The Secret to Onboarding 100 Startups Each Year
The Family has been onboarding 20 startups from all over Europe every 2 months since September 2017. That’s 100 startups every year, coming from 20 different cities and tackling 25+ industries. Here’s how we manage to create unique bonds with every single one of them.
First, a bit of context 📍
In September 2016, The Family went European and opened offices in London and Berlin. The reasoning behind this move was that Paris was not big enough to be a healthy ecosystem of its own, and neither was any other European city for that matter. So the idea was to create links between the 3 most advanced sub-ecosystems in Europe, therefore turning the continent into a fully-fledged player that could build toward competing with Silicon Valley and China.
This is still the goal today, but as you can imagine, it’s harder than it sounds. The first months were dedicated to understanding the local characteristics of each city, building up a community of investors, experts and entrepreneurs, and producing a TON of content (in English of course). This was a long but fruitful step that let us connect with super communities such as the Rocket Internet world and renowned VCs like Accel and Index Ventures.
The next challenge was to capitalize on that community and make it accessible to all our entrepreneurs, no matter where they are. This is where the internet, and notably Slack, worked its magic. We hired our own developer team and built the custom tools we need to efficiently help hundreds of companies with a 40-person team. Once we felt comfortable with the value we could bring to companies outside of France, we opened our doors to startups from all around the continent with this article that goes into more depth about that moment.
That’s where Emilie, Pietro and I came in. We joined The Family in September 2017 to form the Fellowship team, tasked with selecting the best entrepreneurs in Europe and integrating them into our Family. We have to know all our startups’ needs so that the rest of our colleagues know where and how to add value — through workshops, dinners, introductions, etc.
The community that had been built around The Family, both in person and through our YouTube videos and Medium articles, attracted a lot of attention, and we were soon receiving over a hundred applications a month. Our first months were spent on the phone, talking to everyone who was reaching out. Quickly, we realized that selecting entrepreneurs was only a tiny fraction of the job — so we built a product with our developers to help us deal with applications more efficiently and we started focusing on solving…
The puzzle 🤔
The real challenge was actually to find a way of building strong relationships with people from very different professional and cultural backgrounds, working on a wide variety of businesses tackling different industries. To complicate things further (for us), our One-Platform-to-Rule-Them-All approach means our entrepreneurs live in over 20 cities across Europe, so we only get one shot at creating bonds that are strong enough to fuel our collaboration over time.
Geographically, this is where our startups came from:
So how can you bring value to a company doing customer service for healthcare companies in Lisbon while at the same time being helpful to a used-car marketplace in Glasgow?
And thus, the onboarding weekend was born 🏰
Our solution was to create a weekend in a castle, away from the distractions of the city, where we could focus on getting to know the new family members. If you want to know more about exactly what happens there, read this :)
Here’s why it works:
During the weekend, each startup has an office hour with Fellowship team members to start working together and decide the key objectives to focus on: the outcome is usually a to-do list for us and a list of objectives for them. We also bring along some entrepreneurs that we’ve been working with for a while and who will have insights on a particular topic (B2C Acquisition, B2B Sales, Backend Dev, etc.) — they’ll also have office hours with any relevant startup.
After the weekend, weekly calls are set up for the following 2 months to create a strong dynamic of entrepreneurs sharing their current issues and our team finding a way to help them. This dynamic then transitions from weekly calls to on-demand support. The long-term goal is to create a virtuous cycle that looks a bit like this:
The weekend is the cornerstone of this onboarding process, which is designed to help us communicate more efficiently with startups in 3 ways:
🧠 It helps us be aware of all the current and (near) future challenges for each startup. We also get the opinion of our “old” founders regarding the team and their ability to deal with these challenges, which gives us an indication of where to focus our efforts.
👫 It creates the human connection and trust that are needed to be truly efficient while collaborating remotely. It shifts the professional relationship to a friendly one: Since we’ve started doing these weekends, we’ve noticed that the questions we get on Slack are more to the point and we’re more comfortable with being direct with our feedback, as we know they won’t take it personally.
💎 It ensures they understand the power of our community. This weekend is also the best way of showing new founders how much value they can get from our community at large. Intros can seem like a lazy way to help but we think it’s actually the best use of everyone’s time when you know someone is more knowledgeable on a certain topic. Insights can come from anywhere!
What’s next? 🚀
Solving this puzzle took time and iterations but we are happy with the results. However, it’s still only the first puzzle of many in our quest to build a European infrastructure as the problems facing our startups will only get more complex over time and we don’t plan on slowing down.
If any of this resonated with you and you want to grow with us and build one big European ecosystem, come see us on our European Tour!
