Once Upon a Time in Southwest France
There is a house near the Atlantic.
It is full of pinball machines and vinyl records.
Two friends are building something there.
Not a startup. Not yet another app.
A new kind of entertainment.
One that listens before it speaks.
They met as kids. Became brothers by choice.
The kind who never learned to stop playing.
His name is Nicolas Raspal.
He had already founded BIME (acquired by Zendesk) and Sweep (with Coatue and Balderton).
But that is not why he built Spokable.
His co-founder, still in stealth, joins full-time later this year.
He built it because of the thousand board games.
The pinball machines crowding out the furniture.
The years hunting obscure kung fu films on VHS.
A childhood spent dreaming up new ways to play.
Some people collect things. Others collect obsessions.
Their house is not an office. It is an artistic residency.
A modern Villa Medicis where two obsessives retreat to create.
No boardroom. No pitch deck orthodoxy.
Just a surf house, two brains that never stopped playing,
and the stubborn belief that entertainment forgot something important.
It forgot to listen.
What if entertainment could hear you?
SPOKABLE