What’s in It for Europe (and for The Family)?

European Straits #48

Dear all,

At the beginning, my firm The Family very much resembled a startup accelerator. We’ve now expanded beyond that, as our service-providing subsidiaries generate more cash flow and we’re able to opportunistically deploy capital in our best startups’ later rounds. But we’re often confronted with questions along the line of “Do you incubators and accelerators really add value at the earliest stage?”.

Our answer is that most people look at accelerators the wrong way. Because an accelerator focuses on the earliest stage, it is often seen as the first building block of a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem.

We actually think it works the other way around. Before you can design support for startups at the earliest stage, you need an ecosystem that has grown healthy enough, with several generations of successful companies that made it from the garage to dominating their industry at a global stage. Then it’s possible to reverse-engineer what made those companies so successful and industria…