Thoughts on Copenhagen, Intensity & Hygge
The Family is on the road, hunting for the best founders all across Europe. Our first stop was Copenhagen, where we met entrepreneurs, investors and great community builders like CPHFTW. Here are some thoughts on our encounters in the Danish capital, where we met over 50 founders and dozens of investors; if we didn’t get to meet, please reach out (mathias@thefamily.co)!
Oussama, one of The Family’s cofounders, recently tweeted that we are “custodians” of our founders’ time: when we know they are wasting it, either because they are learning and iterating too slowly or because they’re refusing to see the lack of a future in what they are pursuing, it’s our job to tell them so.
Startups need intensity.
Intensity is the price one must pay to learn fast. You shouldn’t be taking a month to make those 30 client calls or test that feature if you could do it in a week, or better yet, a day. That’s learning 5x quicker, or even 30x. If you’ve only got a couple months of cash left, the extra testing you can do with that saved time could be crucial. What usually prompts people to have that intensity, when they’re not being driven by someone else, is the fact that their time is ticking away: if you sit around too long and the cash runs out, the music stops.
But death isn’t the worst thing that can happen to your startup. It’s actually much worse for it to stagnate and live forever (or at least for a very very long time), trapping you inside it. There’s a lot of ways that can happen: you can get grants, raise money continuously from business angels, finance yourself with benefits, do agency work on the side or engage in a combination of all of the above.
None of these things is necessarily problematic as a one-off. But if you keep doing them, you might end up wasting huge amounts of time learning very little, your cap table will be a mess, you’ll be constantly running after short-term funding and you likely won’t end up building something people want.
Hygge
In 2016, hygge, which means “coziness and conviviality”, was named runner-up as word of the year, coming second only to “Brexit”. That positions it pretty well in the Danish soft power exports. Even a short trip gives you an idea of the different ways in which hygge permeates Danish culture. People are welcoming, teams are diverse, inequality is low. You see that hygge isn’t just about personal comfort, it’s also about togetherness.
This had some amazing impacts on the culture of the companies we met. Take Founders, the startup studio building the future of work that kindly hosted us during our stay. All portfolio companies have lunch together, events are hosted frequently to constantly inspire employees and work hours are flexible to accommodate family lives.
But there’s a lot more that excites me about growing The Family in Copenhagen:
- with companies like Zendesk, Unity and Trustpilot, the Danes have more than a few companies to be inspired by, and many of their early employees are now founders themselves;
- with such a good safety net, many more people can take on risks without the fear of losing everything;
- with a great education system, we can expect amazing teams and products to come out of Denmark and we’ve already seen several;
- with such a high quality of life, Copenhagen will increasingly attract international talent;
- and with a growing community of Nordic-specific angels and seed stage-VCs (Nordic Web, Futuristic..) competent teams tackling great challenges can be properly funded.
So why am I bothering to write this? Because some of the startups we met lacked intensity and were not aware of how high the opportunity cost for that lack of intensity was. Sure, maybe that has nothing to do with hygge, but hygge caught your attention. It might be because there is enough public money to keep companies afloat that otherwise would drown. It might be because there aren’t enough people telling them to try things faster (or telling them to Tag lige en slapper…). Whatever the reason, we want to bring intensity to those early days.
So what’s The Family’s plan in Copenhagen?
Our offer to Danish founders is straightforward: we are here to challenge your assumptions, strengthen your ambitions and question why you’re not moving twice as fast. But we’re also coming to help the earliest stage companies connect to the broader European ecosystem in terms of markets, talent pools as well as advisor and investor networks. For local investors, we’re also bringing the opportunity to invest in companies outside of Denmark: sourcing deal-flow is hard, but diversification is essential to managing both risks and returns.
We will be back soon with more events, dinners and parties to engage more deeply with a community we are very eager to work with. In the meantime, we’re looking forward to the Danish companies who join The Family making the most of the infrastructure we’ve built: you can now have embassies in Paris, London and Berlin. To build huge companies, European founders need to be thinking on a European scale very early and European ambassadors are a great way to do just that.
In the meantime, if you’re a founder based out of Copenhagen that we didn’t get to meet during our stay, or an investor interested in learning more about how you can work with The Family and our portfolio companies, please reach out (mathias@thefamily.co)!
Our tour will bring us to Tallinn next, before heading to ten other cities. If you’re in one of those places, we want to meet you! Reach out to Hugo (hugo@thefamily.co).
