The Incubator That Ends: Co-founding Feÿtopia and the Art of Community Without Capital
Details
- Interviewee: Mathieu
- Role: Co-founder, Feytopian
- Community: Feÿtopia
- Location: chateau du fey
- Date: 2026-04-03
- Language: English
Summary
Mathieu is a co-founder of what became Feÿtopia, with a background running Mangrove, a Paris collective of freelancers, and later scaling corporate culture at fast-growing startups. He met Jess at The Embassy SF and arrived at Château de Fey in early 2020, weeks before the first French lockdown. With ten people and all events canceled, they prototyped the commune from scratch.
The first two months he describes as delightful: a small stable group, lockdown removing all alternatives, pure incubation. Then summer opened the gates and it became summer camp. He burned out by July and took months away. The lesson crystallized around the ratio of culture-holders to newcomers: you cannot have everyone leave and arrive at the same time without losing the thread. Culture transmits through mimicry, not documentation.
On governance, Mathieu describes a do-ocracy: the people who showed up became the core team. Ownership is exchanged in time, not money. His own contributions each season are balanced at the end, informally, against accommodation or future hosting. No one but the paid château staff receives a salary.
His deepest contribution is a philosophy of impermanence: projects may need to end. Mangrove ended. He tracks it as a success because of everyone it changed, not because it lasted. Seven seasons into Feÿtopia he holds the same view, and the same open questions: how to diversify, how to scale culture, and what is the best legacy.
Key quotes
People mimic what they see. If a majority already behaves in a certain way, others follow.
I developed a philosophy with these things that perhaps they do not always need to persist.
During this lockdown, in less than two months initially with just ten people, we created what would be the foundation of what is still alive now.
The currency stays time rather than money. No one other than the paid staff of the château receives a salary.
Transcript
---
interviewee: Mathieu
community: Feytopia
location: France
featured_in_posts: none
transcript_format: clean
themes:
- Tension
- Values
- Governance
- Challenge
- Community
- Learning
---
# Interview Transcript: Mathieu
**Community:** Château de Fey / Feytival
**Interviewer:** Sharon Avraham
---
**Sharon:** So then I... okay. Well, you can just put this there. Let's start with your name and where we are sitting.
**Mathieu:** Yeah, I am Mathieu, and we are sitting in Château de Fey in Burgundy. The Fey community.
---
**Sharon:** And how did you come to be here?
**Mathieu:** I was co-founder of another community ten years ago, and we were visiting other communities in San Francisco. We met Jess there, who was living in a commune in San Francisco. That was the initial contact.
We kept in touch. We were doing some events, maybe in 2019. With these events, once we came to the castle to do just a co-working retreat, maybe at the beginning of 2020, and it was a few weeks or months before Covid, the first lockdown. So just when France was about to go to lockdown, we messaged with Jess and it was like, hey, is there something happening at the castle, do we do something.
She had this idea of prototyping this commune and taking advantage of the fact that all the events that she had to run at the castle were canceled because of the lockdown, to prototype this. So first I arrived here with a few friends and we were then eleven and we started. At the beginning this had no name. After a few weeks we named it Feytival.
During this lockdown, in less than two months initially with just ten people, we created what would be the foundation of what is still alive now.
---
**Sharon:** And what was your journey before you took this step with community?
**Mathieu:** I think from university and student life I understood that it is something I like a lot. You know, just the clubs, the fact of living together on campus and organizing cultural stuff. So already I was taking leadership of the houses and the big teams organizing such things.
After that, when I went to professional life, I created my own company. I had employees, business partners, investors. I was still seeking, I guess communities were seeking to become some sort of incubators. We were in a lot of networks. Then there was a lot in the dance community, hip hop dance. That was also a strong community.
So without naming it, I think I was always attracted to that more than the classic city lifestyle, even if I was living in Paris city life. The classic idea where you have your apartment, your dreams, whatever. I was always attracted to this community dynamic.
