LES AMIS

A conversation with Anna Bilych — founder of Les Amis, the app helping women make friends.

ANNA BILYCH · FOUNDER

I first noticed Anna on LinkedIn. I was impressed watching her build Les Amis — her posts about being a female founder and how she navigated a world still largely dominated by men in tech caught my attention. But what really drew me in was the product itself, and the way she talked about friendship.

From my own sixteen years of nomadic life — living across different countries, adding the US between university breaks, which brings the total closer to twenty years abroad — I can see clearly that the older we get, the harder it becomes to make real friends. Partly because we are busier, more selective about who we let into our inner circle, and more protective of our limited time and energy.

In Budapest, at twenty-four, friendship happened naturally. Shared flats, friends of friends, house parties, colleagues, the easy freedom of being young with nowhere to be. In Madrid, at thirty-seven, everything felt different — for the first time in my life I found myself testing meetups, language exchanges, structured social events. None of it felt like mine.

The friendships that actually stuck came through something much more accidental — a specific basketball court I kept showing up to, a bar where I became a regular, a creative meetup where I happened to connect with one person who is now a real friend, someone visiting Madrid from Budapest who introduced me to a local. None of it could have been planned. It just happened, in the most specific and unrepeatable ways.

That is exactly what Anna is building with Les Amis. We are living in a moment where we have more technology for connection than ever before, and yet somehow we need an app to help us make friends. Something has been lost. Anna is trying to build it back.

What follows is our conversation.

— FRIENDSHIP —

01

What was the real moment that made you create this app — was it personal loneliness, moving cities, or seeing a gap in the market?

For me, it started very personally. I had moved countries twice and tried all the expected ways to meet people — apps, events, communities. Nothing worked in a consistent or meaningful way. I remember sitting alone in a new city and thinking not even that it was sad, but that it was inefficient. There was clearly demand, but no real system behind it. That's when the idea for Les Amis clicked.

02

Making friends as an adult sounds simple, but in reality it's not. Why do you think it's actually so difficult, especially in a new city?

Making friends as an adult is difficult because the infrastructure disappears. At school or university, everything is designed for connection — you see the same people repeatedly, you share context, and there's no pressure. As an adult, you're expected to figure it out on your own. Friendship becomes something high-effort without any real structure.

— CONNECTION —

03

There are already platforms like Meetup that are free and offer endless events. What do you think is missing there that your app solves?

The issue is not lack of options, it's lack of curation. You can go to an event with thirty people and still not connect with anyone. What we've built with Les Amis is much more intentional — smaller groups, curated audiences, high quality, and a focus on compatibility. It's closer to a private experience than a public event.

04

Your app is curated and selective — how do you make sure it creates real connections and not just another nice experience people attend once and forget?

From the beginning, I was very focused on not becoming just another nice experience. Real connection requires repetition, some level of vulnerability, and a sense of continuity. So we design for what happens after the event. The real metric is whether people meet again.

— LONELINESS —

05

Do you think people today are genuinely lonely, or just less willing to invest time and effort into friendships?

I think it's both. There is a lot of research showing how serious loneliness is — work by Julianne Holt-Lunstad highlights its impact on long-term health. At the same time, modern life optimises for convenience, and friendship is inherently inconvenient. It takes time, emotional openness, and consistency.

06

From what you've seen so far, what actually works when it comes to building real friendships?

From everything we've seen, real friendships are built on three things: repetition, shared context, and a bit of vulnerability. You need to see the same person more than once, you need to have something in common beyond just location, and you need to move beyond surface-level conversation relatively quickly.

— BARCELONA —

07

Barcelona is very international, but many people still say it's difficult to connect with locals, especially Catalans. Have you seen your app helping to bridge that gap?

In every city we have forty to forty-five percent locals, and Barcelona is no exception. Personally, I found many Catalan friends through Les Amis — and even attended the wedding of one of my Catalan friends and her boyfriend from Scotland. She is a lawyer living in Barcelona.

"Friendship becomes something high-effort without any real structure — and most people don't realise how much structure actually matters."

— ANNA

What I like about Anna's story is the fact she recognised the problem and put her hands on to fix it. She did not wait to be invited anywhere by anybody — she created a product which gives women the option to meet people and form friendships in an organic way. That, to me, is the best kind of entrepreneurship. Not building for the sake of building, but because you genuinely needed the thing to exist.

Les Amis is available in Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, Milan, Berlin, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Munich, Zurich, Austin, and New York.

LES AMIS · EVENT

ABOUT ANNA

Anna Bilych is the founder of Les Amis and a former PayPal Product Manager. She built the app after moving countries and realising there was no real infrastructure for adult friendship — only the expectation that you would figure it out alone. She is joined by co-founder Oleg Pashinin, former Google AI Product Manager, who shares her belief that technology should bring people closer in the most human sense of the word.

Visit Les Amis at lesamis.cc

LES AMIS
BARCELONA