David Maurice Chevalier and the value of a shortcut

David Maurice Chevalier was out for a run when Surfe closed its first $1 million contract. He saw the news and immediately called Maged Elhadad on FaceTime. There are tidier ways to mark a company milestone: an announcement, a presentation, a carefully selected photograph. Chevalier wanted to see his colleague's face.

Elhadad had moved from Egypt during Surfe's first year, trusting a French co-founder and a German one with the next chapter of his working life. Years later, he had helped bring in a contract large enough to change the conversation inside the company. Chevalier saved a screenshot of their call. In his telling, the money and the memory belong together.

That small scene offers a useful way into a founder whose business concerns contact records, software integrations and sales data. The quantities can grow abstract very quickly. A colleague on the other end of a phone keeps them attached to a person. For Chevalier, the pleasure of building includes watching the people who joined early become capable of things the company once could barely contemplate.

Surfe began with a less celebratory form of screen time: moving information from LinkedIn into a customer relationship management system. A CRM is where a business stores its contacts and tracks its dealings with them. An astonishing amount of modern office life consists of making one computer application repeat what another already knows. Chevalier and his co-founder, Romain Ginestou, had a university assignment that made this absurdity particularly difficult to ignore.

Before the spreadsheet became a career

Chevalier had already built something of his own before he entered banking. At school, he and friends created a social trading game because financial education was missing from their classes. A partner bank involved with the game recruited him. By January 2023, the game was described as having more than 20,000 users in Germany. It was an early instance of an inconvenience turning into an invitation.

His subsequent banking work involved mergers and acquisitions and leveraged finance. He began his analyst career at ODDO BHF in Frankfurt. Those are substantial subjects, full of consequential numbers, but after about five years he wanted the feeling he remembered from creating the game. The work had held his attention; the prospect of doing it for another two decades did not.

He went to Paris for the entrepreneurship program shared by HEC Paris and École Polytechnique. His education also included Mannheim and time at the University of California, Berkeley. The joint program put business people and engineers together, a practical arrangement for someone looking for a business to build rather than merely a business to study.

The choice is revealing without requiring a grand declaration about destiny. Banking had come through a project he enjoyed. Leaving banking was an attempt to find that kind of project again. His career makes more sense when followed through the work he chose to start than through the job titles he accumulated along the way.

Two students, one very long chore

During their California exchange, Chevalier and Ginestou used LinkedIn to make connections and conduct interviews for their program. The conversations then had to be recorded in a CRM for the program manager. They tried existing tools. The connection they needed still did not work. Chevalier spent night shifts copying the information across while Ginestou worked on a shortcut.

The division of labor has the satisfying unfairness of an origin story: one student gets the repetitive task, the other gets to write the escape route. The shortcut became the beginning of Leadjet, founded in 2020 and later renamed Surfe. Ginestou became chief technology officer; Chevalier became chief executive.

The initial proposition was easy to grasp. Someone found a useful contact on LinkedIn and could transfer the details into a CRM without retyping them. A small action replaced a sequence of small irritations. The product's place in the browser mattered: it appeared near the work people were already doing, rather than requiring a separate destination for every new contact.

Years later, Chevalier was still joking about the university task. Remembering manual contact entry, he wrote that the memory gave him chills. The joke works because the chore is familiar. People may disagree about the future of enterprise software, but a roomful of salespeople can usually reach consensus on whether they would like to spend tonight copying names between tabs.

The customers arrived before the capital

By October 2022, the company had more than €1 million in annual recurring revenue, a team of 22 and a customer base of 1,500 companies. Google, Uber, Spendesk, Mirakl and Opendoor were among the names attached to that early chapter. The founders had bootstrapped before announcing a €4 million seed round led by 360 Capital, with TS Ventures and business angels participating.

The sequence matters to Chevalier's story. There was already a product that people used and paid for when outside capital arrived. Money would support a larger team and further development. It followed evidence of demand, which gave the founders something more concrete than a prediction to take into a fundraising conversation.

