VC @eurazeo (ex @balderton / @xangevc / @laposte). Tweet about the #web #tech #startups #mathematics . Fan of Claude Shannon. #FOCS

Joined February 2008
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This is Claude Shannon. An absolute genius. I still don’t understand why this brain is not known more. Humanity owes him a lot. Let’s spread the word. I am a Fan of Claude Shannon. #FOCS
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Nicolas Debock retweeted
Yep, we did.
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Theory of relativity in a single picture
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haha this is a funny chart.
Onlyfans and church were tied on Google trends as of 2025 whereas now Church is almost 2x Onlyfans. Interesting cultural shift
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Nicolas Debock retweeted
In 1948, a 32-year-old at Bell Labs published a paper nobody fully understood. Engineers found it too mathematical. Mathematicians found it too engineering-focused. One prominent mathematician reviewed it negatively. That paper - "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", became the founding document of the digital age. The man was Claude Shannon. Father of Information Theory. At 21, he wrote the most important master's thesis of the 20th century. Working at MIT on an early mechanical computer, Shannon noticed its relay switches had exactly two states - open or closed. He had just taken a philosophy course introducing Boolean algebra, which also operated on two values: true and false. Nobody had ever connected these two things. His 1937 thesis proved that Boolean algebra and electrical circuits are mathematically identical, and that any logical operation could be built from simple switches. Howard Gardner called it "possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master's thesis of the century." Every digital computer ever built traces back to this insight. At 29, he proved that perfect encryption exists. During WWII, Shannon worked on classified cryptography at Bell Labs. His work contributed to SIGSALY, the secure voice system used for confidential communications between Roosevelt and Churchill. In a classified 1945 memorandum, he mathematically proved the one-time pad provides perfect secrecy, unbreakable not just computationally, but provably, permanently, against an adversary with infinite power. When declassified in 1949, it transformed cryptography from an art into a science. It laid the foundations for DES, AES, and every modern encryption standard. At 32, he defined what information is. His 1948 paper introduced one equation: H = −Σ p(x) log p(x) Shannon entropy. The average uncertainty in a probability distribution. The minimum bits required to encode a message. Three things followed: > He defined the bit - the fundamental unit of all information. His colleague John Tukey coined the name. > He proved the channel capacity theorem, every communication channel has a maximum rate of reliable transmission. You can approach it. You can never exceed it. > He unified telegraph, telephone, and radio into a single mathematical framework for the first time. Robert Lucky of Bell Labs called it the greatest work "in the annals of technological thought." Where his equation lives in AI today: Cross-entropy loss - the function training every classifier and language model, is derived directly from H. Decision tree splits use information gain, which is H applied to data. Perplexity, the standard LLM evaluation metric, is an exponentiation of cross-entropy. Every time a neural network trains, Shannon's formula runs inside it. He also built the first AI learning device. In 1950, Shannon built Theseus, a mechanical mouse that navigated a maze through trial and error, learned the correct path, and repeated it perfectly. Mazin Gilbert of Bell Labs said: "Theseus inspired the whole field of AI." That same year he published the first paper on programming a computer to play chess. He co-organized the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop, the founding event of AI as a field. The man: He rode a unicycle through Bell Labs hallways while juggling. He built a flame-throwing trumpet, a rocket-powered Frisbee, and Styrofoam shoes to walk on the lake behind his house. He called his home Entropy House. When asked what motivated him: "I was motivated by curiosity. Never by the desire for financial gain. I just wondered how things were put together." In 1985, he appeared unexpectedly at a conference in Brighton. The crowd mobbed him for autographs. Persuaded to speak at the banquet, he talked briefly, then pulled three balls from his pockets and juggled instead. One engineer said: "It was as if Newton had showed up at a physics conference." He died in 2001 after a decade with Alzheimer's, the cruel irony of information slowly leaving the mind of the man who defined what information was. Claude, the AI model, is named after Claude Shannon, the mathematician who laid the foundation for the digital world we rely on today.
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Ok this is a crazy idea .
This startup lets you ORDER SUNLIGHT from space to your exact location in 30 seconds 😭
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L'année 2025 a été exceptionnelle pour LegalPlace : 💹 65% de croissance de l'ARR yoy 👩‍💼 300 collaborateurs en France 🏦 lancement de l'assurance pour créateurs d'entreprises 🤖 l'IA fait désormais partie intégrante du produit LegalPlace Ⓜ️ premières campagnes métros et gares de la marque 🧑🏻‍💻 40 000 clients abonnés à la plateforme Très fier du travail et de l'ingéniosité des talents de LegalPlace. On avance de plus en plus dans notre vision de super app pour gérer sa TPE en France. Beaucoup de réalisations arrivent en 2026, d'où le retard pour ce petit post d'update annuelle ! Keep posted.
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Australian tech entrepreneur Paul Conyngham explains how he used ChatGPT/AlphaFold (spent $3,000 with no biology background) to create a custom MRNA vaccine to treat his dog’s cancer tumors. Unreal.
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Nicolas Debock retweeted
To sum up this Six Nations... Scotland beat France, who beat Ireland, who beat England, who beat Wales, who beat Italy.
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This year France won the 6 nations thanks to Louis Bielle-Biarrey and not Dupont. What an incredible player. Only 22 years old.
Mad that kicking a ball and making Bielle-Biarrey chase it is still such an overpowered tactic. #FRAvENG #FRAANG
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Wahou. This is becoming intense.