I think a stronger shift, or an acknowledgment of that, came when I stopped after three years in my first business. I felt really tired, burnt out, and I wanted and needed vacation or rest to be able to rest, but I did not have money for that. So I wondered, what is a lifestyle that could bring me the most energy.
I quickly checked the digital nomad lifestyle, like, oh, that sounds nice. You are a freelancer, you travel around the world. But it felt super lonely and there was super low belonging to anything. Already when I had my first company, compared to what I lived just before in uni, whatever. It was a few people, whatever, you do not belong.
I was looking at people who are in companies. When you are in a company, you belong, like you know, it is the next step for many people after school. You have a tribe, some of the colleagues and all of that.
So I wondered, is there anything like digital nomad life but where you really belong to something. I was discussing that with some friends in Paris, people I had met in the startup ecosystem. One of these guys, Adriano, told me, hey, we are going to Morocco with a few people with the same mindset.
We went there and we read a bunch of books, including Reinventing Organizations, the one I talked about. From there we thought, oh, let us create a community collective of freelancers who want to grow together. But it is not just a collective where we rent a place. We really want to grow together.
We recruited people who had the digital nomad lifestyle and who were like, hey, we bring much more. This had huge traction, mostly in Paris and a bit in Berlin. It was my first community, called Mangrove.
That year, 2016, was a year of very strong inspiration because then we started researching very actively the other people doing that. We were inspired by people in New Zealand, I think it was, or I do not remember. Maybe it was Australia or New Zealand. Then we discovered the scene of San Francisco and many things.
I guess that year I got much more into this in a way that felt more explicit and known. I ran this community for maybe three years with others. We were five co-founders.
So I think that is how I entered, and quickly also with this other community, Mangrove. I was part of the people who were present and pitching it a lot, in Paris or elsewhere. There was a lot of business interest because they saw that we were attracting a lot of talent, people who would normally be expensive, or even people who would normally join companies. They would instead join us.
People asked, hey, what do you do to attract these people. Then we started presenting concepts from Reinventing Organizations or similar, like having a very strong purpose, how we can create together, how we grow together, what maybe lacks in companies and how HR could improve.
That made me a freelancer in HR, and then someone who was recruited to scale corporate culture in scale-ups for some startups that were interested in that. For example, I joined a company to help with scale from fifty to two hundred people. They wanted to have a culture with very few managers or things like that.
That also helped me. You talk a lot about recruitment, how you create a culture, how you maintain a culture, even when you onboard a lot of people who come from other cultures, corporate cultures. It was a lot of work on many different touchpoints in the company, from the recruitment to the senior managers to whatever, to keep culture very strong even when you have very high turnover and very high growth.
So that was another aspect of what I brought then to Feytival as a co-founder here.
---
**Sharon:** So it is interesting. Your community journey curves between very personal aspects and also the business aspect of being together.
That is interesting because in my judgment sometimes things feel very slow. It just feels more of something that does not match. A lot of people talk about community and then they try to come and commodify it. Sometimes it feels very successful because I think if you as a person embody it, it can be successful.
But if you try to go too much on that side, it gets a bit funky. I am interested if you can say more about your personal motives, or why you were searching for that, and where it felt personal and where it felt like a good opportunity to get paid for the thing.
**Mathieu:** I think, I may lie to myself, but I feel this is one hundred percent personal, and I did not get money out of that, ever. That even became a problem. I always worked other types of freelancing or similar work to really get money.
For me it felt mostly like a need. As I said, this kind of comparison between how fulfilled I could feel in the university club settings or all the things I described, versus other types of settings. For me the contrast felt very sharp and stark.
That is why when we started Mangrove it felt, hey, if you are in the common options out there, usually freelance life feels very alone. In a company you really belong, but you feel trapped inside a machine almost, that purple corporate thing. Purpose entrepreneur life feels cool, you create your own right world, but it can be very draining. You do not want to do that all the time, and it still takes time and it may be slow.
