Family Affairs: From Collecting Paintings to Helping Founders
The 27 rue de Fleurus, home to Gertrude Stein’s salon in the ‘20s & ‘30s, shares many similarities with The Family’s home a couple bridges away, at 25 rue du Petit Musc.
At the turn of the 19th century, Gertrude Stein & her brother Leo settled into a studio in the 6th district of Paris and started showcasing their paintings, initially their collection of Cézannes, to a small group of artists. The meetings quickly evolved into weekly dinners, where every Saturday, Gertrude, who had since parted ways with her brother but lived with her partner Alice, would host many of the artists who would turn out to be the most influential of their time.
Across two decades, Picasso, Picabia, Braque, Apollinaire, Fitzgerald & Hemingway came to be regulars at these weekly moments of sharing, critiquing & … partying. It wasn’t till I read Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast” that I realised how similar what Gertrude had built as a community resembled what we are trying to build at The Family.
We are not here to tell founders what to do. We are here to create an environment in which they feel safe & sane in making seemingly crazy bets. One in which they are surrounded by people who understand that it is precisely because you only need to be right once, and that you need to work intensely towards your counter-intuitive vision of the future.
Clothes & Pictures
Hemingway quotes Stein as saying, “You can either buy clothes or buy pictures. It’s that simple. No one who is not very rich can do both. Pay no attention to your clothes (…) and you will have the clothes money to buy pictures.”
Why did Hemingway care about owning paintings, when at the time he seemed mostly focused on having enough money to eat? It wasn’t just a question of pride or aesthetic appreciation — it mattered because owning others’ paintings was also a way to belong. When he replies that even without ever buying clothes again, he wouldn’t be able to afford a Picasso, Stein came back with, “He’s out of your range. You should buy people of your own age.”
And then it clicked.
Stein had built a community of people who were not just meeting each week to learn from others, get their work critiqued or get the moral support they needed to continue in their seemingly insane & unconventional ventures. The culture of buying & exchanging paintings amongst themselves had also created an environment in which altruism was no longer the sole motive for collaboration.
In buying each other’s art, they came to own bits of each other & thus their bonds strengthened: if one were to become a better known artist, they would all benefit.
The parallels then became increasingly obvious.
Focus & intensity
There are few things we tell founders more often than how focus & intensity are the main determinants of their venture’s success, in addition to being one of the few things in their control. And that was precisely what Gertrude incessantly said to Hemingway: “it’s all repetition, (…) , all repetition, remember that.”
Artists, like entrepreneurs, do not make a name for themselves by doing things that have already been done many times. If great startup ideas initially appear to be counter-intuitive, great art tends to start off as somehow clashing with the status quo, whether in the content, the style, or the medium itself. And just like new forms/styles are hard to achieve by thought alone, so great startup ideas are hard to come up with from the armchair.
Hackers & painters
Alice, The Family’s CEO, started her career working with artists & quickly came to realise that founders were actually a lot more like artists than pop culture would lead one to believe. As Paul Graham put it, hackers & painters are “both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things.”
But the analogy goes further than that. Great artists & great founders share similar obsessions; take Graham’s description of Leonardo’s portrait of Ginevra de Benci:
“He put a juniper bush behind her head. In it he carefully painted each individual leaf. Many painters might have thought (…) No one will look that closely at it.
Not Leonardo. How hard he worked on part of a painting didn’t depend at all on how closely he expected anyone to look at it. He was like Michael Jordan. Relentless.
Relentlessness wins because, in the aggregate, unseen details become visible. (…) All those unseen details combine to produce something that’s just stunning, like a thousand barely audible voices all singing in tune.”
Great founders obsess over things that their customers might not even explicitly notice, but which they know to be game changers to their experience, whether that means having customer support teams never work more than a couple hours a day like Jean-Daniel Guyot & his team at Capitaine Train insisted on or limitless attention to the finest product details like Antoine Martin at Zenly.
Their relentlessness won because, in the long run, those unseen details became visible.
Sharing moments
The Family, Version 1 was Alice, Oussama & Nicolas cooking for founders once a week, offering them a place to discuss the issues they were confronting, work through them together, and increase their level of ambition by surrounding themselves with others who envisioned a different future and were working towards making it a reality.
The name, The Family, suited our mission from the first day: creating a haven for ambitious, radical & ultimately different people who in many ways did not resemble the people initially surrounding them. Rather than encouraging them to find a path to normalcy, it was a place that encouraged them to foster that intensity, that difference, that radicality.
Like the artist in the studio, there is something deeply solitary in the early days of building a company, something that many people who have not built one struggle to understand. The reason “partying is a serious matter” is displayed on several walls of The Family’s offices is precisely because partying together is an amazing antidote against both the solitude of this journey & the high-stakes aspects of venture-building.
Belonging & incentives
Their differences mean many of these founders would likely never have met outside The Family, or at least not so early on, at a time when their risk-taking can easily lead them to question their sanity. The Family is also a unique place in that there’s no politics involved: the shared identity & belonging mean founders not only have people to turn to for help, they also have peers who are thrilled to celebrate their successes.
As their companies grow, an increasing amount of the founders in our family are becoming investors in other companies of the portfolio and even in The Family itself. The sense of belonging, which was already strong due to the pay-it-forward culture that we’ve been hard at work implementing among our fellows, is only strengthened by this alignment of interests through shared equity.
We often note that European founders are stuck in thinking of themselves as the first employee of their company rather than the first shareholder. This can be a limiting factor in lots of ways. But imagine how gigantic the transformation is when the most ambitious people in your community no longer limit their ambition & intensity to the outcomes of their own ventures, when they start to include others’ companies within their scope — all of a sudden, a part of their outcome is tied to the work those others do. Basically, our founders too, have started to swap paintings.
Restless & a bit lost
The founders we work with were for the most part born between 1985 & 2000. Not unlike many of the artists of the Lost Generation, they are part of a generation whose lives feel brutally disconnected from the previous one. Though the type of fracture is radically different from the First World War, constant connectivity, the advent of social media & the 2008 crisis are the foundations of an era very different from the one our parents grew up in, both in terms of careers and private lives. Having come of age at a time of brutal transition, care is a central part of the value we can provide to founders.
Whichever perspective they came from, they share a form of restlessness that fuels their drive. They have a perpetual desire for motion & improvement that has allowed them to build something despite the toxicity of the environment they landed in. Come to a dinner at The Family and you will hear it in the way founders talk about their companies, the same kind of intensity & restlessness you find in the pages of Hemingway & Fitzgerald. And even if our parties aren’t exactly on par with Gatsby, they aren’t too damn far off.
Separated by the Seine
The Family’s Parisian home & Gertrude Stein’s studio are separated by just the Seine, a few kilometres apart. Stein’s home attracted some of the world’s most prolific artists, coming from all ends of the Continent & even from the US. At The Family, we chose a slightly larger playing field, with offices in Paris, Berlin, London & Brussels. But we remain convinced that much of the intensity, inspiration & good life that those artists were seeking in Paris a century ago is still to be found in Europe.
We have helped hundreds of founders build companies in industries as varied as agriculture, transportation, fashion, HR. I have no doubt that they will have an impact just as transformative as did the members of Gertrude’s salon, and that Europe will continue to attract some of the world’s most ambitious & creative people, with The Family a home for them all.
If you feel like a family like ours is something you might need, please reach out to mathias@thefamily.co :)
