What does it take to really support entrepreneurs in Europe?
My name is Irina. I grew up in Macedonia, studied cinema in NYC, and settled down in Berlin, where I launched my first startup. One day, I came across The Family, as I wanted to learn from other founders how to grow my business. I fell in love with the French but (surprisingly) super open-minded team. Several months later, after getting off the roller coaster of my startup life, I decided to join them. Their mission was aligned with my values: ambition can be taught, so let’s make it the reality on the European tech scene!
If there’s one thing people know about France, it’s that the croissants are excellent 🥐
If there are two things they know, it’s that French people love to protest.
In 2014–16, a lot of those protests came from Paris’s taxi monopoly. The traditional players were pretty upset about what smartphones did to their business with the arrival of new entrants, famous ones like Uber and local ones like Heetch.
It was violent — teargas, highway blockages, tires on fire, some cars burned. And that was just on the streets. There were political discussions that could easily have been like lots of other regulations in the EU: protecting the incumbents, smacking the startups.
The Family got into the middle of these arguments for one reason: Heetch was one of our startups. And so we set to work. Our co-founder Nicolas Colin wrote an article showing how the traditional taxi monopoly’s view of innovation and technology was all wrong, which got him sued for defamation the head of Paris’s G7 taxi company (Nicolas won).
When everyone else is saying you’re crazy, that you’ll never make it, that you can go to jail… you need support. We helped Heetch’s founders to make the best decisions possible, fast. We lobbied publicly and privately, showing why Heetch was important, how they solve very real problems for people. Old monopolies are such a weight on the economy, they usually overshadow the benefits of newcomers. It was a long battle — and even now, Nicolas still periodically gets hate tweets from the taxi industry.
But it was worth it. Heetch didn’t just avoid death, it thrived: in early 2019 they raised $38M to keep growing, and today they’re providing rides in countries across both Europe and Africa.
So what is The Family? Like any great family, it educates, protects, and supports its members. Our mission is to make sure our entrepreneurs have more success because they’re part of The Family than they would without us — and that they have a lot more fun while doing it ;)
Our infrastructure makes sure that we’re always on the side of our entrepreneurs: founders sell us 5% of their company at nominal price, no preferred shares, no complicated terms. That keeps us 100% aligned with their success, since the only way we’ll make money over the long term is if our founders make money. If we have 5% in your startup, you can be sure that we’ll do everything in our power to make that 5% worth as much as possible. Plus, both sides (entrepreneurs and us) take a few months to test how we really get along before any papers are signed, which makes it all very transparent — no pressure.
Staying aligned with entrepreneurs was a huge deal for our 3 co-founders, Alice, Oussama, and Nicolas, because they’d seen just how toxic the ecosystem could be for European startups. Working alongside them, I’ve seen a lot of what that means first-hand. Just a few examples:
- Public grants teach entrepreneurs how to fill out forms instead of learning about their users.
- Corporate money holds startups back, blocking them anytime an entrepreneur actually starts to disrupt an industry’s value chain.
- Building co-working spaces isn’t the key to innovation. It’s not the co-working space that matters, only the people inside.
For the first few years, The Family fought against that kind of toxicity in France. Then in 2015 The Family moved to the rest of Europe, because that’s what ambition is all about — after all, France is a tiny market. We opened offices in London and Berlin and started to create A LOT of content online (you can watch on Youtube and read on Medium, in English of course). And entrepreneurs from all over Europe started applying to join. That’s how we slowly moved to accompanying entrepreneurs online, no matter where they are in Europe.
The rule when you’re part of The Family as an entrepreneur is pretty simple: you give and you get back. You learn to ask for help when you need it, to boost others and be boosted by them.
Our community is made up of:
- 220+ Startups
- 500+ entrepreneurs
- 30+ dedicated warriors on demand (me and my team)
- 100+ investors from around the world
- 23k+ Slack messages per week
- €700M+ raised by our startups since the beginning
And of course we have a lot of IRL moments too, like our huge party dinners, summer camps, 3-day bootcamps… all creating bonds that strengthen over time!
And like I said, The Family has fought against taxi monopolies, but that’s not it! We fight every day…
- To better share equity among employees;
- Against bad angel investing;
- For a European way of building startups;
- For a better safety net;
- Against bullshit PR;
- For female founders,
- and a million other things, big and small.
The one constant is the battle to help entrepreneurs better deploy their solutions to people’s problems.
If this all sounds like something you’d like to be a part of, if you want to grow a business that changes people’s lives, come on — the application takes 10 minutes, and it’s right here 💖
