science

Thibaud Elzière

Thibaud Elzière is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Thibaud Elzière rather than just read about it. In short: Thibaud Elzière (born September 13, 1979 in Aix-en-Provence, Bouches-du-Rhône, in France), is a French entrepreneur and founder of several startups. In 2004, he co-founded the stock photography company Fotolia, which was sold to Adobe in 2014 for 800 million euros.

Key takeaways

Thibaud Elzière belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Thibaud Elzière to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Thibaud Elzière from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Thibaud Elzière (born September 13, 1979 in Aix-en-Provence, Bouches-du-Rhône, in France), is a French entrepreneur and founder of several startups. In 2004, he co-founded the stock photography company Fotolia, which was sold to Adobe in 2014 for 800 million euros. In 2011, he co-founded eFounders, a startup studio that became Hexa in 2022, which he still manages today. He has launched several other companies, including Gama Space, a solar sail project, Iconic House, which rents out prestige real estate, and Kate, a microcar manufacturer. He has been at the helm of Folk, an xRM project created within Hexa, since 2019. Also an angel investor, he has personally invested in around a hundred startups since 2009, including Algolia, Notion and Hugging Face. Since 2020, Thibaud Elzière has been included in Challenges magazine's ranking of France's 500 richest people.

Biography

Early career with Fotolia Thibaud Elzière founded Fotolia in 2004, during his studies at the École centrale de Lyon, with his partner Oleg Tscheltzoff. Fotolia is an online marketplace that enables professional photographers to sell their digital photographs directly to customers. It was also at this time that he moved to Brussels, where his future wife lived, having met her during an Erasmus Programme exchange in Berlin. In 2014, Fotolia was sold to Adobe, which renamed it Adobe Stock, for 800 million euros.

eFounders then Hexa Thibaud Elzière founded the eFounders startup studio with Quentin Nickmans in 2011. Originally focused on the software as a service (SaaS) sector, the studio specializes in the creation of startups by recruiting founders, usually a chief executive officer and chief technology officer, to whom it provides an idea, initial funding and strategic advice to launch their project. eFounders concluded the sale of its first company, TextMaster, in 2018. In 2022, eFounders initiated 3founders, a new studio specialized in Web3, and carried out a global restructuring. The company adopted the name Hexa, while retaining the eFounders name for the original SaaS-focused studio. This restructuring led to the organization of the studios into verticals, each specialized in a specific field, such as Hexa AI, devoted to artificial intelligence, or Hexa Health, dedicated to improving the health system. Hexa has been behind the creation of some forty startups since 2011, including three unicorns valued at over a billion dollars: Front, Spendesk and Aircall. Aircall has also become a centaur, a term used to describe startups with annual recurring revenues in excess of one hundred million dollars. The startups launched by Hexa have reached a total valuation of five billion dollars, created around 2,800 jobs and raised 700 million euros in funds.

Other companies In total, Thibaud Elzière is the creator of around ten startups. While he generally delegates the day-to-day management of all these companies, still being head of Hexa, in 2019 he decided to become CEO of Folk, a xRM or "extended relationship management" application, created within the startup studio. This choice was motivated by the fact that he had great ambitions for this project, without however managing to properly pitch it to potential candidates. It was also an opportunity for him to directly apply the advice he used to give to business executives. In 2020, he teamed up with Louis de Gouyon Matignon, then a space law student, and invested 500,000 euros to launch Gama Space, a startup aimed at producing solar sails. This propulsion device uses the radiation pressure emitted by stars to move through space like a sailboat, whereas current systems only have electric or thermal propulsion. In 2022, Gama Space raised two million euros, notably from the French National Centre for Space Studies and Bpifrance. The sail, which measures 74 square meters and is fifty times thinner than a human hair, is made from ultra-thin plastic aluminized. The following year, he launched Iconic House with his brother Robin Michel. The idea was born when the two founders owned a loft too large for the two of them to live in. They decided to turn it into a place where friends and business acquaintances would stay, before turning it into the headquarters of Iconic House. The company's concept is based on the purchase of luxury houses and villas, which are renovated before being made available for seasonal rental, with the services of a palace. The first houses are located in Hossegor, Courchevel and Gordes. In 2023, Thibaud Elzière teamed up with Matthias Goldenberg and Pierre Escrieut, two former employees of the automotive equipment manufacturer Valeo, to launch Kate, a microcar manufacturer. They believe they are the future of everyday mobility, rather than SUV or other energy-hungry vehicles, whether thermal or electric. They therefore bet on a small, light, clean and financially accessible car. To this end, in 2022 they acquired Nosmoke, a company founded in 2012 that was then generating four million euros in sales. They announced an initial fundraising of seven million euros in 2023. The launch of the K1, their first vehicle which should cost less than 15,000 euros to buy, is scheduled for 2026.

Angel investor Thibaud Elzière has invested in around a hundred startups, as an angel investor. For example, he took part in the initial fund-raising of Hugging Face, an open source artificial intelligence company, Algolia, a search engine which became a unicorn in 2021 and Notion, a note-taking app claiming thirty million users. In 2020, he joined the Challenges magazine's ranking of France's 500 biggest fortunes. In 2023, his fortune, derived solely from his entrepreneurial projects, is estimated at 700 million euros.

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Thibaud Elzière

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Thibaud Elzière claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Thibaud Elzière before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Thibaud Elzière ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Thibaud Elzière

In research: Thibaud Elzière appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Thibaud Elzière in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Thibaud Elzière is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1979 births, 21st-century French businesspeople, French chief executives, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Thibaud Elzière outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Thibaud Elzière in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Thibaud Elzière means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Thibaud Elzière out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Thibaud Elzière in simple terms?

Why does Thibaud Elzière matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Thibaud Elzière?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Thibaud Elzière.