Jean de La Rochebrochard

People ^ Venture ^ Capital | With @Xavier75 | @kimaventures | | Jean @ | email only

[Jean de La Rochebrochard @2lr]

Until you're 10+ in a startup , the only roles that exist are head of get shit done & chief common fucking sense officer.

[Jean de La Rochebrochard @2lr]

Thrilled DAILY USER !

[Kenneth Schlenker @kschlenker]

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.

[Kenneth Schlenker @kschlenker]

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.

[Jean de La Rochebrochard @2lr]

For years, consumer has probably been one of the most misunderstood, underrated categories in venture capital. Too emotional for some. Too trend-driven for others. Too risky. Too crowded. Too visible.

And yet, consumer creates a very particular kind of fascination.

https://t.co/SkDzx7mBbr

[Jean de La Rochebrochard @2lr]

@brivael Oh woooow 😍

[Thomas Yeddou @thomasyeddou]

When I pitched @2lr on a profile, in March, he was immediately in. "I'm willing to share everything," he told me. From our very first conversation, while he was walking along the harbor of Bormes-les-Mimosas, he did.

Throughout our many phone calls in April, we talked about his early days as a fundraising advisor, his time at The Family, the first time he met Xavier Niel and what that relationship became, and about New Wave—probably the most complicated period of his life. Most of all, we talked about his fears, his doubts, and what drives him.

I also spoke with the people around him.

@pascalmercier welcomed me in his office near the Champs-Élysées. He told me about their first meeting over a beer and what he's watched Jean become since.

@an21m welcomed me in his office too (and I had never seen anything like it). We'd scheduled thirty minutes, we talked for two hours. He told me how Jean cold-emailed him at six in the morning on the day of their launch, and about their years together across Paris, London, and Silicon Valley.

I sat with @AlexLouisy, with whom I share the same WeWork. He told me about what their investor-founder relationship actually looks like.

And @ale6_ told me about the human behind the machine, how Jean operates, and the balance @kimaventures rests on.

For ten years, Jean has invested Xavier Niel's money in more than a thousand startups. What drives him?

Link in comments.

[Jean de La Rochebrochard @2lr]

I’ve seen hundreds of decks, cohort analyses, and retention reports from consumer social companies over the past decade.

High growth. Explosive engagement. Incredible early retention curves. Social proof so strong you start believing the product is unbreakable.

And then, most of the time, it fades.

People move on. They get distracted. The hot new thing becomes yesterday’s app. Very few products earn a permanent place on someone’s home screen, let alone in their habits or identity.

Some user churn is normal. Every consumer product loses some of their users over time. But the truly exceptional products are different. At some point, the users who left start coming back.

They fall back in love with the product, with the fact that it serves an inherent need.

And after hundreds of graphs and reports over the years, this is the first time I’ve seen something this extreme happening simultaneously:

- insane product and distribution velocity, and the growth that comes with it !

- retention curves bending back upward !

Meaning: over time, some cohorts stop decaying and begin strengthening again because returning users outweigh the users still churning from that same cohort.

That’s extraordinarily rare. That is @amoamoamo.

[Des Traynor @destraynor]

@patrick_oshag @garrytan Keep an eye on @amoamoamo in terms of consumer companies

[Jean de La Rochebrochard @2lr]

It’s actually been very emotional to read. It brought back so many memories. A lot of gratitude too. Gratitude for the people I’ve met, for the lessons learned, for the privilege of spending so much time around builders. It also reminds you of how far you’ve come, while making you realize how much there is still left to build. Always Day 1. Beautifully written.

https://t.co/VMtnK7oquE

[Jason Warner @jasoncwarner]

Today @poolsideai is releasing Laguna M.1 & Laguna XS.2, our latest generation models and first public models

We started Poolside because we believed that to build truly capable coding agents, you need to own the full stack: data, training, reinforcement learning, inference.
These models are the first result of that work, and we’re making them available to everyone

[Eiso Kant @eisokant]

Today we’re shipping Laguna M.1 and Laguna XS.2 – our first public models. We’re also shipping our agent harness and a preview product experience.

Both models were trained from scratch on our own stack: data pipelines, training infrastructure, and agent RL.

[Nicolas Bustamante @nicbstme]

https://t.co/pQ9XUn04x0

[Guillaume Luccisano @luckwi]

We started generating draft replies on OpenAI's Davinci model in late 2022.

By 2023 we had autonomous AI agents handling customer support in production. Way before it was cool.

Today we're releasing Ask Yuma. You talk to it in plain English. It builds your automations, investigates why tickets went wrong, finds your next optimization opportunity, and generates reports from thousands of conversations.

It doesn't just build things. It finds what's broken, proposes a plan, gets your approval, implements the fix, tests it, and verifies it worked.

CX teams used to configure software. Now they talk to it. The industry isn't ready for how fast this changes everything.

3 years of production. This is what came out of it.

