How The Family Hosts 300+ Events Each Year 🎉
Hello, I’m Vlad (officially Vladimir, but come on, that’s way too formal) & I just joined The Family to craft the best startup/tech-related events ever in Paris!
Since I arrived at The Family one month ago, I’ve noticed one thing every single day: the intensity, especially in how we build events. As Lou explained, events are our magic square, combining Intelligence, Social Proof, Identity, and Community all in one place. They are at the core of our education strategy, as both the raw material for our videos & a bridge to the outside world. So we put in a lot of effort to make sure they’re valuable, both for us and for our community.
The mission ☄️
We believe that today anyone can become an entrepreneur. Our mission is to create the best environment for this Entrepreneurial Age to emerge in Europe. Yes, that means startups, but it’s not only about them: Tons of areas in our society are key to this ecosystem’s being able to thrive.
Events let us involve various communities around those different areas in a real-life location. We’ve recently upped the intensity by hiring a head of events for each of our cities (Irina in Berlin, Mark in London, me in Paris) and are keeping up an execution pace of two events per week per city. That means we’ll be hosting more than 300 events per year all across Europe. The long-term goals are to gather a large volume of content online on various startup topics (operations, HR, product, fundraising and so on), reinforce our pay-it-forward spirit, and continue to feed our deal flow.
The method 👾
Mark, Irina and I have the job of crafting these events from A to Z — full-stack mode. We separate things into five steps: Hunting, Design, Promotion, Event & Content.
Hunting 🏹
We have three main acquisition channels: hunting down specific speakers, taking advantage of opportunities (when The Family team members meet with potentially relevant people) and people coming directly to us to propose an event. Convincing people to talk is not the hardest thing, but identifying good speakers is really tricky. We spend a significant amount of time online checking out conference videos to try and figure that out.
At all times, the key question is: Does this speaker bring real value to our community?
Design 🎨
When the right speaker(s) and the date are found, the event needs to be structured:
- The content. We have to be 100% sure the person knows her stuff. The insights must be real and deep, talking about something she has personally experienced. It’s nearly impossible to “find” a topic for someone, so we try to be flexible and adapt to each speaker.
- The format. What feel do we want to give to the event? A discussion (fireside chat), knowledge (presentation), different perspectives (panel)? How many people can/should talk about the subject?
- The title & the description. We want to brand the event in both an attractive & accurate way. We want to share our culture and tone, while still being very specific about the content people can expect.
Promotion 🗯️
It’s all about making sure the room is full of passionate people 😍
We use various channels such as Meetup, Eventbrite, social media, newsletters & groups. If you’re trying to build events, find your own way(s), test them and double down on the channels that work the best for you. When the topic is super specific, target the right community.
Event ✨
The day of the event: Care, care & care 💜
Care for the speakers — Our job is to put them at ease & make them feel confident. It’s about respect, not awe. They should see the experience as smooth and chill, especially if they aren’t used to speaking on stage.
Care for the audience — Food & drink are mandatory. We’re there to talk before and after the event to make sure they made the most out of their time. They decided to trust us and come out, so it’s time to make sure they love it.
Care for every single detail — Be 100% present & detail-oriented, it’s the moment when we have to think about everything that could happen and anticipate needs and potential problems.
Content 📦
Events are an amazing content source so we make sure to them as much as possible through various channels. We do videos (including small teasers), we tweet about them, we’ll sometimes write an article. But we know there’s still more to do, and are thinking about leveling-up on this aspect with tweetstorms, podcasts, systematic articles and better ways to diffuse our videos. Never be satisfied 😉
Making things happen 🚀
Startup founders
Education is deeply rooted in our identity, and so we want to invite the best speakers we can get to The Family. For example, we’ve hosted events with Aditya Agarwal, CTO @Dropbox, Sean Ellis from GrowthHackers.com, and Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek. We also reach out to more niche startup-related communities with a diverse range of speakers: JavaScript developers, Talent Acquisition Managers, Growth Hackers and people involved in emerging industries such as legal cannabis.
We are also working on setting up a new kind of event with our portfolio startups. It’s a way for us to boost the visibility of our startups on key subjects and to invite journalists and other media to get to know them, something our PR manager Maud is working on.
Friends
We build BFFs at The Family and you’ve probably heard of some of them. Lion have their own offices and events focused on startup employees while other BFFs craft events at The Family: Kymono on startup culture, Pathfinder on corporate innovation, Ekwity on employee ownership…
Public institutions
Haaave you met Zineb? She joined The Family to build bridges between startups and public officials. One of our cofounders, Nicolas Colin, is well-known in this area, and we’re looking to push things even further. For example, Zineb has been crafting events with Civil Impact and many more will come. In Europe, working with public institutions is essential to making the digital paradigm shift a healthier one.
Students
Haaave you met Blondy? He works a lot with schools organizing amazing hackathons at The Family and talks students about entrepreneurship. Young people really are in the best position: They are in sync with society’s current state and they usually have more freedom and energy to build new things. No environment aimed at the future can be built without them.
Europe
We have offices in Paris, London and Berlin, but that’s not enough: Our ambition is European. That’s why we’ve been out on a European tour. It extends our knowledge and presence in geographical startup communities we don’t know quite as well yet.
Mixing things up 🌌
The digital age isn’t only about forming online communities, it’s also about using digital tools to find people who share your vision and values, people you want to hang out with. Events are the concrete moment when various communities can come together within your universe.
Different worlds meet at The Family and we are proud of being a place where serendipity happens. Having diverse voices and experiences is a value all by itself, and we believe entrepreneurship can be an emancipation tool in all parts of society.
If you’re a founder, think creatively about how you can use events. What are all of the communities that can be involved in your mission (and not just the ones directly linked to your product or industry)?
Take a wide view. Meet people you didn’t know you were looking for, but who are actually aligned with your interests. Don’t just go around to every event — never forget to focus on why you’re doing it.
💎 Wanna speak at The Family? Have someone to recommend? Ping me :)
🤝 Wanna keep up on the next events? Join our Meetup group ASAP!
🎁 Pay it forward: Give without expecting anything & get involved in our community by joining our LinkedIn group
LOVE 💜
Vlad
Thank you Kyle Hall for your precious help! 🙏
