Biography
CEO and co-founder of Timeleft, a platform delivering real-life human connection at scale — matching strangers for in-person dinners in 50+ countries, with 150,000+ people showing up monthly. He built the company on a direct thesis: use technology to get people off their screens, not deeper into them.
He writes daily (2pm and 7pm) on LinkedIn about the mechanics of scaling a consumer social product, the tension between digital fatigue and real-life connection, and founder lessons — including the parts of building a company that don't make the highlight reel. Outside Timeleft, his stated interests include longevity and endurance sport.
Session
- AI For TodaySpeaker
Fireside 1 - From Dating Fatigue to AI Saturation: Why People Are Coming Back to Real Life
Tuesday 22 September, 17:00 – 17:15Auditorium StageDating apps removed rejection, not loneliness. AI removed friction, not the need to be known. Maxime Barbier built Timeleft on the opposite bet: put strangers around a dinner table in 200 cities worldwide, and make the awkward part the point. In this fireside he argues that friction is a feature, that restaurants have become the last piece of social infrastructure we have left, and that the harder an experience is to outsource to a model, the more it is worth doing yourself. Booking gives you a room. Skyscanner gives you a flight. Timeleft gives you a human. A deliberately contrarian counterweight to the rest of the programme, on loneliness, third places, and what we quietly lose to LLMs.
With Katrina Logie