[Jean de La Rochebrochard @2lr]

@Peter_Quadrel AI

[Jean de La Rochebrochard @2lr]

Un long texte, pas très optimisé mais sincère sur mon identité d'investisseur, j'en profite pour glisser une petite application rapidement développée, une sorte d'interface qui fait écho à la manière dont j'aime accompagner les entrepreneurs.

https://t.co/kxx7ZkxPmZ

[Hugo Mercier @hugomercierooo]

𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗧𝘄𝗶𝗻 — 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗜 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝘆 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗲𝗿.
No setup. Secure. Infinitely scalable.

We just raised a $𝟭𝟬𝗠 𝘀𝗲𝗲𝗱.
After a beta with 𝟭𝟬𝟬,𝟬𝟬𝟬+ 𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝗱𝗲𝗽𝗹𝗼𝘆𝗲𝗱, we’re now opening to everyone.

RT and comment “Twin” — first agents on us. 👇

[Jean de La Rochebrochard @2lr]

Founder Space.

Very often, founders in our portfolio hesitate to reach out, even when they simply need a moment to talk... about a decision, a direction, fundraising, or a moment of loneliness.

Next year, we’ll open dedicated time slots they can book freely, with no agenda and no justification required. Whenever possible, I’ll also extend these conversations to founders outside our portfolio.

YOU ARE NOT ALONE is my most recent post... https://t.co/SEtqFq2tjB

[Jean de La Rochebrochard @2lr]

Let's gooooooooooo 🔥

[Quang HOANG @qhoang09]

Today we’re launching Vybe to the world and announcing our $10M Seed round to make vibe-coding actually work inside companies.

This is why, how and our vision:

Over the last few decades, every fast-growing company has quietly built the same mess behind the scenes: internal ops glued together with rigid SaaS, fragile spreadsheets or custom-coded tools nobody wants to maintain.

Meanwhile, eng teams are stretched thin. Internal tools never make it to the top of the backlog.

Vibe-coding is changing the game but it’s mostly been good for prototypes, landing pages, and side projects disconnected to production data.

Our belief is simple: in the next few years, most internal software will be vibe-coded by teams working with AI, engineers and business teams together.

Vybe is built for that collaboration:

1/ Business teams own the surface area:  Business teams (Ops, CX, PMs etc.)  can build and iterate on apps themselves: flows, UI, fields, and logic; without waiting weeks for eng to pick up another “internal tools” ticket.

2/ Engineers own the foundation:  Integrate production data (Postgres, Salesforce, Jira, and 3,000 integrations), define SQL definitions once, set up SSO auth, access control, and keep everything in Git to help when needed (from their favorite IDE!)

3/ Secure by design:  Our security and permissioning layer is not vibe-coded and can’t be modified by AI. Everyone can sleep at night.

4/ Team-ready out of the box:  SSO, Auth, environments, deployments, and review flows are built in.

Over the last few months, we’ve been in closed waitlist mode and have hand-onboarded teams to pressure-test Vybe on real production workflows:

- A YC Founder runs his entire CS operation on Vybe and saves ~2 days per week.

- Another company ingested millions of rows from their warehouse to build BI-like internal views that would break typical AI builders.

- One team fully replaced Metabase/Looker by plugging Redshift into Vybe and just… prompting their way to MAU, DAU, funnels…

Remix apps from world-class operators

To make it even easier to get started, we’re launching templates co-created with operators who’ve already solved these problems at scale:

- @collinmathilde (CEO @ Front) – how she runs 1:1s
- @lennysan (yeah, that Lenny!) - how to manage up, do perf reviews and write PRDs
- @sushmars (CTO @ 23andMe) - her  7Cs Framework for Build vs. Buy Decisions
- and many more from the best Tech leaders

Backed by people who’ve lived this pain

We’ve raised $10M in Seed funding, led by @firstround with participation from @ycombinator and an incredible group of operators and founders, including: The CEO Datadog, CEO Grammarly, CEO Reforge, CTO Intercom, Head of Product at OpenAI, Head of Product Anthropic, and 50 more incredible operators who believed in our vision!

Huge thank you to our early customers, team, and investors for believing in us this early. 🙏

We’re now in GA: no more waitlist!
https://t.co/jqEYOWYGSQ

[Antoine Martin @an21m]

❤️

[Jean de La Rochebrochard @2lr]

Insane Ambition, Huge Heart... Something rare in our world !

[Maxime Germain @maximegermain]

Today, we’re launching Beside out of stealth with $32M from @IndexVentures & @eqtventures (+ many great investors/angels) to build the conversation layer for AI.

20k+ individuals and 600+ businesses now run their day through Beside: we answer the phone, text messages, take notes & update your tools.

We began by rebuilding the Phone & Messages app on iOS

We’re now launching with macOS & Android.

Read our story here: https://t.co/v85qJd3g4O

[Jean de La Rochebrochard @2lr]

😬

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

What’s the best thing written about why the remarkably vigorous and inventive France of the 70s and 80s (TGV, Minitel, Ariane, Rafale, Concorde, the world’s preeminent nuclear grid…) has not been nearly as visible in the 21st century? What went wrong?

[Jean de La Rochebrochard @2lr]

Love the U.S. for its speed, its hunger, its lack of shame. Love France for its craft, its thoughtfulness, its refusal to settle. Love both, learn from both, and build something worthy of both. Here is the post : https://t.co/eJybhX0Kyu