Thibaud Elziere @tiboel

This is how it all started. Summer 2003. With the money from my internship, I bought my first digital camera: a 3-megapixel Casio Exilim. Today, that sounds laughable. Back then, it felt like the future. The image quality wasn’t great, but I had a conviction: digital would eventually replace film, even for professional photographers. Two years later, it happened. Agencies started requiring photographers to switch to digital. Every technological shift creates huge opportunities for some—and wipes out those who fail to adapt. Back then, people called it the “Kodak moment.” Twenty years later, I had exactly the same feeling the first time I opened ChatGPT. The technology was still imperfect. But you could already tell the world had just changed. 📖 Excerpt from Feet on the Ground, Head in the Stars “Since arriving in Berlin, an idea had been quietly taking shape in my mind. That summer, I returned to Unisolution for another internship. With the money I earned, I bought my very first digital camera—a 3-megapixel Casio Exilim—which I was incredibly proud of. At the time, it was considered a technological breakthrough. Digital photography was beginning to go mainstream: quality was improving, prices were falling, and the revolution was already underway.” Buy book : iconic-edition.fr/products/feet-…

At Wat.com It’s always a little too cold. Right now, it’s actually way too hot. The WiFi is still improving. Sometimes you have to fight for a seat. We improvise. We adapt. We build with what we have. But the energy… The energy is unreal. For the past 9 months, 120 entrepreneurs have been working side by side in an old printing factory while waiting for WAT to open. They’re coding. Selling. Hiring. Building AI, health, climate and mobility startups. Every time I walk in, it feels a little like San Francisco. Not because everyone speaks English. But because of the ambition. The optimism. The feeling that anything is possible. Launching before everything was ready was probably the best decision we made. WAT isn’t open yet. But the community already is.

@ValentinHervieu @paulg Thank you for the compliment. It means a lot to me.

I’ve never really had a mentor. But if I had to name one, it would be @paulg . Most people know him as the founder of Y Combinator. What they often underestimate is how much he shaped modern startup culture. • Product first • Respect for builders and CTOs • Solve real problems • Move fast • Founder-friendly investing Much of what feels obvious today wasn’t obvious 20 years ago. As I wrote in my book: “If I had to name a mentor, it would be Paul Graham. Since my early days as an entrepreneur, I’ve drawn inspiration from his writings. “PG,” as everyone calls him, has been writing essays since the 2000s that have become the foundation of global startup culture. We haven’t yet fully grasped the extent of his influence, but he has defined the structure of the modern tech ecosystem.” For anyone interested: 📚 Essays: paulgraham.com/articles.html 🎤 Stockholm talk: ycombinator.com/library/Q7-pau… 📖 My book, "Feet on the ground, head in the stars": iconic-edition.fr/products/feet-…

You’ve probably heard about our Hexa House in San Francisco. This summer, we’re turning it into a Hacker House. Think of it as an artist residency… for founders. The idea is simple: live and build together for a few weeks in the heart of SF, surrounded by other people already shipping. The only requirement: you’re already building something. No pitch deck. No equity. No strings attached. It’s completely free, and we’ll cover: 🏠 the house 🖥️ the workspace 🍜 meals 🤖 $600k+ in AI & cloud credits 🌁 access to the Hexa network in San Francisco 🚀 mentorship from some of the best builders in our ecosystem We’ll only select 8–10 European builders. 📍 San Francisco 📅 July 2026 ⏳ Applications close on June 19 Link to apply here: form.typeform.com/to/IXfaVl65

Releasing a book is always a strange exercise. Even stranger when it's your own story. It can turn into an ego trip real fast. I wrote it as a manifesto for entrepreneurship. An attempt to tell a founder's story a little less how we wish it had gone...and a little more how it actually went. And maybe to answer a question most founders end up asking: what am I really chasing? The book goes behind the scenes of Fotolia and the sale to Adobe, the birth of eFounders (now Hexa), Iconic House, the failure of Kate, the wild ride of Gama in space, and plenty of other more-or-less reasonable projects. Naturally, everyone takes a few hits. Me first. Then the VCs, the lawyers, the private bankers, the journalists… You only roast the ones you love. But really, it's just the simple story of a founder trying to understand what kept him running all these years. Feet on the ground, head in the stars. EN Version : iconic-edition.fr/products/feet-… FR Version : iconic-edition.fr/products/les-p…

