🪡 🌁 Last week was special with Objet -we threw our second soirée in SF on Friday and got lucky to see some great folks share the love.

What Saumya and Colt are building is so important. Check their work out: Build IRL Newsletter #22. And especially if you’re living in SF, they always share some cool events you can join. That’s how I knew about the new IRL Movie Club for instance and got to watch the Join or Die documentary.

I can’t agree more with Caitlin and really liked her invitation to move from volume to value: Less Volume, More Value. I also agree with her ‘medium-hot take’: “volume-based growth lacks imagination”.

🍄 👜 Dirt also introduced their new column -Objet- in collaboration with us. They’ve asked five writers to write about a single object that is significant to them and will be publishing these essays in the coming months. For its first: Marlowe Granados on the cathartic potential of a second-hand bag: The Bakelite Bag.

I like to think of them [old things] as talismans of the past. I don’t just put them on display but use them as they were made to be used.

There’s also a sense that whatever it witnessed through my ownership is just a minor chapter in the bag’s life. It holds my secrets but also the mysteries of those that came before me. I can only hope to pass it on as the common thread between me and generations of stylish women.

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🎨 Henrik struck again. Look at that opener 👇 I was hooked right there. The whole thing looks like a great -and wise- ‘lesson’ to pass on kids: everything that turned out well in my like followed the same design process.

• If I look at things that have turned out well in my life (my marriage, some of my essays, my current career) the “design process” has been the same in each case. It has been what Christopher Alexander called an unfolding. Put simply:

  • I paid attention to things I liked to do, and found ways to do more of that. I made it easy for interesting people to find me, and then I hung out with them. We did projects together.

  • I kept iterating—paying attention to the context, removing things that frustrated me, and expanding things that made me feel alive.

  • Eventually, I looked up and noticed that my life was nothing like I imagined it would be. But it fit me.

It took Mathilde, Max and I, 4 weeks in San Francisco to gather 35 people to get a uniquely designed label with a chip inside sewn on their denim by local tailors; generating 200 taps during the night -playing a ‘tap them all’ game- which triggered 1,300 notifications total. Let’s unpack Objet's first soirée: La Première.

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🪡 We threw our first ‘denim soirée’ in San Francisco last Friday and we can’t be happier. Stella was one of the local tailor. Learn more about her and how she’s doing some magic with fabrics since age 8.

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👕 Shameless plug to start: I was stoked to meet and chat with Sophie about the possibility (or not) to regulate our emotional attachment to fashion. [if you can't read the article, let me know and I can send it to you]

If we don’t pay enough attention to what we want and why we want it, we just tend to crave for what’s next.

🚶‍♀️I can’t agree enough with Patricia's title ‘solved by walking’. I’ve personally always loved walking. I’m currently in Berkeley, CA and I’m very surprised by the low amount of people walking -especially in the hills. Below are Russel's words:

In addition to physical exercise and my family fondness, walking remains important to me as an emblem of the sacredness of life. Humans think. Human feel. Humans move.

We encounter others in our walks. The world – nature, cities, streams, forests – unfolds underfoot. Walking remains a primary way we go beyond ourselves.

🪡 The first name of my very first company -back in 2010- was ‘My Tailor is My Friend’ so this new section by Mathilde on The Objet Journal feels quite special. Clara Metayer is a Parisian tailor, founder of Sauve qui Peut and tailor-in-residence at Patine.

Over time, I realised that I didn’t want to sell new products. We already have so much. How about keeping those we have and love? This opened a brand new world! Mending is made of so many techniques. For one given challenge, there are a thousands solutions: visible -embroidery, patches,…-, invisible - darning, or the art of recreating fabric literally, be it jeans or wool stitches,…

🤰 This testimonial by Daniel is a must read: Looking for the Anti-Mimetic Doctors. The subtitle says it all: “Rethinking Medical Interventions, and the Courage to Do Less”. On many aspects, it reminded me Mathilde's experience -and I know she might share it all soon on A Wander Woman.

As doctors, we know full well that tracking the baby’s heart rate during labor has increased interventions but has not improved outcomes. In simpler terms, tracking the baby’s heart rate during labor has gotten more women induced or sliced open, but has not decreased stillbirths or postpartum deaths. Then why do we do it? Because it’s scary not to, that’s why. And I speak from experience.

Yesterday I saw a post popped up in the Acquired slack's #parents channel. Marc basically asked: "has anyone started a vc-backed company while having very young kids or planning to? [...] how did timing it with a young family impact it [your company] longer term?".

