The Family and Public Subsidies
European Straits #51
Dear all,
My firm The Family has always been very suspicious of money provided by governments to support tech startups.
When we founded The Family, Alice, Oussama and I briefly considered taking a chunk of money that the French government was then allocating to early stage venture capital firms and startup accelerators. We sat down with a junior analyst at the headquarters of Bpifrance (the mighty government-sponsored bank that finances everything related to small businesses and innovation). He basically asked us two questions:
Q: “What is your business model?” A: “We don’t know. We’ve just started. We’re discovering the market, as every early stage venture should do.”
Q: “Why has it been working so far?” A: ”We don’t know. We’ve been strategic and opportunistic at the same time, but we can’t make that crystal clear yet. Maybe we’re just doing something right?”
We decided to leave it at that. After all, each of us had had bad experiences with government money in the past: Alice as the head…