Violette Beaume on Why Europe’s Best Young Founders Should Start in San Francisco

Violette Beaume runs the Spring cohort of The Bridge at Entrepreneurs First (EF), an eight-week residency that brings Europe's most ambitious young builders to San Francisco to find a co-founder and start a company from scratch.

Violette is French and grew up in Mexico and Costa Rica. She came back to Paris for classe prépa and then HEC Paris. Before EF she founded two companies, the second as co-CEO with Thomas Rebaud, founder of the unicorn Meero. She joined EF as an investor eighteen months ago and has worked on The Bridge since day one.

The first cohort put 55 European founders in a single house in Mission Dolores for eight weeks, starting in April 2026. EF invested $250K in 14 of the companies that came out of it. In October those companies pitched to around 200 partner-level investors at Demo Day to raise their seed rounds.

Sofiia from our team first met Violette before that cohort landed, and we caught up with her again this week. We talked about what building and shutting down two companies taught her, what happens inside the house, whether taking Europe's best founders to San Francisco is good for Europe, and what she is seeing in the market right now.

Q&A

1. You grew up in Latin America, came back to Paris for prépa and HEC, and founded two companies before joining EF. What did building and closing those companies teach you that you now use when you back founders?

I didn't grow up around tech. My first exposure was an internship during HEC that I got through someone I happened to meet, and it changed my path. I fell for the people: how much they cared about their work, how fast they moved, and the feeling that they were building what the world would look like in ten years. I had a pure business profile, but I knew those were the people I wanted around me.

So I took the entrepreneurship master at HEC and started my first company with a close friend, in women's health. It taught me my first hard lesson about markets. In France healthcare is essentially free for the patient, so nobody was going to pay for what we were building. We had a real problem and no business model. It looked more like an NGO than a startup.

Three weeks after graduating I started my second company with Thomas Rebaud, who had just stepped back from Meero, the unicorn he had spent close to ten years building. We grew to ten people, raised from angels and ran close to bootstrapped. Two years in, Meta launched a product very close to ours and our market disappeared almost overnight. That was the second lesson: you can execute well and still lose to a platform decision you have no control over.

I could have pivoted within content creation, but I wasn't passionate enough about that space to give it another five years. What I wanted was range: more industries, more technologies, more people. Investing at EF gives me exactly that, because we back people before they have an idea, in every sector.

Those two companies taught me the zero-to-one path from the inside: choosing a co-founder, killing ideas, doing customer discovery, pitching angels and VCs. That is what I advise founders on every day.

2. The first Bridge cohort put 55 European founders in one house in San Francisco for eight weeks. How did the programme come about, and what does a week inside actually look like?

We built The Bridge because for most companies, building in San Francisco and selling to the US is more than twice as easy as starting in Europe.

People talk about Europe as one big market. It is 27-plus countries with different languages, regulations, buyers and cultures. If you launch in France, you haven't launched in Germany or the UK. Your real starting market is a fraction of the US, and every new country is a new launch. The US gives you one language, one set of rules and the deepest pool of early adopters in the world.

We also see a pattern across our own portfolio: when a European company and a US company go after the same market at the same time, the US company usually wins. Deel and Omnipresent both started in global payroll in 2019. Deel, based in San Francisco, raised over $680M in two years. Omnipresent, an EF company based in London, was eventually acquired by Deel. The gap comes from structure, because capital, customers and feedback all compound faster in the US.

So if we want our founders to build global category leaders instead of national champions, they need to think US-first from day one. San Francisco is the obvious place to do that. It has the best engineers, the most ambitious founders and the investors, and its pace of execution shapes your company's culture before you've hired anyone.

Inside the house: our first cohort brought 55 founders together in one house in Mission Dolores, and we run four cohorts a year. About 80% arrive without a co-founder, and we balance each cohort between CEO and CTO profiles so the matching works.

● Team formation: we make introductions and give founders frameworks to test whether they can work together for the next ten years.
● Ideation and market selection: we help teams pick a market big enough to matter and avoid the mistakes that kill most first-time companies.
● Senior advisors: founders who built companies in the US come to the house every week for one-on-ones tailored to each team.
● Investors on site every day: I sit in on customer discovery calls, run ideation sessions, connect teams with the right people and rewrite outreach messages with them.
● A chef cooks every meal, so the only things left to think about are building and training.

