Launching The Family (AAA)
London’s Programme to go from Seed to Series A
I’ve been working at The Family for almost two years, selecting and supporting entrepreneurs from all over Europe, with a focus on our London portfolio.
I found out a lot of things about the startup world since I began, and it’s been fascinating studying its key players from different angles: founders, investors, employees, advisors, local governments, etc.
Today, I’d sum up my focus area — London & the UK — like this:
- ☄️ The ecosystem is incredibly startup-friendly, vibrant, full of remarkable talent & equally remarkable early-stage investors. With tax incentives that make angel investing very attractive, an amazing pool of seed venture funds and a great deal of value-add accelerators and incubators, founders are spoilt for choice when it comes to support.
- 💪🏻 UK founders are extremely good at pitching, almost as good as their US counterparts. They are eloquent, know how to sell their vision & founding team, how to prepare a good seed deck and how to appeal to early investors using the right buzzwords.
While easy access to early funding means the environment is ripe for the emergence of future Revoluts, TransferWises, Farfetches & Deliveroos, it also has a couple of implications:
- 💰 A huge amount of money is being raised before founders learn how to survive with few financial means, how to get creative about getting customers with no marketing, how to run their company with a lean cost structure;
- 🤸🏿♀️ Founders get the impression that fundraising is an easy game: “Gather a stellar founding team, find a cool idea in a large enough market and go into full-on pitch mode.”
However, once you make it past seed, the game changes as you hunt for serious growth and need follow-on capital to scale.
Raising a Series A isn’t like raising your seed round. What may have taken you a few weeks with little fuss is going to get much slower, even for the best & most connected seed-stage founders. Series A rounds can take months to close and involve a lot more due diligence. Only 15–20% of startups who raise a seed round in Europe are able to level up and raise a Series A within 3 years, and just a fraction of these are able to do so with Tier-1 funds.
And while there’s a great deal of support structures around for going from zero to one in the UK, there is NOT a lot of guidance when it comes to raising your Series A (other than some great articles from folks like Andy Leaver, David Bailey and Ophelia Brown). This is where the need for a Family comes into play, and that’s where I will be spending my time, starting today.
We are launching AAA, a London-based programme to help the most ambitious seed stage founders raise their Series A with the best investors, with the best terms and while staying focussed on what really matters: their growth.
👉🏼 aaa.thefamily.co
The idea is simple: An intense, 1-day-a-week programme to:
- ⏳Save time by learning everything we’ve learned by working on dozens of Series A deals in the past years
- 🕊 Work on your vision, value proposition, & pitch. When we asked Aaron Harris — who runs YCombinator’s Series A Programme — why so many startups (even with crazy metrics) can’t get to Series A, he answered: “Some founders just can’t tell their stories well. That can kill a seemingly obvious raise.” We’ve done it before and know what it takes.
- 👨👩👧👧 Take a step back and think about your team: You and your cofounders are awesome; we get it. But what were you able to achieve with the money you made / raised up to now? Our HR experts will meet with your team and uncover important truths about the machine you’ve been able to build.
- 📊 Put together a comprehensive set of data, legal docs and financial plans in the context of Series A to pre-empt 90%+ of the Due Diligence investors will want to do regarding your deal. If investors get almost everything they need all at once (or almost immediately upon request), your fundraising process can be dramatically sped up.
- 💙 Spending time with a family of people who share your same level of ambition while facing the same difficulties. Aaron told us that the biggest value founders extracted from YC’s Series A Programme was the feeling of not being alone. Working on this is one of the things we do best at The Family.
Once they feel ready — whenever that is — we’ll introduce founders to the best Series A investors, ones we’ve spent the last 6 years building bonds with: from the likes of Accel Parners and Index Ventures to Sequoia and more focussed players like Notion, Felix Capital, Heartcore, Hummingbird, and many more.
It doesn’t end there. After raising their Series A, AAA founders will become part of The Family’s network and get long term access to all of our support.
What am I most excited about in this new venture? The stellar team that will help me make this big: Giulia, Mathias, Balthazar & Oussama.
If you’re a founder looking to raise a Series A from Tier-1 VCs within the next 2–6 months, reach out! Similarly, feel free to connect me with anyone you know who you think may be a good fit.
Pietro 🏄🏻
