About me

My name is Maxime Corbani. I am 34 years old and live in Paris, France, with my wife and three children. I grew up in Paris suburb with two brothers and a sister. I didn't have access to the best schools early on, but I finally studied in a French engineering "Grande Ecole" (Centrale Paris).

While there, I became the President of a 40+ students NGO called Mada. We raised a decent amount of money and split the group into five cities in Madagascar for two months to build infrastructures for abandoned children and orphans.

My scholarship at Centrale allowed me to do a double degree program in Brazil, where I started working in management consulting. After returning to France and gaining some experience, I joined forces with my friend Mohammed to build Symolia, a tech consulting firm. While growing the company, I worked as a consultant alongside French banks on innovative payment solutions (e.g., the launch of Apple Pay with SocGen) and also had the opportunity to work on a mobility super app for an O&G leader in Central Europe.

End of 2018, I co-founded Dashblock with my friend Hugues, attended Y Combinator, raised a seed round, built a team of 5 engineers, and iterated a lot around RPA, web automation, and API integration. Early 2022, we shut down the company, which was a tough yet realistic decision to smooth things out for our team, customers, and investors.

After Dashblock, I joined Iris to help with investments and improve internal processes. I also became a member of Orange fund's venture team, the investment arm of Orange DAO (YC alumni fund focused on web3).

I love complex tech simplifying people’s life and particularly enjoy B2B, especially:
- Devtools/OSS products because of developers’ mindset, the community-driven approach, and the growth generated when well executed ;
- AI applied to concrete problems because of its potential to reshape parts of society and our lives ;
- Fintechs because of the space for innovation and the challenge of transforming burdens into delightful experiences.

While not with startups, I enjoy spending quality time with my family and discovering new things (mostly related to technology, science, or nature). I also love listening to and playing music (I'm eclectic in terms of listening & currently playing handpan) and used to climb (but struggle to find time to practice).

I hope my writing will be helpful to you.

mxcrbn • 2023