Koudetat: Origins
At The Family, we love posters. We have a ton of them hanging in our three offices (Paris, London, Berlin), giving us and our entrepreneurs little shots of energy during the day, and our visitors an idea of who we are. A while back I caught myself staring at the one that says, “Anyone can become an entrepreneur.” And it got me thinking about all the ways that those “anyones” find their way to entrepreneurship.
That’s why I was super excited to start working on a new education program — Koudetat (15–23). From the beginning, we wanted it to be different from any other entrepreneurship program.
That’s because schools and programs teach us things, with the idea that by learning them, we’ll succeed. But the issue with helping us succeed in that way is that it hinges on convergent thinking — arriving at a single correct answer by following a series of logical steps. In an entrepreneurship program, that would typically be writing a business plan reaching 3 years into the future, all for a business that doesn’t exist and probably never will exist.
But real entrepreneurship is driven by a different philosophy: Unlearn everything you know, debunk your surest assumptions, and fail until you succeed. In that way, it feeds on divergent thinking — a much more creative process that pushes us to explore various possibilities. The divergent thinking counterpart to the business plan is the infamous lean methodology — getting out of the building and testing.
Doing Koudetat right, in a way that encourages divergent thinking, is important because even though divergent thinking is something that comes naturally to us, it disappears with the years.
Remember those history classes where you had to answer the question “what was the cause of the French Revolution” and you could get it right or wrong? This rigidity in learning hardwires our brains for convergent thinking. Once we acquire these reflexes, they are extremely hard to undo — and they become the great enemy of innovation. So it’s a big bonus that we focused on younger entrepreneurs — the one unbreakable requirement was that they be from 15–23 years old.
Welcome behind the scenes of Koudetat (15–23)
Koudetat is a way for people to discover the real entrepreneurial mindset, not pitch competitions or business plans. Koudetat (15–23) takes place every Saturday at The Family, over the course of 3 months. Welcoming younger students with different personality types, backgrounds, and skills, the idea is to learn from the best entrepreneurs who have already ridden the roller coaster.
Oussama (co-founder at The Family) is a great teacher, but this was nothing like the school our participants were used to — or even anything we were used to, either.
At first, we had everything set up very neatly: a full breakfast, cameras to record classes and the tables perfectly aligned. The first Saturday was fun but a bit awkward, because no one knew each other or why they were among the fifteen who had been selected. Oussama gave his first talk in the morning and started to shatter the assumptions they had constructed around business and careers one by one, giving them a completely different way of seeing things. Then they had lunch with Xavier Niel, who proceeded to rock their world. ;) Dimitri, a 21-year-old from Bordeaux explained how their talks changed his frame of reference — “Now when I try to overcome obstacles in my personal life, I don’t call up the same things in my mind.” It was a day of seeing divergent thinking in action.
As the program went on, the tempo kept accelerating. Our Koudetats were upping their curiosity levels and dropping the reflexes they had carefully constructed in school. Yago, one of our students and founder of Codeinfirmères.com, told me one day that coming to Koudetat was like receiving a “very much needed slap in the face, every single time.” 👋
Field Trip 💖
One week, we decided to drop the Saturday session and bring them along to our Onboarding Weekend, in a castle in Burgundy. There they spent the whole weekend with the newest entrepreneurs at The Family and members of our team. They roamed around and sat in on office hours here and there. They heard discussions of the very precise and minute actions that make up the day-to-day of entrepreneurs. They saw how things move forward little by little, realizing that it can be as simple as creating a mailing list or writing a great blog post. By the end of the weekend, one of the Koudetat kids mentioned this was a point of no return for him— “Now I have to be an entrepreneur and it’s kind of a bummer that I can’t get started right this minute… ”
After that, it was really us following them. Oussama stepped off the stage and let them take the lead. They became the teachers, since each of them had an area of expertise. We had excellent classes about influencers, building a marketplace, optimising your SEO, strengthening your community, speeding up your self-learning…
…And then something of The Family’s chemistry experiments started happening — the Koudetats were hanging out at the office during the week, working on their projects, cooking lunch in the kitchen and blowing up their Slack channel. They organized field trips to Station F and a couple of barbecues for themselves.
They were forming their own functioning unit.
Within a month they were consulting with our entrepreneurs on a whole range of topics — they had realised that they could be Jedis, too. For instance, Maxime wrote this article listing the best free tools to get started that has been a hit and already benefited plenty of startups ;)
The whole point of this program was to pick incredible people, put them together and see what happened. It’s still not over but they are already an integral part of our community and are paying it forward like crazy, acting as fresh role models for us all.
And because we never stop… Monday, a brand new Koudetat program will be announced— but it’s a big secret, shhhhhhh ;) Stay tuned ✌️
