4th of July 2026

Coming-to-America stories never get old for me, and maybe that’s because I have one of my own.

The first time I landed in America, it was in NYC in the Fall of 2017. I was starting an internship at Consensys, a crypto startup in Bushwick in Brooklyn. My entire software education was teaching myself C, Python, and Solidity. A few weeks into the internship, Consensys offered me my first (and only) full-time job as a software engineer. Having just turned 17, I was being paid to build the future of crypto.

A year later, the same people who made that first bet gave me $200k to start my own company, Shipl, with the vision of making crypto accessible to everyone.

Two years later in March 2020, as Covid hit, I flew back to France to be with my family. That spring, I tried to raise $500k while there, but not a single French VC considered investing. However, the American VC Y Combinator let me in. By then, I was 19, but it took the partners just 15 minutes to decide to back me.

In the fall of 2020, I left crypto. The industry I had joined to free the everyday person had become a speculative asset class. That wasn’t the change I wanted to make. Restless, I spent the next couple of years exploring ideas and industries, trying to figure out what to do with my life.

In the summer of 2023, I became convinced that the most important unsolved problem in software is still least-privileged access. I started building something from scratch, using a different approach to what I’d been seeing. Customers like Ramp and Notion bet on me when I had nothing to show but a prototype, and from that early traction, we raised our seed round. That’s how Formal started.

None of this would happen if I’d stayed in France. You see, my grandparents immigrated to France from Algeria. My parents were born in France, and so was I, but I never felt I had access to the same opportunities as a “native” French person. In France, what matters is your background, your connections. Not just which college you attended, but which primary school, in which district of Paris.

America is the only country I know where none of that really matters. What matters is what you do, and whether you actually bring value to people.

And people here are surprisingly open and helpful. Coleen, the CISO of a $20B public company in San Francisco, wrote my O-1 visa petition letter without asking for a single thing in return. She told me I was building something valuable that security teams needed, and that I should have a chance to be here and deliver it. Today, she works at Formal.

In how many other countries in the world would a seasoned executive at a multi-billion dollar tech company help a 23-year-old immigrant, ask for nothing in return, and then by a twist of fate, join that immigrant’s startup years later?

The US is truly magical.

I’m not blind to the moment. The country is divided and angry, and for many people the dream has been delayed or denied outright. But, my own path taught me something: there are very few places on earth where someone with my background could have become who I became. At its best, this country doesn’t just reward what you’ve already done. It gives you room to become more than anyone expected: it will bet on you.

To everyone convinced America is in decline: never bet against the US. This country started as an experiment, and every day the most talented people in the world show up to keep making it better. I am grateful to be here. Thank you to everybody who gave me a chance. I love this country and its people.

I don’t claim to be a big Ronald Reagan fan, but this really resonates with me: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

🇺🇲 Happy 250th birthday, America.