THE FORGE

What deserves to exist must be built carefully.
ENTREPRISES

Apysoft — 1989 My first company, and everything was already in the name. I didn’t want to make “micro softs” — I wanted to make cool softs. Cool, back then, meant Fonzie. Fonzie meant Happy Days. Hence Apysoft. 😉

Wimsea — 1990 That one’s Belgian, and it means… onwards, lads. You needed exactly that spirit — and a big heart — to jump into the NeXT Computer adventure and create one of the first NeXT Centers in France.

Oléane — 1991 Steve (Jobs) sort of left us hanging with NeXT, but he gave me the springboard I needed — because by then, I’d fallen in love with what wasn’t yet the Internet we know today. So I created France’s first independent Internet operator. And thanks to Steve, we hit the ground running when we won connectivity for all of NeXT France’s key clients and partners.

Tancred Ventures — 1999 We’d just accepted France Télécom’s offer to acquire Oléane, and an idea had been brewing for a while — giving something back, in the form of an incubator before the word existed. Not quite a VC fund, not another startup. First deals with France Télécom spin-offs (Algety Telecom, Netcentrex), then a pivot toward funding our own ideas — because I could feel the world was going mad. That’s where Witbe started.

Witbe — 2000 Built with Marie-Véronique Lacaze. A robot that watches your service the way a real user would. Listed on Euronext Growth Paris since 2016.

Just a Moment LLC — 2025 My first American company. More a passion than a business. Paris Match is built around the weight of words and the power of images. So am I — jmp.net for the words, and here, for the photos.

SOFTWARE

Karl Lagerfeld SA — 1987 Before Apysoft, before everything. A management app — stock, invoicing, delivery — based on a first version my father had written in BASIC on a TRS-80 for personal use, then completely reworked for a professional environment on IBM PC. My first professional program, which allowed me to buy my dream at the time… an Apricot Xen. Far better than any IBM PC.

QuidSource That one deserves a whole chapter. My first hack. The complete decompilation of Multilog executables to get back to the source. What was locked — fixed report generation from the Quid — became editable. And my second real experience of the professional world… a lot to say. 😉

Cull-Me-uP Thirty-plus years later, I’m back to coding. Same logic as always — build what doesn’t exist, or doesn’t exist well enough, starting with my own needs. Here the subject is photo workflow. You come back from a shoot with 3,000 images. How do you sort them, organize them, seriously and fast — without effort, almost playfully, and actually with pleasure. The goal: clean folders where your photos are sorted (Pick, Reject) and organized (metadata, XMP…) so you can go straight into your favorite editing software (DxO PhotoLab, Lightroom, Capture One…). A companion app. Which fits perfectly — that’s exactly the tagline: Software Companion.

→ Learn more / Download on the App Store soon 😉

 

— Bilan —

Thirty-five years. A provisional, incomplete, and certifiably approximate account.

  • 4,847 sleepless nights. Rounded down, for credibility.
  • 1,200 liters of coffee. 92,500 of fizzy drinks in two words.
  • 12 personal computers, laptops and less-than-laptops. The Compaq 386 portable qualified because, despite weighing 10kg, it had a handle.
  • An unrivaled talent for plugging a VGA output into Asian Barco projectors. Everyone went “woahhh” because I pulled it off almost every time on the first try.
  • 1 server crash that took down newsgroup delivery across France — we were the first French server and the 50th worldwide — because I’d left a floppy disk in the drive. I had to go back on a Friday night, late.
  • 23 times around the Earth by plane, in roughly this order: Paris, New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Paris, repeat.
  • 14 family dinners missed for a demo, a fundraise, or a time zone incompatible with real life.
  • 24 birthdays made up for with the “gift voucher” principle: printing out what the person will soon, one day, actually receive.
  • 1 New Year’s Eve at the office, all night, monitoring our systems that were monitoring a client’s video infrastructure for the launch of a highly anticipated new series. One lobster sandwich bought for three because I wasn’t understood properly. And cold fries.