So I felt I had these three options and none really fit. I needed something else somehow. Because I really personally needed it, that brought me close to other people who also needed it or built it.
I think that is how my main navigation implicitly happened. Even for the startup thing, I did not really want to do it. That job, for example, came more from companies really getting me in.
Actually it created an interesting dynamic because, for example, I did not want to join the company so much. I did not want to be in an office. This company did not use remote work at all. So I said, okay, I can join, but not full time and remote, fully remote. Then I thought, I do not want to be the only one, that would feel unfair to the other people.
I had practices of how to work within remote, let me bring that to the company. Then I created programs in the company where people could go and work from abroad a few weeks, sometimes a month at a time, which the company did not offer before. Some people experienced that. It created change.
Then we increased the possibility for full remote, which made the company ready when Covid happened and companies were pushed to do it. The company was very ready because we had switched to that model by choice.
So I think the fact that I did a lot of stuff for myself brought an interesting dynamic, because it helped me avoid some side effects. The side effect for me is that I did not build capital, but now I am learning to do that more.
---
**Sharon:** When doing Feytival or these more community-focused projects, what kind of challenges do you see come up in doing that?
**Mathieu:** I think it is a very broad question. Is it the challenge for what makes the community thrive and survive, is it a personal challenge as a founder, is it a challenge between people. Whatever stays with you.
Let us say the challenges that prevented it.
One, I think, is money. Clearly. It also connects to the way I did it. I personally love things without money, and this does not mean money is absent. Take Burning Man. There is no money there, on the playa, but you pay a lot to enter. So for people it still becomes expensive.
I love settings where you pay once, for example, and then your day to day transactions are not mediated by money. Not for interactions. I love that type of setting. Here in Fey, for example, you pay and it has a cost, but the day to day interactions are not mediated by money. You never use money and it primes you. It is a mindset that I love.
For Mangrove we worked a lot without money as much as we could, meaning we did a lot of partnerships. We had access to places and offices because we did exchange with them, like we mentored other people or did talks. When we traveled we did the same. Between people or contributors we did the same.
At some point we created contribution points where we tried to harmonize who contributed what. We made a total of that since inception, and we also had the result of the month to give a chance to newcomers who contributed a lot to get a voice, to be seen and all of that. These were ways to have a functioning machine without money.
That brought immense results, and also limits. That is a challenge and maybe a reason for failure. One reason for failure is that people need money. So at some point, if you do not get money out of the activity, you freelance on the side and give your free time to that phase, kind of doing the same thing. Even if sometimes we could find deals.
At some point it enters in competition in your life. You also need to build wealth if you want to buy apartments or other things. So it limits the capacity of people to really contribute and be there very long term, versus a project that leans more into business. At least maybe it gives an incentive for the founder to really stay and step.
Maybe the second challenge we had in our first community that we do not have here, at least not so far. With Mangrove we worked as founders of Morocco. We knew for ourselves we needed this. Once we had created it for ourselves and we had two or three hundred people around this, and it felt amazing, we all reached the level of growth, transformation, learning that we wanted.
Each of the founders started to have other projects that emerged from this project. None of us felt motivated to just scale Mangrove forever and then turn it into a network for other people to live the same transformative journey. At some point we had a lot of feedback that the thing felt amazing, like two, three years ago, while all of us founders felt fully disengaged and still received feedback that this is amazing. The engine felt dead.
So we stopped, and it felt like a good thing to stop. That is a challenge that maybe came from money, maybe from other things, but it ended the thing. I developed a philosophy with these things that perhaps they do not always need to persist.
If you just look at what happened after Mangrove, when you do the final P and L or balance check, many things happened. Hundreds of people learned a new way of doing things. They translated it in their own projects, in their own businesses. They started some artist careers. Networks were created, people are still friends.
Even if the thing stopped, maybe it was just a giant incubator. I feel very positively surprised to see that with Fey so far, the core people, many core people, do not feel bored. It has been the seventh season and we are still here, enjoying and protecting ourselves. I still hold in mind all the ways projects can stop, and I feel fine with that, or evolve and really change nature. That is one observation that I have.