This was my answer:

one thing i didn’t expect when starting something new while becoming a parent [and i can speak on behalf of my wife too who’s launched something new too while pregnant]: having young kids at home makes you so much more efficient. and i’m talking like 1,000x more efficient. period. both in terms of: (a) prioritizing what to work on [answering the simple question: what would seriously move the needle?] and (b) decreasing time between starting to work and being 100% focus/ deep in flow mode (procrastination just completely disappeared)

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📝 I’ve been touched by Rob's ode to manifestos in Manifestos are magic spells. I can’t agree more with this typically:

The process of writing a manifesto, at its core, is the process of clarifying your desire. In a world that's constantly distracting us with digital noise and shiny objects, keeping us running on a mimetic treadmill of manufactured desires, getting clear about what you want, deep down, is a radical act. Exploring and articulating what matters most, then committing it to writing, is a bit like waking up to your own humanity after a deep slumber. It kicks off a journey of coming home to yourself.

Which is exactly why we wrote ours at Objet: "LE NEW CONSUMER".

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🏛 Great article on The Hacking of Culture and the Creation of Socio-Technical Debt.

Like any well-designed operating system, culture is invisible to most people most of the time. Hidden in plain sight, we make use of it constantly without realizing it. As an operating system, culture forms the base infrastructure layer of societal interaction, facilitating communication, cooperation, and interrelations. Always evolving, culture is elastic: we build on it, remix it, and even break it.

That line made me think of New_ Public work and what they study/ fight for:

As more and more spaces for meeting in real life close, we increasingly turn to digital platforms for connection to replace them. But these virtual spaces are optimized for shareholder returns, not public good.

Do I want my kids to be hurt? Of course no. Do I want them to be constantly afraid of everything in life and paralysed in face of every challenge? Hell no. We -society- have a problem in the way we let kids learn and experience life. As usual the challenge lies in finding the right balance. Every time I talk to my grand-ma it's like she's sure 'outside' is utterly dangerous. Worst, she's certain it's more hostile than during her youth. Unfortunately this feeling is widespread. But the victims are the kids. We don't let them roam outside and explore. What do we do instead? Give them a screen and off to the couch, which is way more tragic.

I don't have any solution, yet, except letting my own kids take risks. Every time we do this with Mathilde, we can feel the 'pressure' from others, parents and whatnot. So I wanted to present here a collection of personal anecdotes, as well as great pieces of writing and excerpts from other people.

I think I'll come back to this topic quite often here. Kids are the future. Period. The way we raise them has a profound impact on tomorrow's society.

🏡 One of my observation following my latest US trip was: “In both NYC and SF people were defining themselves and thought on a 'neighborhood-basis'.” Ava and Phil demonstrated this perfectly in their discussion about the importance of picking your neighborhood.

All this to say, my neighborhood choice has really affected my experience of San Francisco. So when I started chatting with Phil Levin, who founded Live Near Friends and Radish, a multigenerational compound in Oakland with 20 adults and six children living across 10 homes, and he mentioned that picking your neighborhood is more important than picking your city, everything clicked into place.

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I've been thinking a lot lately about the differences between Europe and the US. I'm a European first -I grew up in France- but I've always felt strongly attracted by the US. It's been a love at first sight since my very first visit in Boston when I was 16 y/o. Since then I've been countless times and I got lucky enough to live in LA, California and a few years later in Boulder, Colorado. We now have a routine with Mathilde and the kids, we go back to the US altogether every year, home-swapping for the whole summer.

As an entrepreneur, I've experienced firsthand the biggest differences in terms of mindset between both places. But it is only now that I spend more time over there as a parent that I realise how impactful -for life- are all these differences. Many of them can be trace back to some of my observations following my last 2 weeks over there.

☠️ I’ve already sent this post to a few friends last week. Henrik at his best: Don't sacrifice the wrong thing.

You don’t have to do things others do, or have things they have, at the expense of the deeper things you want. You really don’t. Almost everything is an option. You have full permission to ask yourself what really matters to you—whatever that is—and then optimize for that in all hard tradeoffs of life.

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Most people have a complicated relationship with money. Now, add one more person into the mix and... boom, enjoy the show. Money within couples tend to exacerbate many trends and behaviors. I'm building a life with Mathilde for more than 18 years -we've met when we were 17 years old- so we spent our fair amount of time dealing with the topic, taming it, ultimately mastering it according to who we are, what and how we want to build our family.

💬 since I started tracking my screentime a long time ago, I know for a fact chat-based apps are taking more and more of my time. So when Sriram wrote about how group chats rule the world, I did agree with many of his thoughts.

Most of the interesting conversations in tech now happen in private group chats: Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal, small invite-only Discord groups. Being part of the right group chat can feel like having a peek at the kitchen of a restaurant but instead of food, messy ideas and gossip fly about in real time, get mixed, remixed, discarded, polished before they show up in a prepared fashion in public.

