Home / Founders / Simo Lemhandez
Lemhandez left McKinsey, learned to code and found every CRM he tried painful, so he co-founded folk, a simple AI CRM that more than 5,000 companies now use.
Simo Lemhandez is co-founder and CEO of folk, a Paris company started in 2020 that makes an AI CRM for sales and relationship work, with contact enrichment, follow-up reminders and email campaigns.
Growing Up in Morocco
He grew up in Morocco in a family of entrepreneurs and always wanted to start his own business, according to Founderoo. After a classe préparatoire, France's intensive program for top schools, he was admitted to both HEC Paris and École Polytechnique, and he graduated from HEC.
Consulting at McKinsey
He worked in investment banking at Morgan Stanley and then in consulting at McKinsey. He grew tired of projects he did not care about and recommendations that stayed on slides, so he enrolled in Le Wagon, a coding bootcamp, and began freelancing, he told Starter Story.
Starting folk with Thibaud Elziere
As a freelancer he tracked leads in a spreadsheet while juggling LinkedIn, WhatsApp, email and meetings, and the CRMs he tried felt 20 years out of date. He met Thibaud Elziere, who had founded Fotolia, later sold to Adobe, and the startup studio Hexa, and then CTO Jean-Yves Poilleux. A landing page for a simpler CRM drew 10,000 sign-ups before the team built anything. They opened folk to the public on Product Hunt in April 2022 and started charging that September, The company's careers page calls CRM the biggest and most profitable sector in software, and one ripe for change.