---
**Sharon:** So do you have questions yourself. Maybe you remember something that presented a big challenge, to really engage people in a committed way that you met along the way, but you can identify it.
**Mathieu:** Yes. One is the limited ownership that people who are not founders can take. I saw that a lot in Mangrove, for example. People would arrive, join, learn, but at some point there is an informal structure in place. Founders funded it in a certain way, things took a certain shape, and there is inertia toward change.
In Mangrove people did not know exactly up to which point they could take ownership. That really prevented them from engaging. I think here it could become the same pattern.
What feels clear is the more you offer clear ways for people to be engaged, and clear moments when it is not the thing, the more it works. When you say on one hand, be engaged, and on the other hand you arrive and override what they do, that feels very confusing for people.
So the more you can explicitly offer this, the more it works. I think Jess has done that very well as a core founder, even for the other founders. I think the other people in the ecosystem do that in certain ways.
It can feel simple for newcomers, like telling them they can really have impact on their week. They are here for one week and we tell them, yes, we have things that are structured, the Monday onboarding, the community meeting. Those are sacred. If you want to change that, it needs a lot and there will be resistance or at least discussion.
There are many other things that are kind of playgrounds where people can have ownership. If they want something to happen on Thursday night or even use community resources, or take the whole community on a special event or walk, there is freedom to do that.
I think that is what can get people engaged, and withholding that prevents people from feeling engaged.
---
**Sharon:** So with all of this context and all of these steps, when you look at Feytival, there is on one side the clear structure for governance and for business, some new business in some ways. Then on top of it there is this co-living experiment that develops into something much more.
How were the first steps into this for you. What were the hopes and the challenges when you just made the first steps into this, the first two months into this.
**Mathieu:** The first two months felt extremely exciting and very delightful. The ten of us here already had the jiggy, the gym that happens, sort of weekly check ins and the type of parties. Getting to know each other as what became the core team felt delightful for us because we had a stable structure, then people.
It felt great and we could only dream. It was also such a special time, the full lockdown, so everything stopped everywhere. You could not have events or think about what could happen elsewhere or another life, because life stopped for everyone. That felt like a great incubation moment.
We started brainstorming on what could happen in the future. Would we, at some point, buy the château collectively, would we all buy stuff around, would we live here full time, would we become a traveling troupe like this Altenberg, we called it. There was a lot of ideation about what things could become.
Then there was a part that felt a bit rocky for me and became too much. The months that followed, when we opened the castle to many people, the core culture was not there yet. There was also no way to select or invite people who particularly fit the filter. The filter felt a bit large.
Many people had been in lockdown and just wanted to party in a castle. Then we became, maybe May, June, July, a place with a lot of turnover, groups of people discovering partying, very different vibes, very different groups coming in. Sometimes friends of this person, then twenty friends coming from the UK, then friends from the south of Paris, a completely different vibe. Then other party people from festival crews. It felt like summer camp.
As long-termers, we felt like summer camp workers. I felt so exhausted at the end of July that I really took time off the castle. Even if Fey reopened for the next September, I took a few months off because that felt too intense.
So my experience felt delightful, then too much, and then I learned from that. It gave implicit learning about what you can do and can avoid when you want to hold the culture.
It raised questions about the ratio of old team people who already hold the culture versus newcomers. You do not want everyone leaving and arriving at the same time. If you look at the blend we have now of long-term people here for one month or a bit of warrior time, three weeks, two weeks, and people who stay less, you never have everyone leaving at the same time and a new batch arriving.
If we had that, it would require much more work to maintain culture. Here, informally, even you, in the second week, when a person arrives for the first week, you can already answer questions or they just see you around in the space. People mimic what they see. There is a lot of transformation that happens informally just because people mimic what happens. If a majority already behaves in a certain way, others follow. This is my broader sense.
