I’ve just posted this new post on Substack >> https://2lr.substack.com/p/social-regression

Don’t hesitate to subscribe 😊

It’s time for a change, follow me there :)

Over the past few months, I have wondered if it made sense for me to move away from Medium to try another platform. The main reasons behind this consideration were the following:

• I wanted a better filtering systems for the 197 posts I had written so far;
• I wished I could better engaged with the community of readers;
• I didn’t feel like Medium had some of their writer’s best interests at heart.

For some time I considered using Ghost or Wordpress, but I wasn’t so delighted just thinking about the configuration of a template & some plugins… Then I saw the emergence of Substack, intrigued. …

Forewords

Venture capitalists back entrepreneurs who work hard to build meaningful organisations. They contemplate them execute on a single mission, support each one of them in their own way by leveraging as much as possible what they know, observe, and learn from their comfortable position of having many chips in different pots.

Don’t mind me saying that I have the best job in the world, especially with a single investor, Xavier Niel, who enjoys taking risk, has the means to undertake them, and more importantly in my position, trust the people he works with. …

Impala just announced its $11M Series A round led by Stride and Xavier Niel, with the participation of Insight Partners Co-Founder Jerry Murdock, as well as Tom Stafford and the partners of DST Global 💸

I am thrilled to join the company’s journey alongside those amazing people 🤗

How Impala got our attention 😎

Venture capital is a search for outliers, it’s a walk through a chain of events (among them meeting with entrepreneurs, digging into the unknown, learning from people, drawing lessons from mistakes) that ultimately unfolds into the discovery of unexpected yet perfect matches between incredible opportunities and stellar teams.

While Ben articulated a brilliant narrative around the travel hospitality industry when we met in June, the circumstances behind this get together reminded my how lucky we are to meet with extraordinary founders. …

My browser is opened with only one tab, the notifications are off both on my computer and my phone. There is a cup of coffee on my left and my Bose noise-masking sleepbuds are on with a boardwalk sound.

I’m in the zone.
To write.

I know that this piece will take me approximately two to three hours to write, more or less, or at least that’s the time I will dedicate to it. It’s 8.47am.

Focus, on automatic

Whenever you are on an intense streak, practicing sport like climbing or karting for instance, not only concentration is required, but it naturally comes to you as your full mental bandwidth is dedicated to it. I’m taking those two activities as examples because they work for me, while I find myself thinking a lot when I’m running, cycling or swimming for instance. …

People ^ Venture ^ Capital

Over the past few years, I have come to realize the inherent logic and intuition behind our decisions to back entrepreneurs who have revealed, over time, to be phenomenal founders and company builders.

Why did we invest more money than other investors would have dared to, at valuations that totally defied the consensus, at a point of high uncertainties that characterize the early days of a team? There are common patterns:

1. During the first minutes and hours of discussions with a founder, we make our mind about the opportunity, we provide information about what we’ve observed elsewhere, we share our views in order to guide the founders through their thinking process and choices. Then comes a time of enlightenment, a moment when we realize that the thinking, learning, execution velocity of the founders is transcending our interactions, as a result of their talent and hard work. …

When I joined Kima Ventures in September 2015, it was becoming clear that our mandate to support the rise of French entrepreneurship was taking on its full meaning.

Honestly, I don’t think we could have predicted such acceleration in the maturity of the market. The quality of French founders, both from an execution excellence prism and a growth velocity perspective, is phenomenal, the amount of capital raised and deployed towards them has grown tremendously, and the ambition to build beautifully giant companies is finally catching up to realize self-fulfilling prophecies in the making.

When we backed Zen.ly back in November 2015, I remember telling Xavier that it was a $10B+ opportunity. We sold it to Snap for 30 times less. Nevertheless, I still believe it is a $10B+ opportunity. …

Kima Ventures has the largest portfolio of French companies in the world. We’ve had the opportunity to observe over the past few years the incredible rise of the following phenomenons:

• There are more and more French entrepreneurs, with either remarkable learning curves and/or past valuable experiences, making them more talented and ambitious than ever.
• This growing environment foster excellence and velocity on top of talent and ambition. It’s creating compounded effects that make us believe that we are just at the beginning of a remarkable ride for French startups.
• As a consequence, more and more foreign investors are interested in investing in French VC firms (Which have still to step up their game and ambition) but more importantly, in French startups. …