A founder who writes. French by birth, American by naturalization, and genuinely both by temperament. The US sees me as French; France sees me as American. I've made a career out of living in that gap - building companies, telling stories, and refusing to pick a lane.
I'm Elisabeth Bykoff - a French-American entrepreneur, author, and associate film producer based in Austin, Texas. I've never been good at staying in a single lane, and I've stopped apologizing for it.
My life has been a series of landings: from France to the United States, from one career into the next, from the certainty of a plan into the freefall of starting something new. Each time, the work was the same - learn the language, earn the trust, build the thing, tell the truth about it.
Reinvention isn't a moment. It's a discipline you practice until it becomes who you are.
Today that discipline lives in Boxsy, the AI-powered operational platform I founded and lead as CEO - built so that other founders can spend less time fighting their own back office and more time building what matters. It lives on the page in French Landing, my memoir about ambition and arrival.
Building and storytelling have always felt like the same act to me - both are about taking something that exists only in your head and giving it enough shape that other people can believe in it too.
A French upbringing that gave me a love of language, craft, and the long view - and a restlessness I couldn't quite name.
Crossing the Atlantic to chase a bigger version of the question: what could I build if no one had told me the rules yet?
Building an AI operational platform for startups - turning the chaos of early-stage operations into one calm system.
Publishing French Landing and supporting La fille dans les Nuages - because the story matters as much as the strategy.
The most useful thing a founder can offer is an unvarnished account of the climb - the parts that worked and the parts that didn't.
A company, a book, a film - they all live or die on whether someone else can see what you see. Clarity is the whole game.
You can learn to land in unfamiliar places and make them home. I've done it across countries and careers, and I'd do it again.