---
**Sharon:** If you can speak a bit about governance culture and space. It feels a bit unclear. I know a little more about this project, at least about this side of it. What is the governance structure and also the business model.
Because there is the château that rents out rooms and provides food and that generates income, and Jess and her family live here. Then there is the Feytival team. Are you getting paid for it, or how does that work, and how is the relationship with the château.
**Mathieu:** I think this feels very informative and hard to define in a classic framework, yet it feels aligned with what I said about belonging. It stayed implicit for a long time and now feels more and more structured. We could almost put it on paper.
At the beginning it felt much more like one-on-one deals with Jess. Now it becomes more rationalized, more clear. In the first years Jess was this benevolent authority. We took as a rule that she holds the grounds.
So first, Fey has some very concrete aspects. Different people rent rooms from the business. There is the part easy to see, the legal part, and the thing happening in the air. The part that is easy to see and concrete is Fey as people renting rooms from the business, Château.
The business runs all year. It also has weddings and welcomes festivals from external organizers. It does not organize everything itself, but has external organizers renting the place. Often they feel part of our network or community.
The château operates as a business like that. During the time Fey runs, it rents different parts of the place and that is where the money flows. People also pay for the food and the business. There is the fact of being chefs who will also use that food budget to cook and clean. Except for dishes, most of the cleaning and attending breakfast or similar is done by the staff who stays year round to take care of the castle.
Even the staff has its own stakes. If Fey applies for a month, the staff also works for the rest of the year, so they have their word about how we keep the place in check and in shape.
That is the formalized part. I would say the very formal part stops here, because the space people rent becomes a playground and the community part. These people could imagine they rent a room and do their life the way they want. The way they organize as a community, with community meetings and decisions, comes into the realm of the institution that we call Feytival, and all these informal practices inherited from San Francisco communities, where many people came from.
Jess as a business owner creates this playground and sets the limits. She decides who can do what in the rooms, who can go in which room, which are open, which stay closed. She defines what is the business area.
At the beginning there were frictions about this because it was not clear. Sometimes we redefined the model again and again. That connects back to some questions. Am I going to live here all my life, am I moving here, am I betting something. Can I rely on this place to live, because I hold no formal decision power. If there is an overall yes I can stay, but then for a business reason I might hear that in fact I cannot stay, I need to change rooms.
If I want to decorate my room, at the beginning it felt blurry. Can I rely on this. Because I hold no formal decision power.
That was more of a challenge and we had a lot of governance discussion. Through the years, as the playground became clearer, the business manages the limits, where the community holds no decision power because community members hold no financial stake.
Once this feels clear, the whole playground gets defined informally between us. Feytival mostly uses distributed leadership that created itself informally, because the same people always showed up in community meetings. When there was an emerging tension, people naturally came to the mediators. They learned more about what happens, about the situation, the informality.
This is how the core team formed. The people who showed up at the beginning when we had a lot of stuff to figure out, sometimes monthly, when we worked on design for Fey. People showed up more than others. People talked more than others. That is how what we call the core team today crystallized. These people became the ones with the most knowledge about how everything went.
---
**Sharon:** What is the difference between you two and Jess, for someone coming here for the first time as a participant. What is expected from you and from this person. What do you put in. Are you paying to be here. Are you getting paid to be here. What is the exchange that happens with the business, and what is the equivalent of what is expected from someone who just arrived.
**Mathieu:** For example, during a long time in the season I was hosted in a place that is not part of the business, the cottage close to where Jess lives. It works like this. At the end of the season, for example, and this is the same with some others, we sum up what has been done somehow.
For the season finale, the end of season festival here for Feytival, I created it. I put a lot of hours last year, a lot of meetings, we tried options with the staff, with how to organize the festival. We consider that as a lot of value for the community, for what it means. So at the end, we say, okay, you can be hosted a few months or one month in exchange for that.