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bon c’est un truc assez fou mais un mec en Australie vient de concevoir un vaccin ARNm personnalisé contre le cancer pour sauver son chien en utilisant ChatGPT & AlphaFold sachez déjà qu’il a 0 formation en biologie et malgré tout ça ça a marché…la tumeur a réduit de moitié, les chercheurs en génomique sont sous le choc & je pense que cette histoire est infiniment importante qu’elle en a l’air voilà ce qu’il a fait concrètement il a payé $3000 pour séquencer l’ADN de la tumeur de son chien, il a donné les données à ChatGPT pour identifier les mutations d’intérêt, ensuite il a utilisé AlphaFold pour trouver la structure 3D des protéines mutées & identifier des cibles thérapeutiques, puis il a conçu un vaccin ARNm sur mesure ciblant spécifiquement les néoantigènes de la tumeur…le tout depuis son ordinateur portable mdr le professeur de génomique qui a reçu la demande au départ pensait que c’était une blague, quelques mois tard il regarde les résultats et dit si on peut faire ça pour un chien pourquoi on le fait pas pour tous les humains atteints de cancer et je pense que c’est là qu’il faut comprendre VÉRITABLEMENT ce qu’AlphaFold représente vraiment (j’ai fait de nombreux threads sur ce programme dans le passé) parce que la plupart des gens en ont entendu parler sans saisir la profondeur de ce qui se passe je vous explique pour ceux qui découvrent le sujet pendant des décennies pour comprendre la structure 3D d’une seule protéine il fallait des mois voire des années de cristallographie aux rayons X ou de cryomicroscopie électronique des labos entiers mobilisés sur une seule molécule MAIS AlphaFold 2 a résolu ce problème en prédisant la structure de pratiquement toutes les protéines connues soit de 200 millions de structures, ce qui lui a valu le prix Nobel de chimie 2024 par ailleurs, AlphaFold 3 sorti en 2024 est allé encore loin, là où AlphaFold2 prédisait la structure d’une protéine isolée, AlphaFold 3 prédit les interactions entre protéines, ADN, ARN, petites molécules & ligands dans un système unifié, en gros il modélise comment une molécule médicamenteuse va se fixer sur une protéine cible avec une précision améliorée …et il le fait en quelques heures au lieu de quelques années et c’est exactement ce que ce mec a exploité pour son chien, il a utilisé AlphaFold pour voir la forme 3D des protéines mutées de la tumeur & comprendre comment un vaccin ARNm pourrait apprendre au système immunitaire à les rreconnaître & les détruire d’ailleurs ce qui me fascine c’est ce que ça annonce pour la suite dans la mesure ou isomorphic labs la filiale de Deepmind dédiée à la découverte de médicaments a déj signé des partenariats de plusieurs milliards avec Eli lilly et Novartis, et les premiers médicaments entièrement conçus par IA grâce à AlphaFold 3 devraient entrer en essais cliniques humains prochzinement on parle de candidats en oncologie et en immunologie qui ont été conçus par design rationnel, c’est à dire que l’IA a littéralement dessiné la molécule pour qu’elle se fixe parfaitement sur la cible au lieu de tester des millions de composés au hasard comme on le fait depuis 50 ans!!!!! et le mouvement s’accélère car Deepmind a rendu AlphaFold3 open source fin2024, la communauté scientifique a immédiatement construit dessus, des modèles comme OpenFold3 soutenu par Amazon et Novonordisk, des startups comme Recursion qui développent des versions spécialisées, on entre dans l’ère du «labo autonome » (sujet dont j’ai parlé l’année dernière) où en gros pour vulgariser l’IA conçoit une molécule, des robots la synthétisent et des plateformes de screening la testent sans intervention humaine et je crois que le prochain horizon c’est la modélisation temporelle, aujourd’hui Alphafold prédit la forme statique d’une molécule mais demain on prédira comment elle bouge & vibre au fil du tps à l’intérieur d’une cellule vivante et c’est extrêmement fascinant pour l’avenir! voilà, voilà ;)
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🧐🧐🧐
🚨BREAKING: Someone just open-sourced a headless browser that runs 11x faster than Chrome and uses 9x less memory. It's called Lightpanda and it's built from scratch specifically for AI agents, scraping, and automation. Not a Chromium fork. Not a hack. A completely new browser written in Zig. Here's why this changes everything for AI builders: ↓
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This is a great example of how AI can change value chain and outside the pure tech world. (I don't know why it has to be Nvidia powered though haha)
An NVIDIA powered farming machine uses Al vision and precision lasers to eliminate weeds in milliseconds without herbicides and without harming crops, a potential shift toward chemical free agriculture
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Nicolas Debock retweeted
Feb 17
Very proud to announce our partnership with Gradium. This is just the beginning! More soon.
InteractionLabs and @GradiumAI are partnering to redefine human-robot interaction! Voice will become the primary interface between humans and machines. To get there, it needs to stop sounding like a machine. That's where Gradium comes in. They build foundational audio language models that make speech natural, expressive, and fast. At InteractionLabs, we take a fundamentally different approach to robotics. Where the industry obsesses over capabilities, we believe that before robots can be useful in the home, they must first be welcome in the home. This is just step one 🚀 More to announce soon.
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Beautiful map
A map of population distribution in Europe (black = at least one inhabitant per square km) Always stuns me to see how empty swaths of Spain are!
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Nvidia investing in a foundation model ?
The penguin stole a stone from his wife and gave it back to her. 😂
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growing but not on the human side.
Total employee count at the 4 largest tech employers. Notice the flatline 2022-2025 in all of them
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bad timing for this ad for a BTC conference...
THE PRICES ARE GOING UP TODAY! DON’T MISS THE OPPORTUNITY. 11.-13.6.2026, PRAGUE
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great puchnline @daveg
Software used to be expensive to build and cheap to run, now it is the opposite.
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