It’s On, Europe!
For a few months now, applications at The Family have been closed. We were working on rebuilding our infrastructure from scratch, to match our ambition of providing the best platform for entrepreneurs to operate and scale fast, no matter where they’re from. Today, we are happy to announce that applications at The Family are open again!
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🇪🇺 Europeans Wanted!
Europe is in our DNA
I’ve said it plenty of times, I love Europe! Building a bunch of European Googles and Facebooks is part of our — not so secret — agenda at The Family. The problem with Europe is that it’s no Silicon Valley: investors, talents, corporations, policies, even local ecosystems are misaligned and create frictions for ambitious founders who want to create something big.
Our mission at The Family is to free the entrepreneurs from those frictions and create a virtuous infrastructure, one that empowers entrepreneurs, that creates a lively community of founders throughout Europe, that gives them access to capital, services, tools and know-how; all to foster their growth.
27 countries, one infrastructure to rule them all
To do this, we worked on rebuilding The Family from a clean slate.
One reason the European entrepreneurial ecosystem is so toxic is that no one envisions it as a single ecosystem. They see it as just the sum of its parts. In most cases, it’s even less than the sum because cities fight against each other to determine who’s best. That’s not how it should be, and that’s why we created a new design for The Family, as if it were European from day one.
Skeptics will say Brexit makes that move impossible. We don’t think so. We are bullish on the UK and will stay there for the long term. We believe that the EU and the UK have an alliance to build and that it will be done pragmatically and economically, exactly the way we’re doing it.
We are operating a single, distributed entity called The Family, with bases in three key cities in Europe: Paris, London and Berlin. We leverage the best of those cities, and as founders grow and have new needs, they’ll be able to travel for a few days and access the right tools at the right moment. Picture it as the best people, investors, perks and know-how of each city, on-demand.
And of course, whenever they want, founders can work with us across our software layers (Slack + our internal platform), whether they are in Budapest, Zaragoza, Milan, Antwerp or Dublin.
That’s why we want entrepreneurs from any country in Europe to apply to The Family. We’ll be happy to nurture their growth and support them for the long term.
⚙ How does it work?
Anti-batches
Every 8 weeks, we onboard 20 new startups in The Family.
Don’t think of it as a batch. Batches don’t work in Europe. The reason why we take startups at a specific rate is so we can take them on an onboarding weekend: we welcome new entrepreneurs into our community, help them understand how to best leverage The Family and work to define THEIR OWN goals.
The onboarding weekend determines what we want every new company in The Family to achieve and how to best get there.
Once we do that, we can break the concept of a batch. Instead of packing companies together according to the random fact that they happened to enter The Family at the same time, we can work with them as they face certain types of issues (raising funds, scaling operations, recruiting 10 people …). Our startups progress based on the milestones they achieve, and this can happen at various paces. We fit the needs of every startup.
Bootcamps
Every milestone you achieve defines a new goal for your startup. You raised funds? Good, now you need to hire!
We organize bootcamps to focus on how to reach your new goal. For a few days, we bring in the experts on the topic you’re tackling and work very intensely together to overcome difficulties. And what better way to set up these bootcamps than by looking at what each city has to offer?
🇫🇷 PARIS
Bootcamps: PRODUCT & CULTURE
Paris is the city of Love. It has the soul to develop a strong team culture and build a refined, customer-centric product.
🇬🇧 LONDON
Bootcamps: FUNDRAISING & PEOPLE
London is the financial capital and the most crowded local ecosystem of Europe. Raising funds and hiring the best talents, it happens there.
🇩🇪 BERLIN
Bootcamps: SCALING & OPERATIONS
The biggest e-commerce sites and some of Europe’s most amazing startups have come from Berlin. No better place to learn how to build a sales machine and scale crazy fast.
Cliché? You bet! But hey, that’s how Europe works ;) And we’re confident that’s how your startup will get the best of the European ecosystem. Getting the bootcamps set up right is 100% of our focus right now, but the first signs are very promising (see Alice’s article on our latest onboarding).
Slack + Platform
Being a decentralized infrastructure means working remotely with our founders has to be as easy as working face-to-face.
Through a lot of Slack integrations and a proprietary platform, we are making it seamless for founders anywhere to access the assets that The Family has to offer.
We have a full-time team of developers dedicated to making this platform even better every day and adding useful integrations for our fellows.
💎 What do you get?
Being part of The Family gives you direct access to the best assets to grow your startup into a global champion:
- Paris, London, Berlin: people, perks, investors, talent, know-how: everything the best entrepreneurial cities have to offer, on-demand
- Bootcamps: access customized and results-driven bootcamps in Europe
- Rely on a team of 30 experienced people permanently available to help you scale your business
- Grow by learning from the most ambitious community of founders in Europe (600 founders, plus 50 new arrivals every 8 weeks)
- Raise funds with tier-one investors like Sequoia, Index and Accel. Our founders raise €100M+ every year
- Access a list of 200+ curated deals from the best service providers for startups
- Join a Family that you can trust, that empowers entrepreneurs and fights for them no matter what
- Having us in your cap table is a huge market protection against bullshit :)
