Romain Salzman’s Post

Following the acquisition of BeReal, we’ve spent time thanking the team & partners for all their hard work, but I wanted to drop one last note: When a startup is successful, all the credit goes to the founders & the team; and when a startup crashes, all the laughs go on the investors who backed it. Although it is probably fair in some regards, it’s unclear to me when investors do actually get credit. So just wanted to fix that here,  to Jean, - ⁠who was the first investor in BeReal - who hired for BeReal (me included, recommending me to Alexis, with Antoine and François) - who raised money for BeReal, (introducing Alexis to Sonali at Accel and Bryan at Andreessen -who ended up leading the series A- and Tom at DST -who ended up leading the series B) - ⁠and who -in lack of a better word- “worked at BeReal” for 3 years, providing feedback day/night/ weekends, giving advice, holding us accountable, shaking us when needed, and supporting us when needed Truly, thank you, it doesn’t get better than that. Warren Buffett has a beautiful quote on this: “You look for three qualities in people you hire: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don't have the first, the other two will kill you. If you think about it, it's true: if you hire somebody without integrity, you really want them to be dumb and lazy.” This is probably true for investors too, so thank you Jean for the integrity, the intelligence and the energy, I would not have been at BeReal without you, and BeReal wouldn’t have gotten to where it is without you either. Cheers, Romain