The Family

The Family Directors share their views on entrepreneurship with you 😉  

“In Good Company” is a live discussion, a spontaneous moment to discuss our thoughts on the tech startup world.  

This time we talked about: 

🌎 Feel free to join us every Monday 6pm CEST. 

📹 We’ll be streaming live on YouTube, Facebook and Twitch.   

🔔 To be notified when we’re live, just subscribe to our YouTube Channel 

👆 Our doors are open to daring founders willing to build global tech companies, wherever you’re from! 

Apply for our next batch, starting in September: https://www.thefamily.co/apply  

ABOUT THE FAMILY ✨ 

At The Family, we believe that tech entrepreneurship can build better societies. The Family is a long-term, minority shareholder dedicated to supporting ambitious founders in learning and building their businesses.  In the past 8+ years, we’ve been there for hundreds of startups and thousands of entrepreneurs as they’ve collectively raised over $800M and continued taking their startups to the next level.  Our portfolio includes companies quickly developing into market leaders such as Algolia, Payfit, and many more!

The Family Directors share their views on entrepreneurship with you!  

“In Good Company” is a live discussion, a spontaneous moment to discuss our thoughts on the tech startup world.  

This week we talked about:

00:00 — Intro

03:07 — Unpredictable problems and the importance of adaptability

13:54 — Hiring, reference checks and diversity in your initial team

28:25 — Exits: the impact of how and who you sell your startup to

37:11 — When should you apply at The Family?

44:19 — The new social contract

50:08 — Raising a seed based on an idea and team

52:58 — Book recommendations for building your culture

56:17 — How to meet potential cofounders

ABOUT THE FAMILY ✨

The Family Directors share their views on entrepreneurship with you 😉

This time we talked about:

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

Lyle Fong's experience, pragmatism and passion in building things are truly contagious. He shared his insights about one of the key long-term success metrics of a startup: The ability to scale values and culture, going through his whole journey as a founder at Lithium ⚖️

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Lyle has an outstanding experience: serial founder & now Partner at EQT. He’s been super active in Silicon Valley since the 1990s and just moved to London to get closer to our European ecosystem.  Gamers.com, Lithium Technologies (almost $200M raised in total, 600 employees, exit), Hobo Labs - these are the great startups that Lyle co-founded.

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Learn more about The Family and apply to join us here: thefamily.co

Check out other videos on our Youtube channel: Startupfood 

Check out our events here: The Family Events

We also write amazing articles: Medium

Anyone asking you to work on a business plan while you’re still searching for a virtuous business model isn’t an investor you want. Who you raise money from is a key question - not every dollar is the same 💵  Good money comes when you can reverse the balance of power. Raising funds is like a mix between playing poker and buying a house. You need to go all in with your own cards. But you can’t keep a poker face in front of the landlord, because it could be a long-term relationship, and that should be based on honesty 🃏

What happens when you live with your co-founder, first employee and your girlfriend for 3 years? You apparently end up with one of the fastest growing companies EVER! 😁 If anyone ever told you that giant companies don’t come out of Europe, well PayFit is on the verge of changing that! Since their launch PayFit grew to 200 employees in just 3 years, moved from 40m2, to 200m2, to 2000m2 offices and raised more than €$100M Million🔥

And if you’ve ever seen somebody in love, thats how VCs look like when you mention serial entrepreneur, and CEO of PayFit, Firmin

Only 26 years old Firmin is tackling one of the fastest and most convoluted industries - HR. According to Forbes the HR market is expected to be worth $30bn by 2025, and at the heart of all the incredible innovation is PayFit. 🚀

If that didn’t pop your eyes out 👀, here is another insane fact: to realise the insanity behind PayFit they invented their own programming language Jetlang. 👾

Harry Stebbings, partner at Stride and founder of The Twenty Minute VC joined us on stage to interview Firmin about his journey. Hope you enjoy it.

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

Following courses from the best universities & companies in the world online, and even being able to get a degree from them, is now possible - thanks to Coursera.  This company is fully dedicated to transforming lives through learning. Having a good learning curve is one of the most important traits for success we see amongst entrepreneurs at The Family. The internet made it possible to access tons of information easily and freely online. However, hacking the system by giving access to world-class quality knowledge (you know, the same one rich people get in top universities) was still a big challenge to address to make education ever more inclusive.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Jeff Maggioncalda's background is phenomenal. Before joining Coursera as CEO two years ago, he co-founded Financial Engines, one of the biggest & hottest fintech companies in Silicon Valley at the time, together with the Nobel Prize in Economics winner Bill Sharpe; he then sold it for… $3B.

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Learn more about The Family and apply to join us here: thefamily.co

Check out other videos on our Youtube channel: Startupfood 

Check out our events here: The Family Events

We also write amazing articles: Medium

There is only one CEO. And the CEO isn’t necessarily the smartest person in the room 🧠  

It’s also not necessarily the person who had the idea: ideas have no value. The CEO is the person who you all agree has the ultimate responsibility, the person who is making the final decision.  People like the title of CEO but there are downsides as well: You have to be an excellent manager, and that’s hard. It’s hard to nourish all of the relationships within the company, to have open conversations when things aren’t going well, to personally handle the most difficult times in the life of a startup. 

So one piece of advice: Always make the most sensible person on your team the CEO 👐

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

Cyril talked about the pros & cons of our current internet stack: How was it built 30 years ago? Why and how it could be radically improved by entering the new phase of WEB3? We dived deep into why Blockchain and CryptoNetwork matter. Knowing how these technologies work is not an easy task, and it’s especially hard to figure out current & potential use cases. That was Cyril’s mission: Explaining to us how they will become a major component of the worldwide web in the next decades.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Cyril Paglino is a serial entrepreneur who now invests in blockchain-related technologies and projects. As General Partner at Starchain Capital and cofounder of The Garage, he’s highly aware of all the new stuff coming :)

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Learn more about The Family and apply to join us here: thefamily.co

Check out other videos on our Youtube channel: Startupfood 

Check out our events here: The Family Events

We also write amazing articles: Medium

Picture this 👉 earth is on the verge of extinction, in order to survive you travel with the remaining human survivors to an inhabitable planet. 🌍 There you need to build a new community and start a new life.  It seems quite probable, no? Don’t worry we are not there … yet. 😉  

But for Mundi Vondi, CEO and co-founder of Klang, this scenario is not just a lingering thought. Together with his team, he has built a game called Seed, that would allow us to virtually live out this story. 👾  We are very excited to have Mundi at The Family. 🙌 He will share with us what it means to create games using new technology that allows for more players to exist in the same world, way beyond what has previously been possible.  Amongst other things, he will also discuss with us the structuring of the politics inside of Seed and what it means to build a virtual government. 🤓