Jeremy Goillot

He ran it in a village in the east of France, eight people on the payroll and my grandmother running the admin and the back office. It was sold in 1987, eight years before I was born, so taking it over was never actually on the table.

I did the thing I have always done instead, which is be a nerd and build something. The Mobile-First Company sells to businesses the size of that garage, more than 20,000 of them across the United States and France, and Allo, the business phone platform we make, carries more than a million of their calls a month.

I grew up in Ariège, one of the poorest departments in France. I knew early that I would end up somewhere else, that I would travel a long way and take risks, because the version of my life where I stayed put looked unbearably boring.

I have been making money online since I was 14. WordPress templates first, then a betting site I had no business running at that age, and I bought my first Mac and my first iPhone with what it paid. That is how I found growth hacking, and growth hacking is how I talked my way into my first startup job at 19.

I joined Spendesk in 2016 as employee number four and stayed 1,735 days, building the growth team to about 40 people and then moving to San Francisco to open the US. I left in 2021 with no plan at all, spent the next 14 months crossing 20 countries, and sat down with more than 200 small business owners to understand how they run things when they have no software and sometimes no laptop. That trip is the reason the company exists.

We raised 5 million euros in 2024 from Lightspeed, Emblem and 34 angels, then 12 million dollars in October 2025 in a round led by Base10.

I never finished a proper degree, and for a long time I wanted a prestigious MBA to make up for it. Instead I put everything I made at Spendesk into 42 startups, 17 of them through Kara Ventures, the fund I run in Africa with Réna Kakon. The worst call I have made: I was one of the first users of n8n, Jan asked me to invest twice, and I said no both times. It is worth about two billion now.

These days I am buying boring businesses in Miami-Dade, car towing, ice cream shops, cleaning companies, the sort of thing nobody writes a blog post about. I own property in France and Colombia. I am unreasonably interested in living a long time.