Over years we track what has been done. For instance, some people sleep in spaces that are not really on the booking, because it is a small room that cannot be rented. And that person brings a lot of people to Fey, and brings business to the castle, so she has an exchange that goes that way.
My experience rests with two unspoken expectations. There has never been a fixed expectation, or sometimes expectations appear when we sit together. A lot of the time it feels blurry. I work a lot and we acknowledge that. Often things become, at the end of a season, okay, you can stay next season. Sometimes, like two years ago, I worked a lot and Jess told me, with all this work we can host you as you want a bit more the next season.
The currency stays time rather than money. No one other than the paid staff of the château receives a salary. The chefs, for example Elena, work shifts. They are part of the community because they love the community. They receive pay as staff.
That creates an interesting point of tension. I see this a lot in other communities. Here it feels lighter.
I also feel fine giving a lot of energy and time.
---
**Sharon:** It is interesting because I speak to you and I speak to other people and they see you as a co-founder of this thing. There is a lot of money that flows through this, and you talk about wanting capital to buy a place of your own. You put a lot of time and energy here.
How do you come to terms with this and feel good about the exchange. What does it give you. How do you feel about receiving money, other things, what it brings to you.
**Mathieu:** I think for me, first, Fey does not feel like a money making machine. Second, I do not bear the risks. I have a lot of risk reward mindset from trading and similar things. I think it feels extremely hard to define what is a fair deal.
At least in places like that, with many dimensions, I prefer to see if we stay in an acceptable range. It feels difficult to be sure there is a fair deal. So I ask, are we completely out of our minds or not. That is how I see it in such a project.
What I know is that, I do not see myself as someone who takes the same risks as Jess. I took a lot of time and energy, I prioritized Fey a lot these last six or seven years. Yet I gave myself freedom. If I stop coming for one season or more, I feel free to choose that. I do not bear financial risk.
There are many things that founders do to get capital, and I did not do them. Starting the place before 2020, from what I know about backstage, on the business side it was hard two weeks, and more. In family businesses you have to take real risks to kickstart the thing.
As someone who works a lot with businesses, I see many things I did not do and that I am not doing, that I would need to do if I wanted capital. If I were to transition, I do not see that given the level of risk they have taken, they could find it unfair that family gets capital out of it. Then it becomes a matter of how much. If the ratio gets extreme and many people put energy and receive nothing, people will feel tension.
For the moment I do not see Fey as a money making machine, because this feels like a very challenging business to run. So far, my work connections do not happen much here. I get plenty of value in other terms.
Then I come back to the fact that I do not have a strong money mindset at the beginning. It might be a problem. Sometimes I remove the fairness lens and I just look at alternatives for myself, doing it or not doing it. What do I gain or lose.
If I remove the fairness question and look at this A/B comparison, I feel I gain. I stay careful, because at some point I see that I prioritize Fey over other options. I had offers to take big roles in companies, more than one thousand people. I did not take them because if I did, I would live full time in this other world I described as a world I do not love so much. Even if I understand it, I do not want it as full time reality, and that would prevent me from doing what I do here.
So yes, I make choices to do what I do here. I sacrifice some options. If I just look at this A/B thing, I feel positive about what I do.
Then I return to the fairness question and the question of how smart I act. How do I find my ways to build capital. If I prioritize that, I can do it. For now Fey gives me value that feels worth it.
---
**Sharon:** From your experience, one of the biggest tensions I see around projects like this is the tension between the leader or person in charge and the people in leadership around them. People who feel unseen, and the fact they do not get equity.
What can someone learn from Jess that allows you to feel good about the system. Is there something she does or does not do that someone leading a place can consider and say, I did not think about that.
**Mathieu:** Let me unpack this.
One thing I feel is that I can talk very explicitly about these things. So there is little accumulated unspoken tension. There might still be, but that would be because I did not locate it myself. Sometimes you build resentment without noticing. It appears when someone asks a question.
If I feel something, I feel very safe to speak and I do it. So many expectations become visible and shared.
