I grew up in a place where everyone knew everyone. I've been trying to rebuild that ever since.
Tunisia until I was five. Raised by my aunt in a neighborhood where doors were open. If you needed something, you walked next door. That was the world.
Then France. I didn't speak the language. We landed in a rough neighborhood north of Paris — the kind of place where violence was the dominant language and the only visible paths to entrepreneurship were construction and restaurants. I remember seeing a psychologist as a kid, trying to make sense of a country where people were afraid of everything and barely knew the person across the hall. I'd gone from a place of radical connection to a place of radical isolation.
I was good at math. That was the one thing that didn't require cultural context. Numbers worked the same everywhere. It got me into competitive programs, then an engineering degree. The first computer I ever used was at school — we didn't have one at home.
The web changed everything. Not the technology — the idea. You could connect strangers. I became obsessed. I think I was trying to rebuild what I'd lost — that feeling where no one was a stranger, except this time it would be digital, and it could scale. I spent fourteen years building dating products. One of them grew to millions of users. I sold the studio in 2019. Fourteen years of learning everything through the hardest category there is: human connection.
Then a meeting with a professor at Nanterre changed everything. I wandered into a sociology class and realized something uncomfortable: I barely knew how to read. Not literally — I could read. But I'd never had a culture of reading. Where I grew up, science was the path. Books — the kind that make you think differently about the world — were not part of the equation. Nobody handed me Foucault or Lévi-Strauss at fifteen.
I discovered anthropology, philosophy, sociology. Went from reading nothing to reading compulsively. By 2016 I'd become a sociologist — formally, through the university. Trying to make up for years of not knowing what I didn't know. That obsession eventually became a product — because I realized there were millions of people like me who wanted access to ideas but hadn't been given the cultural infrastructure to find them.
That's my half. Here's the other half.
Antoine grew up in the south of France. Family of doctors. Graduated from one of the country's most elite engineering schools. His path was structured, resourced, legible. Mine was chaotic, improvised, improbable. On paper, we have nothing in common.
But we share the same obsession: building consumer products that work at scale. Not enterprise dashboards. Not B2B SaaS. Consumer — the thing where you put an app in someone's hands and they either use it every day or delete it in thirty seconds. There's nowhere to hide.
Antoine brings the engineering rigor I never had. I bring the user intuition that comes from building products for communities that most tech people have never spent time with. He thinks in systems. I think in people. The tension between those two things is what makes the work good.