Iconic Edition is publishing the first book by Thibaud Elzière, a Franco-Belgian entrepreneur and investor. Through a personal narrative, he reflects on his journey, notably the Fotolia adventure—a stock photo agency sold to Adobe for 800 million euros—and highlights the teams that supported him throughout his projects, reminding us that entrepreneurship is, above all, a collective endeavor. Far from the clichés and slogans circulating on social media, he offers a more lucid and grounded perspective on entrepreneurial creation. He reflects on—and ultimately asks us—what drives us to keep going: is it the fear of failure or the existential need to create?
Entrepreneurship: A Collective Journey
While reflecting on his most memorable entrepreneurial adventures, Thibaud Elzière focuses above all on what is often left in the shadows of success stories: the teams, the partners, and everyone who helped build these projects. Going against the grain of an individualistic and heroic vision of entrepreneurship, he offers a decidedly collective perspective, built on encounters, trust, and shared efforts.
A long story, composed of multiple chapters and numerous characters, far removed from the solitary journey sometimes portrayed.
With over twenty years of experience, Thibaud Elzière looks back on a career marked notably by the creation of Fotolia, a new kind of image bank founded in the 2000s and sold to Adobe for approximately $800 million—still one of the largest acquisitions in European tech today. Building on this entrepreneurial trajectory, he then co-founded, with Quentin Nickmans, the startup studio eFounders (now Hexa), which launched several companies that have become leaders in European SaaS, such as Aircall, Front, and Spendesk, illustrating a career marked by the repeated creation and structuring of European unicorns. Companies like Swan, YouSign, and Roundtable are already taking the reins.
He explores a wide range of fields with the same energy, venturing into sectors such as space technology with Gama (solar sails) and the automotive industry with Kate (microcars). Today, he is reinventing hospitality through Iconic House, Side House, and Weeks Off, with the creation of the “Maisons Hotelières” category, which redefines the norms and combines the privacy of a home with the services of a hotel.
A Personal Manifesto on Entrepreneurship and Creativity
“By reducing entrepreneurship to slogans, we end up forgetting what it truly is: a long, uncertain, deeply human journey, far removed from the certainties displayed on social media.” – Thibaud Elzière
The book deconstructs the often caricatured representations of entrepreneurship circulating on social media today. Through a critical examination of the simplified “commandments” that pit success against excuses, glorify suffering, or reduce success to slogans about action and discipline, it highlights how these narratives, while effective, tend to oversimplify reality.
In response to this culture of radicalism and instant performance, the book serves as a manifesto for a more nuanced, more grounded form of entrepreneurship, one that values the long term, lived experience, and the complexity of life paths. Far from simplistic injunctions, it reminds us that entrepreneurship is not reducible to certainties or catchy slogans, but rather to an often imperfect journey, made up of trials, doubts, and constant adjustments.
What Am I Chasing?
“Having your head in the stars while keeping your feet on the ground. Finding the right balance between naive optimism and enlightened pragmatism. This is the balancing act we must perform as entrepreneurs.”
A more intimate and fundamental question drives the reflection: “What am I chasing?” Behind this question lies an exploration of the constant movement inherent in entrepreneurial journeys, marked by a tension between the desire to create, accelerate, and multiply projects, and the difficulty of stopping to take a step back.
Through this inquiry, the deep drivers of this dynamic are examined: the will to transform, the fear of emptiness, the search for meaning, or simply the continuation of a momentum that has become second nature. To shed light on this tension, Thibaud Elzière draws on the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and the duality of Apollo and Dionysus: one embodying order, moderation, and structure, the other instinct, energy, and creative abandon. Entrepreneurship thus emerges as the result of this constant tension between reason and chaos, calculation and intuition, control and excess.
From this friction springs a vital impulse—one that drives us to create, transform, and give shape to ideas, sometimes in the face of the absurd. But does that mean we must seek a definitive answer? Isn’t the act of creation, in and of itself, enough to justify the journey? In a world saturated with demands to explain, rationalize, and conform, this text ultimately calls for a form of self-evidence: follow your intuition, accept uncertainty, and keep moving forward.
Dare to create. Dare to dream. Dare to be yourselves. Keep your feet on the ground, but above all, keep your head in the stars.