we’re building. And to everyone who shares this journey with us, we’re just getting started.

It’s always Day 1.

There’s something about facing a year like that. It strips away illusions. You can’t outrun your own accountability. Whatever happened, every stumble, every triumph, it carries your signature. Blame, I’ve learned, is just procrastination in disguise. And procrastination is a thief, stealing the clarity that comes from admitting, This was mine to carry. This is mine to fix.

I think back to decisions I delayed, thinking I was being careful, patient, strategic. I was neither. What I was doing was avoiding the truth. By the time I finally acted, the damages were done, not irreparable, but harder, messier, heavier. Life’s toughest choices don’t knock, they kick the door in. They don’t wait for your readiness; they demand your courage here and now.

And yet, courage isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s quiet, even invisible. Like learning to let go of the people and things that weigh you down. We’ve all been there: a snide comment that lingers, an act of betrayal that festers. I carried those, too, until I realised something: the space I gave to those grudges was space I could never give to growth, to joy. Mandela called resentment a poison you drink, hoping it will kill your enemies. I stopped drinking it. I now choose to fill that space with something better.

But filling that space isn’t always easy. Because letting go also means losing the illusion of control, the idea that you can make everyone like you, approve of you, validate your choices. That will always be my Achilles' heel: the need for recognition. Aristotle said there is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing. But that’s not a life worth living. Looking back, I see now that I’ve tried too hard to smooth the edges, betraying my own nature in the process.

2024 slapped me awake to a truth I’d forgotten: comfort is a seductive liar. I feel like I am back in the fight and feel so grateful about it. Growth lives on the other side of discomfort, and it never arrives with fanfare. It sneaks in quietly after the hard decisions, the long days, the uncertain leaps. There were days last year when I thought I’d pushed too far, when exhaustion whispered, This is enough. But when I look back, those were the days I grew the most.

And then there’s the truth about other people. We all carry stories. Two sides, always. Yours, theirs. Neither is complete. The mistake is believing yours is the only one that matters. In every conflict, every misunderstanding, I now try to see the full picture, even when it hurts. Not to excuse, not to justify, but to understand. It doesn’t erase the past, but it makes moving forward lighter, freer.

2024 brought an end to a chapter where I had questioned my optimism, doubting whether it was a strength or mere naivety. In that doubt, I betrayed myself. Optimism wasn’t a weakness, it was the fire that made me alive. Pessimism didn’t ground me, it suffocated me. From now on, I choose energy that uplifts, belief that ignites, and people bold enough to dream without limits. I choose to stand firmly in the light and leave the shadows of doubt far behind.

And now, here I stand, on the cusp of 2025. I’ve shed what didn’t serve me. I’ve made peace with the unfinished stories. I carry forward only what matters, the lessons, the clarity, the hope. This year isn’t about chasing perfection. It’s about pursuit. Of joy. Of purpose. Of that continuous elusive alignment the Japanese call ikigai, where what you love, what you’re good at, and what the world needs all intersect.

As I look ahead, I don’t feel certainty. I feel possibility. And isn’t that enough ? To know that every step, no matter how unsure, is a step forward. To trust that the storm leaves the earth richer, more ready for what comes next.

So here’s to 2025: the year we keep moving, keep trying, and maybe, just maybe, find something extraordinary along the way.

Let’s carry this forward and make it the standard for the next decade

Don’t count the days; make the days count.

The Obvious One: People

Or in other words: People, people, people, people, people, people, people!

“Obviously,” you say? You’re not really listening. While you may agree, most of you don’t act on it. Why? Because it’s hard to face the truth. You’re afraid to ask some of your early employees to leave—and you will regret not doing it sooner. No one likes firing people, but the survival of your company depends on it. In a competition, you wouldn’t accept a member dragging the rest of the team down. The search for product-market fit, traction, acceleration, and profitability is a competition.

Great people operate from first principles—the ones you’ve set toward excellence. They perform beyond their peers, push boundaries, and often go the extra mile. They’ll move mountains, spread excellence, and establish rhythm among colleagues, all with care.

But it’s your responsibility to foster the right attitude within your organization. If your startup is the Titanic, bad hires are the iceberg. Except this time, you saw the iceberg, hugged it, and then blamed the ocean.

A couple of distinctions to keep in mind: An extraordinary achiever with a toxic attitude is never an option. Asking someone to leave doesn’t mean they’re not capable; it just means they’re not the right fit for your company at that moment, or you haven’t created the right conditions for them to thrive.

Growth Mindset

Or in other words: You know nothing, Jon Snow. Or better yet: Adjust to fucking reality.

Startups are chaos. Product-market fit is hard, traction is slow, acceleration doesn’t work as planned, time flies, plans fail, markets shift, personal views are out of touch, competitors come out of nowhere. It’s exhausting. It’s almost like playing Monopoly with no dice, no money, and someone keeps flipping the board.

What makes the difference is your agility and rhythm. If you’re not ready to challenge yourself, you’re likely on a rough path. Our best startups embrace the discomfort of pivoting, changing perspectives, learning new things, and daring to go against the consensus. The best founders are in constant motion—tweaking, adjusting, and moving faster than anyone else. It may not always be comfortable for the team, but it’s reality.

A couple of distinctions to keep in mind: Some people thrive in more structured or stable environments, and that’s okay—it’s just important to acknowledge it. Chaos isn’t a constant state. It comes in phases of varying magnitude and length. Knowing when to lean in and when to regroup is crucial.

Data Rules

Or in other words: Men lie, women lie, but data doesn’t (if well tracked). Or simply: Financial responsibility isn’t optional; it’s foundational.

Many founders lose their grip here. Our best companies have founders who know their data by heart. They have complete control over their model’s equilibrium and never make decisions without consulting their data first. And when the data isn’t readily available, they dig for it.

Founders who don’t track their runway are like pilots saying, “We don’t need a fuel gauge. I just feel like we’ll make it.” Spoiler: You won’t.

You can’t run a business without mastering your data. At best, it’s reckless; at worst, it’s suicidal. Stretch every dollar until it screams. If you don’t know your runway, CAC, LTV, and margins better than your investors, don’t bother asking for more money.

Control the numbers, and you control your destiny.

One distinction to keep in mind: Tracking too many metrics or doing so poorly can overwhelm you. Data literacy includes knowing which numbers matter and presenting them clearly. How you interpret and communicate your data is just as important as how you track it.

These are the rules of the game, and they’re non-negotiable. In the Startup Hunger Games, it’s not luck that gets you out alive—it’s these principles in action. So ask yourself: Is my team strong enough? Am I agile enough? Do I have control of the numbers?

Most of you are showing up with a slingshot while someone else built a flamethrower.

In this arena, the odds are against you.

By default, you won’t survive.