Meet Louis Coppey, Partner at Point Nine
From truffle pig to equal partner in four short years
I recently wrote that once in a while, we see a startup and know after the first call that we just have to invest in this company. Similarly, every now and then, when I interview a candidate for a portfolio company, I’m so impressed by the candidate that I’ll send the founder a WhatsApp message with something like “This is our Head of Sales. Let’s close her immediately!!! 👊🏽” before the interview is even finished.
It’s very rare, but when it happens, it’s an almost magical moment. One such moment occurred to me about four years ago when I interviewed Louis for an Associate role at Point Nine. At that time, we had been looking for our next Truffle Pig for a few months and had a number of very promising candidates on our shortlist. Before my call with Louis, I thought that his engineering background, along with the fact that he went to MIT and worked as a summer analyst at Alven Capital in Paris, made him an interesting candidate who we might want to add to our shortlist. After the call I knew: Our search was over.
I unfortunately couldn’t find my notes from that interview in our applicant tracking system (looks like we’re more GDPR compliant than I thought 😅), but I did find an email from back then:
What was it that made Louis stand out? It’s hard to describe in a few words, but I think it was the depth of his thinking, the level of his intellectual curiosity, and his reflectiveness that impressed all of us the most.
Long story short, a week after our first call Louis got on a plane from Boston to Barcelona, where we happened to do company offsite. A few months later Louis joined us as an Associate.
From his first day at P9, he kept surpassing our already high expectations. Only six weeks into the job he led his first investment, Qwilr. Qwilr is based in Australia, by the way, which goes to show that Louis quickly adopted our remote-friendly approach to seed investing.
The fact that his first investment was down under didn’t prevent Brother Louie (one of h̶i̶s my favorite nicknames) from spending a good part of his time in Paris, though. Commuting between Berlin, Paris (and Zoom), it wouldn’t take long until he started to develop a reputation as one of the smartest c̶r̶o̶i̶s̶s̶a̶n̶t̶s cookies in the Parisian ecosystem and beyond. I don’t know how he did it, but only a couple of months into the job, he was already seeing almost every deal that took place in Paris. I remember that whenever I heard about an interesting startup in Paris I would ask Louis if he knew about the company. The answer was always “yes” (along with a concise assessment of what the company does and why we should or should not pursue the opportunity).
While tirelessly holding the P9 flag in Paris, Looping Louie (my 2nd most favorite nickname) also, amongst many other things, sharpened our understanding of AI and B2B marketplaces, led our investment in PlayPlay, and played a crucial role in PlayPlay’s seed-to-Series A journey. He also led our investment in cargo.one, and, most recently, our first investment in Armenia. In four short years, Louis has shown an extraordinary ability to spot opportunities and build deep relationships with founders, while staying as humble and curious as he was in that first interview.
Pawel and I are delighted to welcome Louis to our equal partnership. At 29 years, Louis is much earlier in his career than Pawel and I. If I look at what he has achieved in the last four years and extrapolate from that into the next 15, my only fear is that there won’t be enough unicorns-in-the-making to keep him busy. ;-)
If you’re an entrepreneur and you have the chance to get Louis on your side, I can imagine only one response: This is our investor/partner! Let’s close him immediately!!! 👊🏽
