The Capitalyst: You started working at 12 and have described an unusually fast career climb (Deloitte at 19, PayPal at 22, CEO at 24). What was actually driving you at that age to move so fast? What did that pace cost you personally, and would you recommend it to other young founders?
Anna Bilych: I’ve always been naturally curious and ambitious. I wasn’t chasing titles – I was chasing learning. Every opportunity felt like a chance to compress years of experience into months, and I loved that feeling. Looking back, I probably grew up professionally much faster than personally. I learned how to manage products, teams, and businesses before I learned how important it is to slow down, protect my energy, and separate my identity from my work. Would I recommend that exact pace? If you really want to stand out and achieve something big – yes.
The Capitalyst: For someone hearing about Les Amis for the first time, how would you describe what it actually is and who it is for?
Anna Bilych: Les Amis is an app and community for women that makes building meaningful friendships as an adult effortless. We connect you online, but with the goal to take you off from the screen and meet IRL. We combine intelligent matching with hundreds of curated offline experiences every month – from dinners and wellness to sports, creative workshops, and travel – helping women build genuine, lasting friendships in their city. Our members are typically ambitious, internationally minded women who value personal growth and are looking for deeper, more intentional connections than traditional social platforms offer.
The Capitalyst: Because it is a vetted, members-only application process, how do you handle curation? What are the key traits you look for to ensure new members actively contribute to a safe and empowering environment for women?
Anna Bilych: People often assume we’re selecting based on profession or achievements, but that’s actually not what matters most. We’re looking for kindness, openness, curiosity, and a genuine willingness to contribute to the community. The application process helps us understand whether someone shares those values. Our goal isn’t exclusivity for the sake of exclusivity – it’s creating an environment where women immediately feel comfortable showing up, being vulnerable, and building real relationships. Community quality is one of the few things that becomes impossible to fix later, so we invest heavily in protecting it from day one.
The Capitalyst: We live in the most interconnected era in human history, yet we are arguably the loneliest. In your eyes, where did mainstream social media go wrong, and how does Les Amis actively reverse those negative psychological loops?
Anna Bilych: Social media became incredibly good at helping us consume people, but not necessarily connect with them. We’re surrounded by updates, photos, and stories, yet we’re participating less in each other’s real lives. At the same time, our everyday lives have become incredibly individual. You can order food with one click, call a taxi with one click, work remotely, shop online, and spend an entire day without having a meaningful conversation with another person. Technology removed friction, but it also removed many of the spontaneous social moments that used to happen naturally. At Les Amis, we intentionally design the opposite. We don’t optimize for screen time – we optimize for real time. The app exists simply to help people meet. The real product is what happens when they put their phones away.
The Capitalyst: Les Amis started as a platform specifically for women. Was there ever a version of the idea aimed at a broader audience, and why did you narrow it?
Anna Bilych: Yes. From the very beginning, I wanted to solve a problem I personally understood. Women often build friendships differently. Emotional safety, trust, vulnerability, and consistency play a huge role. Designing for one specific audience allowed us to build a much stronger product because we weren’t trying to solve everyone’s problem at once. Ironically, the narrower our focus became, the stronger the product became. Since we proved that our product is working with the highest metrics in the market – our goal is to offer this solution to other audiences but without mixing.
The Capitalyst: You have noted that loneliness is a silent career killer. How exactly does social isolation impact a professional woman’s career progression, her confidence, and her ability to lead?
Anna Bilych: People often think careers are built purely through talent. In reality, careers are built through people. Your network gives you perspective, opportunities, introductions, emotional resilience, honest feedback, and confidence during difficult moments. I’ve seen incredibly talented women hesitate to apply for promotions, launch companies, or take risks simply because they didn’t have a support system around them. When you have strong friendships, you don’t just feel happier. You become more resilient, more confident, and ultimately a better leader. Friendship isn’t separate from career. It’s one of the foundations that supports it.
The Capitalyst: Les Amis leans heavily on curated, paid experiences (trips, classes, dinners). Does that risk making genuine connection feel transactional or accessible only to people who can pay for it?
Anna Bilych: I actually think the opposite is true. People aren’t paying for friendship. They’re paying for infrastructure. They’re paying for someone to curate the right people, organize everything, remove the awkwardness of reaching out to strangers, and consistently create opportunities for connection. Once people meet, something interesting happens. Many of our members continue seeing each other outside of Les Amis, but they also keep using the platform because maintaining adult friendships requires rhythm. Members often tell us they love opening the app, finding a pottery class, wine tasting, or hiking event, sending it to a friend they met through Les Amis, and saying, “Let’s go together.” We’ve built infrastructure not only for making friends, but for maintaining friendships over time.
The Capitalyst: Now that you have scaled to multiple countries and hit the Forbes 30 Under 30 milestone, what does ultimate success look like for you five years from now? Is it total global expansion, or is there a deeper qualitative metric you are tracking?
Anna Bilych: Awards are wonderful, but they aren’t the destination. Five years from now, success for me isn’t defined by the number of cities we’re in, it’s defined by whether we’ve changed how society thinks about friendship. Today, investing in your career, fitness, or romantic relationships feels completely normal, but investing intentionally in friendships still feels unusual. When we started Les Amis, we were literally the first ones, and now we created the whole layer of the communities and similar friendship apps. I love to see that change. If millions of women see friendship not as something that simply happens, but as something worth intentionally building and protecting, I think we’ll have created something much bigger than an app. Global expansion matters because it allows us to reach more people. But the real metric is much simpler – did we help someone build a life where they truly feel they belong? If the answer is yes, then we’re succeeding.
