Thibaud Elzière

Thibaud Elzière is a co-founder of folk, a Paris, France, company that makes an AI CRM for sales and relationship work. He started it in 2020 with Simo Lemhandez, now chief executive, and Jean-Yves Poilleux. He is also senior partner and founder of Hexa, the startup studio formerly known as eFounders.

Fired for Printing the Fotolia Plan

"I was fired from my only job after just a few days for printing my business plan for Fotolia on the company printer," Elzière writes on Hexa's site. The firing pushed him to work full time on Fotolia, which became, in his words, "one of Adobe's key acquisitions at the time."

Launching eFounders With Quentin Nickmans

In 2011 he co-founded eFounders with Quentin Nickmans to bring to life ideas he had while running Fotolia. Managing international phone numbers there inspired Aircall, handling support queries led to Front, and expense management gave rise to Spendesk, all of which reached unicorn status. "I thrive in the 0-to-1 phase," he writes, and he calls the approach parallel entrepreneurship, meaning launching several companies at the same time. Hexa says it has launched more than 40 companies.

On Hexa's site he writes that one priority close to his heart is bringing more women into the firm's partner role, which he says will inspire more women founders and, in time, more women in startup leadership.

Spinning folk Out of an Internal Tool

folk began as an internal tool at eFounders for sharing contacts across the team, FrenchWeb reported in 2021. Elzière saw that many teams could use it and turned it into a startup, taking the chief executive role himself, which he admitted went against the studio's own philosophy. "It lets me get my hands dirty again, confront entrepreneurs' problems again, and regain empathy too," he told FrenchWeb (translated from French).

He pitched folk as an xRM, short for extended relationships manager. "In xRM, the 'x' stands for anyone: you can use it not only for managing clients but also for journalists, suppliers, partners, for example," he said in a statement quoted by TechCrunch.

Lemhandez later took over as chief executive, and folk passed 100,000 users.