Excited to launch Upstream and announce our $3M pre-seed round AN INBOX DESIGNED FOR HUMANS AND AGENTS Upstream's agents sort the noise, draft replies in your exact voice, follow up at the right time, and do what you ask, like finding receipts, scheduling meetings, or writing personalized messages Thousands of people used it in our closed beta to handle their email. Now available to everyone How it works: 🧵

Open LinkedIn, X or Instagram today. Entrepreneurship in ten commandments: ⚡ "There are those who succeed and those who make excuses." 🔥 "If you haven't suffered, you haven't built yourself." 🧠 "Everything is your fault. So everything is possible." 🚀 "School, degrees, employment… all useless." 💸 "If you're not making money, you don't get it." 🎯 "People want results without the effort." ⚡ "Stop thinking. Act." 🏆 "I came from nothing, so can you." 🛠️ "If you're not working 80h a week, you'll never make it." 🧘 "Sport, sleep, discipline. That's the real secret." The fascinating part? It works. Radical, simple, short. Perfect for a story. Social platforms reward radicalism. Nuance doesn't pay. The problem: chasing the audience, we betray reality. A founder's real life rarely looks like this. It deserves better than slogans. That's why I wrote this book. To push back. To bring back the long view, lived experience, complexity. 📕 Out June 9, 2026.

@kschlenker Excited to be part of this journey 🚀

Today we're announcing the new Opal to build the operating system for attention. 1 million people already use Opal every single day. We raised $10M. Personal AGI is coming.  The bottleneck won't be access to intelligence. It will be attention.

What am I chasing? People keep asking me this question. And honestly, I often ask myself the same thing. I guess you’ve probably asked yourself too 🙂 Deep down, we are all chasing something, without always knowing exactly what. Steve Jobs once said you can only connect the dots by looking backward. So between two crazy runs, I wanted to do exactly that: look back, connect the dots, and try to understand what keeps pushing me forward. What makes us run, us entrepreneurs? What keeps us restless, sometimes at the expense of everything else? Why is it so hard to stop, enjoy the moment, and simply stay still? Are we running to change the world, like we sometimes like to believe? Are we running away from something? Running to avoid falling? Running to avoid thinking? Or simply because once you start running, you no longer know how to stop? I wanted to take the time to write, connect those dots, see the shape they create together, and understand what they really mean. Hopefully, this reflection will also help you understand a little more about your own race. Official release on June 9, 2026. To receive the pre-order link before everyone else, comment BOOK on this post.

Today they go further: Auth API, Intel API, real-time signals straight from the telcos. $20M Series A led by @HarryStebbings and 20VC, with @singular__, @seedcamp, @deel and FDJ Ventures. The onboarding and trust layer for the AI age. Huge congrats ⚡️⚡️

@berny_matias and @Zibra_ had run phone verification at Zenly. They had lived the broken OTP nightmare firsthand. The fraud. The inflated bills. The users vanishing at the signup screen. So they built the fix. We invested.

2 years ago, we co-built @roundtable inside Hexa with @Evantesta, Simon Ternoir and Julien Fissette. The idea: collaborative investing made simple.

Because deep down, the best holiday memories almost always end up around a table. Huge thanks to the incredible team making this dream real 🙏

A chef who introduces you to a region, cooks the catch of the day, respects the most demanding diets, turns breakfast into brunch on the fly, or secretly bakes a birthday cake with the kids for their parent. Not there to impress. There to bring joy.

In the end, it's always our taste buds that have the final say. We understood this early on with @robinmichou when launching @iconic__house: the difference between a beautiful home and a true hospitality experience is service. And it often comes down to what happens around the table.