After eight weeks, teams present to our investment committee and we invest $250K in the strongest. They then move into Launch: three months at our San Francisco office on Folsom Street with teams from every EF site, mentored by our US team, many of them former US VCs. It ends with Demo Day in front of around 200 partner-level investors, and the seed raise.

In total it takes about six months to go from no co-founder and no idea to a funded company raising a seed round.

What surprised me most about the first cohort was the talent density. 55 exceptional people, each strong at something different, put those strengths to work for each other. Ambition is contagious. The co-founder pairings get the attention, but the peer network may be the most underrated thing founders leave with. Those relationships will last decades.

3. Most people arrive with no idea and no team, so there is nothing to judge except the person. What do you look for, and how do co-founder pairs actually form in those eight weeks?

We select on potential and ignore the idea. Almost every team pivots, often several times, so the idea someone arrives with tells us very little.

We look at two things. The first is ability: what have you built, and what's the evidence? For a CEO profile, have you actually sold something, made money and shown commercial instinct? For a CTO profile, what can you build, how fast, and how deep is your technical edge? The second is behaviour: ambition, drive, how fast you learn and whether people want to follow you.
The bar is high and very few applicants get in. The Bridge is built for people who want to build venture-scale global companies, and it is intense. It isn't for everyone, and that's fine.

Because we interview everyone, we know the cohort well before day one. We make the first introductions based on complementarity, values and shared interests. Within about 24 hours, most pairs know whether there is something there.
Living together changes how easy it is to walk away. Outside, finding a co-founder takes months, so people settle. In the house, you have dozens of alternatives down the hall, so you can be demanding and turn down what I call a co-founder of convenience: someone who is available and interested in the same space, but who doesn't complement you or isn't driven enough.
I push hard on this because the team is the one thing that won't change. You may change ideas many times, but you won't change co-founders without serious damage.

There is no single path. The Goldfish founders paired up in the first days and never tried anyone else. For other teams, the third pairing was the one that stuck.

4. You are clearly pro-Europe, and you are also taking some of Europe's best founders to San Francisco. Is The Bridge draining Europe of talent, or is it what European founders need before they can compete?

I get this question a lot, and I understand it. Our goal is for European talent to build the defining companies of the next decade. Today, for about 90% of markets, the fastest route there runs through the US.

Starting in the US doesn't mean leaving Europe. Most of our companies incorporate in Delaware and still keep an office and a team in Europe. Many founders will come back after a few years to live, invest, mentor the next generation and strengthen the ecosystem.

The US advantage is concrete. Capital is concentrated there. Customers are more willing to buy from a five-month-old company, sales cycles are shorter, feedback loops are tighter, and you are selling into one huge market. Europe has unicorns, but most are much smaller than their US peers, and most of them open a US office eventually anyway. They just get there later and at a disadvantage.
Could Europe close that gap? Only with a truly unified market, and I don't see it coming any time soon.

There are real exceptions. In defence and sovereignty, including AI sovereignty, your customers are European governments and companies, so you should start in Europe. Climate tech is another, because it gets far less traction in the US right now.

5. Your first cohort has just come out of Demo Day into a strange fundraising market. What are you seeing from the inside right now?

Our first Bridge Demo Day was on 7 October 2026, and the quality of the companies and their traction was very strong. Some teams already had more than $8M in contracted revenue! These co-founders had met only about five months earlier when you think about it.

The market is unusual. Valuations in the US are very high at the moment, so investors are more selective. There is a lot of talk about a bubble, and the upcoming Anthropic IPO is making some funds wait and see.

It is harder than usual to raise right now, but the market hasn't stopped. Several of our teams have already closed rounds at very strong valuations.

6. What comes next for The Bridge, and who should be applying?

The next cohort starts at the end of January 2027, and applications are open at join-thebridge.com until 23 November 2026.

You should apply if you already know you want to build a venture-scale company. You have either sold something or shipped something technical you are proud of. You don't need an idea or a co-founder. You do need to be ready to move to San Francisco and work harder than you ever have.

If that sounds like you, you can message me directly on LinkedIn. If you know someone who fits, send them my way! I’m always happy to chat with founders, and with anyone still wondering whether this is the right path for them.