Irresistible Insights

When the obvious meets the genius

If you ask me what’s irresistible to fund, it’s when the genius meets the obvious, when a founder shares with you something about their industry, their expertise or their approach that you feel is unique and brilliant.

Sometimes, it’s so natural for them that they don’t even realize the necessity to emphasize that uniqueness, to craft the story that will resonate with investors or partners. We’re often trying to extract those irresistible insights as we help them prepare to fundraise.

I had those Aha! moments many times and whenever I meet with a founder, my job is to create to best possible setup for them to make a good impression, but it’s also to extract the essence of what make them irresistible.

About three years ago, Xavier forwarded me the email of a young entrepreneur, Jade. She was starting a food business. It was definitely not something for us, we focus on tech entrepreneurs only. But Jade not only had that incredible drive, energy, ambition, she had already experimented a lot of things with this unique ethos to turn restaurant into entertainment. What she’s building with Ephemera is really special !

When Tony introduced me to Phil back in the days, I wasn’t really excited to hear about a concert ticketing business, to me it was boring at best. Now, whenever I am in London or NYC to attend a board meeting and people ask me the reason of my visit, I always get the same answer : “I loooooove Dice”. The first time Phil told me how upside down was the market and how he was planning to turn it around, I found his angle so obvious and brilliant at the same time.

I just told you, we focus on French entrepreneurs in tech. And it’s true. That’s also what I told Natacha back in 2022 when she told me about her pre-seed round. It’s only when she asked for feedbacks on her deck the year after and that we dug into what had led her to work on Bonjout, that I realized she wasn’t building yet another beauty brand, but a cosmetic hero company.

When I invested with Kima in Lago back in 2021, it was because I believed in Anh Tho, first and foremost. They pivoted a couple of times before launching their open source metering and billing solution. Last year, when she reached out for me to look at her pitch deck and her fundraising strategy, I saw something unique and irresistible in their approach, and there I snapped, I wanted to invest more with New Wave !

I had another Aha! moment with Steeve last week when we discussed the recent milestones they had reached with ZML and how it will change the way developers test and run open source AI models.

Founders make me happy, that’s why I do what I do. They share their passion, their dedication, the goods, the bads, the rebounds, their search, their insights, their findings. We stick to our thesis to back french founders in tech, and it’s nearly impossible to be perfectly diligent with all the opportunities we receive on a weekly basis. However, as we follow our intuition, remain receptive to what could appear as random opportunities, we keep finding gems hidden in plain sight.

We can’t catch them all, but our intentions are real :)