As a leader for this, Jess combines a deep engagement with these discussions and a clear intention. It boils down to intention. If a leader has intentions to keep everything for themselves, people feel it. If it comes from that intention, people will sense it.
If you feel that Jess has real intentions to share, and she also carries the healthy defensive mindset of a business leader who needs to make the business survive, then it creates balance. That defensive mindset helps the thing stay sustainable.
I think she carries both the intention to share and the defensive mindset of a business owner. That is why we held these collective ownership discussions at some point. We put on the table that some of us, should the community buy back the castle somehow.
Such moments reveal protection moves, when actual value appears on the table and a price appears. That still evolves, and it may continue to evolve. We did not fully implement this model yet.
When you talk about behavior or ritual, one thing I want to highlight is making things very visible. If I were unaware of the backstage effort, risk, and work of the business, I would see less difference. Someone took risks to build the place.
In companies I saw this a lot. Some types of work or people remain invisible, and others do not grasp the work it represents. They feel unfairness or tension because of that. Here we have many entrepreneurial people who run businesses or know that world. I feel I can put myself in Jess's shoes, and I do not want to stand in that place. Not only in business running terms. I do not feel good when I run my own business alone. I know it is not my personality.
To translate, people can try to make visible the reality of this role and how different it is from the others. Then discussion can start. It helps when you are surrounded by people who naturally understand this. When people understand less, you have more work as a leader to communicate. Sometimes it feels hard, sometimes almost impossible, which makes discussions more difficult.
So I feel the basics rest on that. Once the bases feel clear, you can stay open to discussions and ways of finding common agreement on that topic. Agreement does not come only from the leader, it emerges during discussions, even if the leader holds the final say. The solution emerges during the process.
It feels like letting the problem find the solution. Here is the equation of that business. How would you solve it. Here is the situation, here is where you are, how would you solve it. With individuals working in good intelligence, the gap reduces even if it never fully closes. It leaves space for Jess to learn something new as well.
---
**Sharon:** From everything you have done before and here, imagine someone searching now how to build a community. They have some money, they find a nice farmhouse or château. They want to do something similar.
What kind of advice would you give a group that is about to start a similar project.
**Mathieu:** I come back to experience, because it mirrors our story. We did not start as people without experience. Feytival grew from gathering people who had seen and lived similar things. No one created exactly what we created, because we created something different from all. Yet each of us had seen things.
It really came from a combination of experiences and curiosity about similar projects. No one had an empty slate.
The second factor is intentionality. We speak about intentional communities. What is the intention of the people behind. People who really believe in this lifestyle and almost need it. Need in quotes, because Jess could have another life, I could have another life, others too, yet we hold a very strong preference.
So the core reason comes from that strong intrinsic preference, far more than from a goal like, let us create value, or let us build a smart community because it is hype. That may work for other reasons. It may create a stable business. For Feytival the mix feels different.
Gathering the core team feels key. Many things extend from the core team. It was the same with Mangrove, my first project. The hundreds of people later felt very aligned with the first ten people. It is hard to integrate people very different from the first ten. You enter echo chamber territory.
So the first people gathered around the thing matter a lot for what the thing becomes. At the same time it feels important to keep some lightness, because some will leave, some will arrive, it will stick with others. It does not need perfection there, yet it still matters.
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**Sharon:** Is there something you know today that you wish you knew in the first months of Feytival.
**Mathieu:** I seldom feel that. Sometimes I have thoughts like that, yet I wonder what would have changed. I feel what we went through stays hard to avoid.
Like the thing you said with team development, these stages feel impossible to compress. So I feel it worked out pretty well. Fey grew faster than we expected. We reached milestones that we thought would take more time to crystallize.
I think the project felt lucky in several aspects. Sometimes planets align, sometimes they do not. Even Covid may have accelerated the thing. The longer lockdown, almost one year, meant that the first year came with little turnover. Many people from San Francisco and other communities, with experience, stayed for almost one year and created a very strong culture in the place.