Partnerships with CRM platforms became an early route to customers. In his 2026 account of the business, Chevalier described the first $1 million in recurring revenue as coming through partnerships, without a sales team. The company could reach people where they went looking for tools to improve software they already owned.

This is a distribution lesson with an unusually literal relationship to the product. Surfe connected existing applications; its early growth connected existing audiences. For a user, the attraction was the work removed. For a partner, the attraction was a CRM that became easier to use. An integration can be a technical feature and a reason for someone else to introduce you.

A bigger business behind the small button

The change from Leadjet to Surfe accompanied a broader ambition. The new name combines surfing and serving, and is pronounced “surf.” A contact entering a CRM had been the first task. The wider aim was to bring useful information into the places where revenue teams actually work, with fewer administrative detours between a conversation and its record.

The company has since expanded into data enrichment: filling gaps in a contact record and checking information across providers. Its waterfall approach tries multiple providers in sequence. The basic logic is understandable even if the machinery is elaborate. One database may lack an answer that another can supply. Organizing the search is itself a product.

Chevalier reported roughly $15 million in annual recurring revenue in his 2026 interview, with more than 10,000 paying customers and 50,000 users. He described revenue of $4.5 million at the end of 2024 and $9 million at the end of 2025. These are his reported business figures, a snapshot of a company some distance from its student-project beginnings.

Growth changes what a chief executive must attend to. The founders can keep the original irritation in view, but they also have to support customers whose requirements stretch well beyond a browser shortcut. The appeal of saving a few clicks remains simple; the organization responsible for doing it reliably becomes considerably less so.

The calendar has no perfect recipe

Chevalier's public description of his own working routine is refreshingly unfinished. He has tried assigning particular days to sales, investors or hiring. He has reserved blocks for calls. He has color-coded the calendar, that hopeful office ritual in which a difficult Tuesday is briefly improved by becoming purple.

“I still haven't figured out the perfect recipe,” he wrote. His days could remain hectic, with attention jumping between subjects. He also said that variety made the work exciting. The admission fits the earlier decision to leave banking: keeping his interest matters to him, even when the result is a schedule that refuses to behave.

He often signs his posts with “Selling good vibes.” The phrase suits the playfulness that interviewer Christian Abt highlighted in their 2023 conversation. It also sits beside quite ordinary executive work: finding customers, hiring colleagues, discussing the company with investors. A relaxed public manner does not remove those obligations. It changes the voice in which he talks about carrying them.

His emphasis on people has a visible setting in Surfe's international team. At the 2026 Surfe Camp, more than 50 colleagues from over 12 countries gathered in Portugal for three days. Some were meeting in person for the first time. Chevalier and Ginestou talked about the company's direction; departments took turns presenting their work. The gathering put faces beside functions.

“I still haven't figured out the perfect recipe.”

David Maurice Chevalier, on organizing his working day

More places to meet

In March 2026, Chevalier shared a visit to Surfe's new New York office with Ginestou. He described faster cycles and higher expectations in the US market. The office added a physical meeting place to a company that had started with two students trying to connect to people in California through LinkedIn.

There is a pleasing circularity there, although the circumstances are different. The students needed introductions and a way to record them. The founders now have colleagues, partners and customers to visit. Both chapters involve getting closer to people, and both depend on what happens after the introduction has been made.

Chevalier's work keeps returning to that interval: between finding a person and remembering the conversation, between joining a young company and growing into a consequential role, between a message arriving and deciding whom to call. Software can shorten some of those intervals. Others need time, trust and colleagues who stay long enough to surprise themselves.

On the morning of the million-dollar contract, the useful application was FaceTime. Chevalier could have waited until the run was over. Instead, he called the person who had helped make it happen. For someone building tools to remove unnecessary work between people, it was a fitting use of the phone.