The Family and Silicon Valley

European Straits #39

Dear all,

My firm The Family entertains a special relationship with Silicon Valley. When our CEO Alice Zagury, Oussama Ammar and I founded it back in 2013, our reasoning was that most local approaches to startup development in Europe were misguided:

• Support was based in government and corporate money. Alas neither of these work, as the incentives of such money providers are misaligned with the interests of entrepreneurs.

• Previous generations of (more or less) successful European entrepreneurs were thin in terms of their ability to share knowledge, teach founders and employees, and invest in new ventures.

• Knowledge was available online, but since it came primarily from the US it was ill-suited to the European environment. We’re not the same, so best practices had to be adapted.

Indeed Silicon Valley is an entrepreneurial ecosystem that works because decades of trials and errors have given birth to all the institutions that entrepreneurs need to succeed. Decades after the early days of Fred …