
building @twentycrm (YC S23 - Open Source). Previously Luckey (acquired by Airbnb).
Paris, France
Joined January 2008
- Tweets192
- Following701
- Followers1.3K
- Likes7.2K
The great convergence in SaaS is happening:
Twenty is a CRM but we use it to run our eng org.
Part of me will miss the MySpace era of SaaS. One tool per problem, all slightly broken but with its own personality.
Félix Malfait retweeted
Introducing Custom Layouts 🎨
You now have full control over what your workspace looks like
Félix Malfait retweeted
It was really fun developing our own tools to build @twentycrm new website. Available on /halftone. We've for sure open-sourced it too!
If you had told me 12 months ago that @thomasdesfrancs who has no software engineering background would be able to build this as code, I would not have believed it
Open source isn't dead but it's true that our security model is.
Right now most SaaS products put all tenants on shared infrastructure. A free signup from a throwaway email often sits on the same database as a paying customer with sensitive data. If all code becomes more vulnerable then maybe the question is: when a breach does happen, how do we mitigate the scope/impact? Infrastructure is probably the most under-utilized lever outside of Enterprises.
At least SaaS will need to adopt standards inspired by how AWS handles service limits on new accounts, or how Stripe graduates merchants through risk tiers. We're currently exploring progressive tenant isolation on our cloud offering. The idea is simple: tenants earn trust over time and get moved into increasingly secure pools. A job evaluates security scores based on signals — KYC completed, payment history, usage patterns, anomalous behavior. New signups start sandboxed. Verified tenants graduate. Enterprise gets private endpoints.
But not sure if shared infrastructure even makes sense for most B2B applications (especially if you don't have a free tier). Starting at $20/month you can probably get a dedicated instance for each customer and give full network isolation from day one. Then open source makes even more sense becaus we're back to the traditional self-hosting model.
But the reason SaaS won over on-premise is that we were not able to build the right tooling to make upgrades and development easy. Our ecosystem is designed around shared databases with tenant_id columns. Managing a fleet of isolated instances, deploying migrations to thousands of tenants, monitoring across all of them, we don't really have the good framework for that. But it's a problem worth solving!
Félix Malfait retweeted
Congrats to the @twentycrm team on the $5M round!
Twenty (YC S23) is building a flexible Open Source CRM alternative to Salesforce: techcrunch.com/2024/11/18/tw…
Félix Malfait retweeted
OSS has a great fit with enterprise infrastructure — not only with the usual data/cloud infra and dev tools, but also core business suites like CRM and ERP.
And I am happy to announce that we led a $5M seed round of @twentycrm, building an open-source alternative to Salesforce!
Félix Malfait retweeted
iiiit's LAUNCH day 🍾
we're superduper excited to bring this community-developed platform live today!
it is a day of celebration and we're hittin it off with a @hacktoberfest hackathon 🔥
all infos here, have a look ⬇️ producthunt.com/posts/oss-gg
Amazing time to start a robotics startup or just tinker for fun. And it’s open source!
First attempt at folding a shirt 😱
- Neural network predicts future motors position from camera inputs
- Cameras of iPhone and Macbookpro
- Robot arms cost 300$ each
- Training over 100 examples takes half a day on Apple silicon
Do it yourself with github.com/huggingface/lerob… ⭐
Félix Malfait retweeted
We released v0.20 with 121 improvements.
Here are some of them:
- audit logs for every object
- a new timeline design for every object that features audit logs, emails, calendar events...
- ability to create objects directly from an object page in a side panel (e.g. create a person from a company's page)
- ability to invite team members by email
- calendar and email blocklist
- new onboarding flow with calendar/email import and team invite
- bringing our REST API closer to parity with our GraphQL API
- new documentation website
- minimize task/note and keep it open while navigating
- new command bar design
- performance of table views
Google trends for Exit Tax in France after Macron dissolved the National Assembly and the next prime minister is likely to come from far left or far right
@nevodavid summoning the Github trend expert! Any idea why this didn't make us trend? It usually did (+250 stars in 24 hours)
I think the most common mistake in today's AI excitement is thinking all software must become “AI-first”.
Construction didn’t become “electricity-first” when electricity arrived. Paris didn’t need to be rebuilt. Haussmannian buildings and high-quality constructions evolved and still stand.
Starting with weak software foundations and a direct focus on LLM is perhaps the worst way to build a defensible software in the era of AI. The best way to future-proof your SaaS is to focus on deep engineering problems.
The core of what makes software great isn't changing; it's getting more important.
Félix Malfait retweeted
Spent hours exploring the @twentycrm's backend architecture and ... Wooow, engineering taken seriously, had to tweet about it 🙂
Kudos to the team behind the masterpiece
🎉 @_felx
Félix Malfait retweeted
Introducing my new open-source side project: oss.gallery
It's a crowdsourced list of the best open-source projects on the web.
Best part? It's dogfoods @dubdotco's API to create short links for each project page + display real-time click analytics for them 📈















