The Family’s Pan-European Ambitions

European Straits #33

Dear all,

Four years ago, Alice Zagury, Oussama Ammar and I founded The Family. It was initially designed as an investment entity to nurture ambitious France-based entrepreneurs, from the very start all the way up to their building an empire. We would take a small equity stake in startups we like, solve problems met by entrepreneurs at the earliest stage, help them pass critical inflection points, and deploy more capital along the way.

Among many other things, we had two main motives for launching The Family:

• We wanted to work with entrepreneurs, not financiers. Our ambition was to build a business on the investing side but none of us really had the taste or patience to go through the pain of a 3-year roadshow to raise our first fund. For us, it was critical to serve entrepreneurs from day one and design our business based on their actual needs rather than replicating what French venture capitalists had been doing for years. This is why The Family used to mostly look like an accelerator …