Kylian Khalifa

Now

I run taap.it. Link management, analytics, conversion. 200,000 users, roughly 30 clicks a second going through our links, a few of them while you read this sentence. Bootstrapped, my own money, no investors (for now). We acquired an American competitor along the way, tapthe.link.

And I co-host Open Source, my podcast. We bring on the best French tech has to offer, the most talented people in the field. An hour and a half a week asking the questions I would have asked anyway, except this time someone is recording.

What I did before

Corporations. Mining, training, home installation, machine hosting. Forty people.

That company taught me life. Not business, life. Everything I know about people, money, trust and trouble comes from there. It was my first real win.

And on that, I disagree with everyone: you don't learn much from failure. Everybody repeats the opposite because it's reassuring. The truth is that wins take you to places failure would never have taken you, and let you do things failure would never have allowed. That's where the learning is. Failure mostly teaches you how to avoid failure.

I kept the name tattooed on me. It's either beautiful or stupid depending on who I'm telling.

And then I got bored.

Comfort put me in a depression

Nobody warns you. You spend years chasing a position, and the moment you get there you find out the chase was the whole point. I had everything I needed. I was doing badly.

But boredom wasn't really the problem. I couldn't stand being that identity anymore. I wanted to rebuild everything from zero. It'll probably happen many more times.

So one day I decided to change careers, change cities and end my relationship. All three inside the same twenty-four hours. I don't recommend that day to anyone and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

That same evening I texted a guy I knew would be my co-founder. I'm starting something. I don't have the idea yet, I'll have it tonight. You in? He came. That's Quentin, now CTO of taap.it. He never asked what the idea was.

I asked ChatGPT where to go to remove every distraction. It said Tallinn. I booked a hotel room and barely left it for twelve months. The best twelve months of my life, which should probably worry the people close to me.

How I think

I don't plan anything. I call it the freemap. I don't know what I'm doing tomorrow, I don't try to know, I follow the energy wherever it goes and I try to do it well every time. It looks like laziness; it's the opposite. When nothing is planned, you don't get the luxury of being good later. And I never miss what was planned, since nothing ever was.

I change my mind all the time and I love it. To me it's the most beautiful form of intelligence. Holding a position just to stay consistent with yourself is decoration.

My only real fear is going to bed exactly the same person who woke up. Not failing, stagnating. It shows up on no balance sheet and nobody comes to warn you. A day goes by, it looks like the one before, it costs nothing. Three hundred days like that and it's a life.

I'm a sponge. What I am is the result of the thousands of people I've crossed paths with. I absorb everything, then decide later what actually makes it into my life. It's why I listen more than I talk, which surprises people who have heard me talk.

People's stories do something to me. Everyone has a completely different life, everyone is exactly the product of what they've lived through, and I never get tired of it. It's also the least admissible reason for the podcast.

I'm interested in everything. Subjects I don't know pull me in, subjects I know make me want to dig further. I've never understood how you close a subject. And when someone doesn't think like me, my first question isn't whether they're wrong, it's how they got there. Then I make up my own mind, and it's usually firm, being open-minded doesn't mean never concluding.

Entrepreneurship is an art form. Turning one euro into two is an artist's move: there's a constraint, a material, taste, and a thousand ways to get it wrong. It's my medium. So it isn't my work, it's my extension, there is no Kylian at the office and Kylian on the weekend. I tried. The seam never held.

Two things I can't stand

People who take themselves seriously. In business, in life, everywhere. Keep taking yourselves seriously, someone with nothing to lose will show up and calm everybody down.

And people who put out the light. There are those you give light to who send it back a thousandfold, and those who absorb it and slowly put it out. Usually the second kind aren't happy, and mostly aren't trying to be. I've run out of patience for it. It's probably unfair. I live with it.

Everything else

I travel to eat. Probably my most serious passion and the only one I've ever gotten up at 5am for.

Intelligent people are another one. Singular ones above all, the ones who don't fit in any box. I look for them everywhere and find them less often than I'd like.

Technology and AI, obviously. It would be awkward otherwise.

Fashion, recently, but seriously.

Sport, art, padel, anything with adrenaline, skydiving, anything fast. Honestly there's very little I don't like, that's more the problem.

And I can't stay more than three weeks in the same place. I don't know if that's a quality, but it's constant.

Where I'm going

taap.it will probably be my last big company. The next five years go entirely into it, and if I do the work, that will be enough.

If it isn't the one, I'll start again. And again after that if I have to. I won't stop before I've built something that matters, it isn't a goal, it's dumber than that, it's the only thing I came here to do. I don't remember being given a choice.

The rest, I don't know. In five years this whole page might need rewriting. That would be a good sign.