Salons and groups have always existed but why the recent shift to private discourse?

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🇫🇷 if you’re in Paris -two interesting events are coming this week 👇

• on wednesday evening at 48 Collagen Café is Fashion Conversations dinner -more info and RSVP here. ​The Fashion Conversations think tank was created in 2019 to foster authentic relations among fashion professionals who are pushing the boundaries for our industry. The community includes founders and leaders discussing new models and solution-driven technology building the future of fashion.

• on sunday for a brunch with 2 very special people, Jenni and Patricia. The topic couldn’t be closer to my heart. I wish I could be there -more info and RSVP here. Patricia wrote about it here as well: a sense of place.

🪩 the question asked by Emily on GQ was utterly interesting: why members-only clubs are everywhere right now? I think that one below could sum up everything:

And will the prospective members find sex, connection, and community all under the guise of private networking?

I spent a whole week in Lisbon, Portugal last month. I was with Mathilde and both our kids -we celebrated their 5 and 3 year-old birthdays over there- they were psyched. We stayed with very close friends who live in Lisbon for many, many years. We have a special connection with the city. We visited for the first time in 2016 and fell in love right away. We then decided to move permanently and settled during the summer of 2018. We finally left a bit more than 3 years later, at the end of 2021. Both our kids are born in the city. Our oldest used to go to a local kindergarten, his first words were in portuguese. We came back to Lisbon during the summer of 2022 and both our kids went to this kindergarten for 2 months. We enjoyed a unique relationship with our neighbours -local teachers and actors- and got lucky enough to call our neighborhood -Penha de França- home for a little while.

I've been a vocal advocate for Lisbon for a while. I remember enthusiastically attracting many people to the city. Unfortunately I grew disappointed. What I saw last month confirmed my fears. So in the spirit of my post following my latest US trip, below are a few observations in no particular order. Needless to add: all of the below is heavily biased, non-complete and subjective.

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👯 Some tenets of the ‘friendship theory of everything’ Ava highlighted really resonated:

1. You accept that in choosing who you spend time with you choose who you are.

2. Almost everyone who’s unhappy is unhappy because they feel isolated. The best cure for isolation is a strong friend group. So much of happiness is having someone you can get a last-minute dinner with on a Monday night, or ask to water your plants while you’re gone for a week. The opposite of loneliness, as it were.

🍪 I got lucky enough to get a sneak preview on the draft of this post. Itay went through points truly close to my heart. It made me remember an old debate at home when I was a kid: if we should get an ‘all-in-one’ TV-VHS combo or not -we decided we shouldn’t. Designing for a single purpose.

🇪🇺 Andreas post is a kinda perfect follow up for my US observations above: Dear Europe, please wake up – eu/acc. I share his feeling below:

Europe is special to me as I consider myself a proud European, but damn we need to talk.

I am equally extremely bull-ish on Europe and equally extremely bear-ish.

🚴 like Taylor, I bike everyday, under any weather -kids included- so taking this as an example for his comfort ≠ happiness made me smile: Any sacrifice for comfort is a waste.

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I spent 2 weeks in the US last month -first in NYC and then in SF. I've been surprised by a few things. In no particular order:

🌎 immigrants are everywhere. Like somewhere else you can meet them in low-status jobs but unlike somewhere else you also meet them at every other layer of the society -all the way to the top; and whatever that 'top' would mean exactly, you'll meet immigrants there. This is so empowering. I remember the story of a brown couple living in Paris for 15 years, they loved the city and their lives over there but when their kids were teenagers they realised that the only examples for them of people with the same color skin were in the kebab restaurants so they left. They now live in Boston. Their kids can still meet people with the same color skin in local restaurants of course, but also as researchers, big company manager, startup CEO, politicians, journalists, you name it.

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When do I feel the happiest? I'm actually not sure 'happy' is the right word here. Maybe it's closer to 'feeling at peace', 'feeling complete', 'whole', a deep sense of 'calm and serenity'. I still choose 'happy' because there is a layer of joy, adrenaline sometimes, a genuine feeling of fulfillment.

Going back to the question itself, well, the straight-forward and instinctive answer is: playing with my kids, alone time with Mathilde, deep discussions with people -sometimes animated but not necessarily, building stuff -which might imply deep and animated talks with my co-founders, exploring outside, skateboarding, boxing, distraction-free reading -good coffee not optional. I could go on for hours. Typical example being: I hate running -the activity itself- but I would 100% put 'running with Mathilde' up there in the list of moments where I feel the happiest. I don't golf but again, I would 100% put all the mornings I spent with my grand-father 20 years ago on a golf court up there in the list. I'm not a foodie but again, well, you get the point.

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