This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Rémi Louf, the 39-year-old cofounder of the AI startup .txt. It’s been edited for length and clarity.
I’m based in Bourron-Marlotte, France. It’s an hour south of Paris, and it’s basically the countryside. I live in a village.
We did the Covid lockdown in a small flat in Paris with a five-year-old and a one-month-old. I remember that the thing we did every day was to look at houses outside Paris. When the lockdown was over, we moved here. There’s also an international school, and my wife is American.
I’m the CEO and cofounder of .txt. It’s 15 of us now — almost only engineers — and we are fully distributed. Half of us are in the US, and half of us are all across Europe.
It’s actually only two of us in France. People think it’s a French company, but really it’s an American company that happens to have a French CEO.
When we moved here, I was freelancing and working from home. I got tired of my home office after a year, and thought it’d be great to find an office in the area. It’s a village; there’s no WeWork. The only option is to rent an actual, standalone office. I didn’t want to do that.
It turns out that there is a castle with a hotel, but they also rent offices. I was like, “This is exactly what I need.” It was the only one that was reasonably close. Otherwise, I’d have to drive to the nearby town.
It’s a 20-minute walk. Instead of walking through the village, I like to walk a little outside in the fields to my office-castle. Often, I’ll be on the phone during my morning walk. If you have my on the phone between 8:30 and 10 a.m., then I’m probably walking in the field.
The castle has a big iron gate that opens, and then you have to cross a moat. There are big fish swimming there.
It’s absurd in a way. I go to San Francisco every six weeks. When you compare the two, they’re so different. One is much quieter than the other.
I appreciate having the space to think. I’m literally touching grass every day. I like to say: “I can hear my own thoughts.” I don’t live in a bubble here. Almost no one knows what I do with my life, and no one talks about AI. San Francisco is the opposite.
The office is beautiful on the outside and boring on the inside. It feels like I’m in an old French office from the 60s. It’s carpet on the floor, which is not my favorite thing.
That’s how you want it: That morning commute is glorious, but then it’s just another day at the office. You’re not distracted.
It used to be the only place in the village with fiber-optic internet. I don’t know why; that’s still a mystery. For someone who has GPUs, they also don’t charge for electricity.
It’s quite a big office. It’s too big for me. I could probably have half of my company in there, but that’s all they had, and I pay almost nothing. It’s about €600 euros a month.
I think your environment is important. However stressful whatever happens is, I still get to walk into a castle every morning. That’s cool. You don’t get tired of it.
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