So a few things probably accelerated Fey compared to other circumstances. Maybe in some aspects Fey felt lucky.
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**Sharon:** Let us say everyone who does community projects or takes part in this work keeps doing it for three generations. Projects where the people receive good funding and support and so on.
What kind of questions do you hold as someone who embodies this path. Are there big questions that feel alive, where it would feel interesting if answers appear through projects like Fey.
**Mathieu:** I think one open question for me is, should projects like this scale, and if yes, how. I sometimes feel very pragmatic. I did not enjoy the idea of communicating too visibly on Fey, for a simple reason. If Fey becomes hype for reasons that do not match our culture, you receive more work in filtering applicants.
It feels pragmatic, coming from the experience of scaling cultures in companies. When you become very visible you attract many people who fit less. The ideal is when inbound applications already feel very qualified. Qualified in the sense of fit. If the person arrives and just fits, it works. Some people feel great in another context yet less in Fey. There are many specificities about living in this castle and in this country.
Then it becomes work. If it feels misaligned for the person, you need to take more care, which costs time. We have that less and less now, which feels great, yet scaling always brings this challenge back.
So an open question is, if the project grows, how to keep culture. That feels like a huge challenge, similar to companies.
Another open question concerns transformation. How much can a project like that transform. With both communities, we stayed pretty locked in our core pattern. That felt great. Still, it meant little iteration beyond the first set of people.
With Mangrove we remained mostly French. We tried to build an international crowd for years. Even with intention, when an international person joined and we all spoke English, as long as the founders remained French, the atmosphere felt very French. Our jokes, our way of speaking.
So if you aim to diversify age, culture, backgrounds, what can a community really do for diversification. Where do you simply accept that it has an identity. If you feel something missing, you go to another community and make friends. That feels like an open question for me. It ties to scaling. When you scale, culture changes.
I also wonder what really makes projects like this sustainable if we look at decades. Fey soon reaches ten years. To really understand fifty years, we would need to learn from people who kept projects alive for fifty years. Is it important that a project lasts fifty years. I told you I carry a mindset where sometimes projects end and it feels fine and great.
So another question appears: what is the best legacy that a project like that can leave. Should we write a lot about what we do. There are two ways of learning. With Mangrove, all the people who came and felt transformation already form a legacy. They learned and carry it.
I wrote many talks and some texts. These are two different outcomes. One outcome is the sum of everyone who came and got something. The other outcome is what we can write, the playbooks.
I feel questions about how much to write. I feel a bit reluctant to write too much. I told you I feel people need to live it. In the past I wrote many playbooks and values, like a backbone for scaling and for core identity. Maybe now I stand more on the other side. I still hold questions about this.
Maybe another question feels about how we keep culture if the core people eventually stop being here. This starts to appear for Fey. We talk about it. Some people leave. If we imagine twenty years from now, Fey exists and none of the initial founders stay. I think that might form a challenge.
There are implicit know-how pieces that initial founders carry and others do not. We already observed that sometimes. So that feels like a challenge we might face.
If we want to be hands off, how do we keep the core identity. That connects with the role of writing or training others.
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**Sharon:** Where do you imagine this place in ten years.
**Mathieu:** Many things feel possible because the world changes very fast. It feels hard to project the world in ten years. What we feel clearly is that Fey can transform. The building and grounds can evolve. The way the building is used can evolve.
By default, if we stay simple, I see two parts. One path goes into more scaling. We discussed having many more buildings, workshops, new structures. For example, permanent community buildings and cabins, while the castle gets rented for events and the community lives elsewhere on the grounds. That brings a more vibrant campus. That is one path.
Another path keeps Fey pretty similar to what you see today, with more kids, and stronger links to other communities, the mycelium network. If the world becomes completely different, maybe the place will adapt in a way I cannot foresee.
So I see Fey as a place that keeps this capacity to transform and respond.
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**Sharon:** Thank you.
**Mathieu:** I feel you held very interesting questions.