A union of love and vision
Michael and Marie were both active in Paris’s tech scene for years, but didn’t actually meet until a board game night hosted by Michael’s roommate and co-founder. Marie was a student and the co-founder of a community space where she organized hackathons, workshops, and art exhibits. And Michael had left a PhD track in number theory at Cambridge to build companies.
When they finally did meet, in between bites and vying for the Boardwalk in Monopoly, they talked extensively about their shared interests. Michael told Marie about Snips, the privacy-respecting voice AI platform he was building, and Marie shared how much she’d learned about coding through after-class hackathons.
They continued to hang out, with Michael offering to pitch in on what Marie was building through the hackathons. “Michael was great at design, and I was struggling with Figma. I kept asking him for help, and one day he said, ‘Maybe I should just do it for you.’” Marie says, laughing.
Their project collaboration turned romantic, and they started dating. With so much in common, their relationship was easy and natural. Marie says, “We would wake up in the morning wanting to talk about the same things, with similar thoughts, and the same goals.” During a trip to Sri Lanka, with the sweeping hill country in the background, Michael proposed. Marie said yes, and they both returned home excited about the life they would continue to build together.
Soon after, Michael’s company, Snips, was acquired by Sonos, which voice all interactions on Sonos speakers. Joining Sonos would be a major highlight on his resume, but stepping away from building products to take on a management role didn’t feel right. Marie and Michael had already been pairing up on various projects, so when he suggested that they start something together, it made sense. Marie says, “It was very natural that he wanted to build another company, and this time he would build it with me.” The easy rhythm of their relationship carried over seamlessly into working together.
They started with a simple website, marieandmichael.com, and in the process of building it, realized there was no good way to collaborate on creating a personalized website. That insight led to their first idea, Motif.land, a collaborative website builder mixing Notion-style simplicity with developer flexibility.
Marie and Michael were excited about what they’d built and started looking for the community that would help them grow Motif.land.
All in on San Francisco
Marie first visited San Francisco after receiving funding for a project she’d built in Paris, and the connection was immediate. “I just loved the energy,” she says. “It felt a little wild. Everyone was trying things, experimenting. No one was judging you. I was always drawn to that.”
She and Michael kept returning, often for weeks at a time, meeting angel investors and spending time with friends who were constantly building. Hackathons ran through the night. Coffee shop conversations turned into collaborations. It felt like progress was always happening, and people around them moved with the same urgency they brought to their own work.
They realized the pace in San Francisco was not only exciting, it matched the way they approached building, the speed at which they made decisions, and the openness they looked for in a creative environment. After returning to Paris from an especially inspiring trip to the Bay, they looked at each other with the same thought, “We should move to San Francisco.”
They gave their landlord notice, packed their things, and relocated along with their Black Labrador, Riva. “It was a full leap,” Marie said. “It helped that we came together. It would have been much harder to make the move alone.”
Once they settled into their Menlo Park apartment, they realized they should have made the move sooner. Now, they were in the epicenter where everything in their world was happening. When they later moved up to San Francisco to be closer to YC and other founders, they felt it even more. In San Francisco, the mindset was different. And everywhere they looked, AI was exploding.
When it all came into focus
One morning in early 2023, over coffee at their favorite shop, they started rethinking Motif.land through the lens of AI. What if, instead of submitting tickets or searching through help docs, users could ask a question and get the exact answer instantly, in plain language, pulled straight from a company’s internal knowledge?
That led them to something bigger.
They realized customer support, as an industry, was outdated. Incumbent tools were built for a different era, and as AI rewrote the rules, they struggled to keep up. But Marie and Michael didn’t want to patch AI onto someone else’s foundation, and they weren’t afraid to start from scratch. They wanted to build the first real alternative from the ground up. An AI-native support platform designed for modern, fast-growing companies that want to scale efficiently without hiring huge support teams.
In just a few days, they launched 14.ai and posted it on Hacker News. “It was on the front page the whole day. The demo requests we got made us feel like people wanted to pay.”
The excitement wasn’t about logos or metrics. It was about impact. “We were helping people,” Marie said. “That was the part that mattered.”
They realized they’d need more support to continue building out their ambitious vision and looked to their new network for help.
Finding community through YC
In San Francisco, they found the peer networks they’d been missing in Europe. In the communal area of their apartment building, Marie and Michael would often chat with other founders. Many YC alums encouraged them to apply, sharing how much the program had shaped their own journey.
Even though they had customers and early funding, Marie and Michael decided there was a lot they could get out of YC, and were thrilled when they were accepted to the W24 batch. For Marie, the real draw was connecting with supportive, like-minded founders. She says, “Every time I talked to a YC founder, I came away inspired. It really felt like a community. It wasn’t about the money, it was the people. When people ask me what YC is like, I still struggle to explain. It’s this unique space where everyone is building their own thing, but somehow we’re all in it together.”
Even now, more than a year after YC ended, they still regularly meet with their group mates from the batch, maintaining the cadence and accountability that’s pushed them to where they are today.
Rebuilding support for the AI era
14.ai takes a fundamentally different approach than the legacy support giants. Where others are retrofitting AI into old systems, 14.ai was designed from day one with generative AI at its core. Marie and Michael’s goal is to automate or assist customer support agents in answering questions by leveraging AI, researching accounts, and analyzing past interactions. It's the ultimate fulfillment of Marie and Michael’s goal to help people.
As in their marriage, Marie and Michael are complements that together form one solid team. Marie focuses on customer experience, community, and product vision, while Michael works mostly on engineering, design, and infrastructure.
Their approach is grounded in usability and delight, building software they’d actually want to use. “Going from stitching into a legacy platform like Zendesk to creating our own from scratch has made me so much more excited,” Marie says.
A future they’re ready to lead
Marie and Michael wake up with a drive they never experienced in Paris. Now that their vision is clear and they’re in the right place to make it happen, the future they once imagined is now the one they’re racing to build.
For Marie, this chapter is all about clarity. The shift from second-guessing to conviction has been transformative. For Michael, building their own platform from the ground up has reignited his excitement for what’s possible. Together, they feel more aligned and focused than ever.
As Marie puts it, “Every challenge we’ve faced has only fueled our ambition. This is just the beginning of what we can build together.”