Ten percent of everywhere.

I build software products and ship them fast: SaaS tools, Chrome extensions and Mac apps. Not one big bet. Small, sharp products that each solve one problem properly.

Right now that means Personade, which makes personalized demo videos for SaaS founders so every lead gets a video with their own name in it, from one recording. CodeYourDash, a developer community with real events and real friends, because remote work gets lonely and Slack groups are not a social life. And 26Studio, the umbrella everything ships under.

I do every part myself: the design, the code, the copy, the marketing, the support emails. End to end. No committees, no handoffs, no waiting. When something breaks at 11pm, the person who wrote it is the person who fixes it.

I grew up French in Laos, which is a strange and useful way to grow up. You are always a little bit foreign, even at home. Then I moved to New Zealand for university and was foreign all over again, in a completely different way.

I'm mixed race too, so the foreign thing goes all the way down. A DNA test once told me I'm ten percent of a lot of places: North Africa, the Levant, the south of Europe, the east of Europe, a touch of Nordic, and most of South East Asia. I never had one place to point at and say that's me. It bothered me as a kid. Now I think it's the point.

Being the outsider everywhere turned out to be the best training I got. You never assume people think like you, so you ask more, watch more, and explain things more simply. Years later I realized that habit is most of product building, and nearly all of marketing. Every landing page is just explaining something clearly to a stranger.

At 21 I wrote and self-published a book, It's who you become. It is about defining success for yourself and playing the long game. I wrote it before I had built anything, and it still reads like the operating manual for everything I have built since.

I speak French, Lao, Thai and English. My English accent is a mess, nobody can place it, which feels about right. Switching between four languages daily keeps my writing plain, because fancy vocabulary does not survive translation. I write the way I talk, and my products do too. No corporate varnish, no jargon, no "solutions".

Bali is where the life and the work finally fit together. My wife Dani works in social media, I build software, and we both work from the same island where we actually want to live. The timezone helps too: my morning overlaps with Asia, my evening with Europe, and the products work while I sleep.

We are also raising our son here, on purpose. I grew up in South East Asia and I want that for him too. Life for kids still happens outside here. Rain, dirt, neighbours, food, strangers who say hello. He will get screens soon enough. As well as a Claude Max x5 plan.

It also keeps me around other people who make things. That is half the reason CodeYourDash exists: I wanted the developer community I could not find, so I built it.

If you want the longer, messier version of all this, it's in my thoughts.