 also from our side. It's great to have you with us today. Thank you so much for the introduction before. I think we do have a very interesting topic that we get to speak about and I'm very excited to have this great panelist with us today. Now, we had a little chat beforehand and we realized that actually we could talk hours about this topic. We'll have 25 minutes on the clock, so we'll keep it short and we'll jump into an analogy. As you can see, we're sitting in a tree. And I read this lovely analogy of if an accelerator is a green house for young plants to get the optimal conditions to grow and incubator matches quality seeds with the best soil to grow. Now, let's see how would you guys define your amazing startup services and may I jump into with Alice. Thank you. Hi, everyone. I'm very happy to be here under this tree. So, to follow on your question, I would say that at the family, we are like a gardener. So, we take care of the plants. Perfect. Can you tell us a bit more about the family does for one? So, I'm the CEO and co-founder of the family. And at the family, we believe that anyone can become a great entrepreneur. So, it doesn't mean that everyone should become one, but it means that it can come from anywhere. Okay? So, our mission is to create a great environment so these seeds, this entrepreneur in Europe can thrive. And to do that, we don't think that we should copy and past the models that have been developed in Silicon Valley acceleration programs. We think that we should create our own thing. It goes through education because we need to level up on vision. That's really important. And education can come from the guys from Silicon Valley. Of course, it's a lot of tools to go faster and to lose less money and access to capital because you need to grow fast. It's a winner's tickle game. So, the family is about this. We take 5% equity in every startup that we accompany, nominal price. People have one year to test us before getting married. So, it's pretty transparent. And it's been five years. We're in Paris, London and Berlin. It's more than 500 startups at Companay. 200 that are still alive. Some that are really growing fast and you may know Algolia, Payfit, AgriCool. Very impressive. And we'll jump into it a bit more in a second. But maybe Rooksang, can I pass it on to you as well? Station F. How do you see it in this plant garden tree jungle? So, you said are we a greenhouse? Are we soil? Are we a gardener? Are we what are we? So, if I had to answer that question, I'd say we can be everything or we can be nothing. It really depends on what the startup wants to make of us. So, Station F is the world's biggest startup campus based in central Paris. If you want to think about it, it's very much like a startup university. We have 30 different programs on campus. We house 1,000 startups per year. We've really tried to put all the resources you could possibly need for starting your business on site under one roof. That means that we have all the public services you would need on the huge investor community. We have tons of software and support and anything you could possibly want. And we don't believe that there's a one-size-fits-all model. So, you pick the program that's right for you. Some of them take equity. Some of them are free. You know, there's all kinds of different models. So, it's really up to the startup to make the most of it. Okay. Thank you so much. We'll get into the models in a second. But before that, Peter, would you join us in this analogy? Science, we're out in LA where it's much warmer than here. Genetic biologists. We curate, pick very few things and we're kind of help manipulating what that business is going to be. So, our model is much more around co-founding the companies with them. They're probably a dozen or so companies a year that we spend time with. We're the extension of the management team. We're working with them every single day. There's daily updates, weekly progress on products. I do all the financing. I raise all the money for every round of the company. But our average is 30% ownership from the beginning. We've done majority ownership on companies as well. For our thesis is you have a great idea, but running a company and building it at scale is really hard. For us, it's about the, we can't be the volume in LA. And for me, I just like touching the product every day. Right. Now, we have a lot of founders with us. And obviously, as a founder, sometimes it's hard to navigate through the startup service jungle or what's the best way. So, Peter, you just mentioned that you're taking founders to that correctly, 30%. So, how do you justify that? What does the founder get for that? You get a whole team. Think about this. One of my partners is their COO, CFO, Ops and Finance. Another partner is legal. My partner, Mike Jones, is probably one of the best product people around. Growth, marketing, business development, strategy, fundraising. The numbers are actually simple. If you think about any seed stage startup, you come out, whatever you think you're worth, $4 million, $5 million, $6 million, $10 million. All my job is on that first round is to increase the valuation by 30% and you're in the money. Right. I mean, the math is really simple. But we're with you forever. Every single round of financing, I've raised $700 million. My, you know, a great story is this year, we incorporated a company in January with the founder that we've been working with since June of last year. We raised $500,000 to incorporate it from science. We have a fund as well. April, we raised $15 million. We just closed $30 million two weeks ago. $46 million, 26-year-old, you know, black kid from Detroit, father was murdered before he was born. You know, this is a story. Largest funding for a black founder ever. Well, trust me, the valuation easily justified. Perfect. Interesting. Now, if we put ourselves more in the founder's shoes, I think for a lot of us, it's hard to evaluate from the outside what's the best. What criteria would you base it on? Alice, let's start with you. So first, if I put myself in the founder's shoes, I guess in the room, you are many entrepreneurs. I think that there are two phases. There is an immersion phase. You, your co-funding team, you gather, focus on this problem, this big real problem that you've been going through, and you try to fake it until you make it to validate the market and to get traction. First phase, you don't need anyone else than you yourself, your work. And don't go to any meetup, incubator, accelerator, whatever. You need you and yourself. When you get a little bit of traction, how will you allocate your time so that you can make the best out of it? And that's how it's really important to surround yourself with people who care for what you do, who've been through it, and who can help you level up, okay? And there. And I don't want to sell my sauce, okay? I just want to give you some tips so that you can find your own. So the first thing is we're in Europe, okay? And obviously, you need to choose between the different places to open yourself. Don't stick just in your town, okay? You have many options, many possibilities. And just compare and balance your lifestyle choice, lifestyle, and your markets. Giving you an example. Two Italian guys, they don't want to pay too much for their cost of living. They go straight to Berlin. But they are very, very focused on building an application for management, managing your finances, okay? In Berlin, the people, it's an historical past. They are traumatized by Big Brother. They don't want to give their data, okay? There is a big thing about that type of RSI. So they've been struggling hard to give their app to the people. And then we just tell them, guys, there is a place, it's called London, where now, but seriously, people are super sophisticated about this kind of usage. They are called EMA. Their app is growing super fast, 20% growth. They have more than 10,000 or 20,000 active users. They are really happy to have changed and moved, okay? So balance between my market, my lifestyle. First thing. Second thing, go to a place where obviously the business model is aligned with your interests. What does it mean? It means that at the end of the day, the people you will be joining look where they take the value. If it's a corporate incubator, what is the goal of a corporate incubator? They will have to hire start-ups that will help them get better communication. They will have to make you develop a product that could be integrated in their whole scheme, okay? So it's very important for us to be independent from government money. For instance, we have a company called Each You go pool like, okay? Very problematic in France. With the taxi, going on strikes, okay? You have to defend them. You have to be ready to go to war. So you cannot have money from the government to do that. See? So second advice is look where the interest and how the business model is made of that infrastructure you are joining. I have tons of others. Perfect. You also let the other two give us a bit of advice. Now actually, I strive on examples. I love examples. So thank you very much for giving me your examples. Maybe could we also hear one from Station F so that the audience kind of gets a feeling of what is the best way, what stage they should join you. Sure. So I love this idea of really putting yourself in the place of the founder. And I think actually when we were building Station F because it's only a year and a half old, we actually went out and we talked to hundreds and hundreds of entrepreneurs around the world to really find out what are they looking for, what do they need, what do they like, dislike. And a lot of things came back. First of all, we got a lot of very different answers. So there's definitely not a one size fits all approach. You can start to see some differences between, you know, when they hit about three years of age or 15 employees, you start to see some differences in terms of preferences. So we tried to build Station F around that. And as we're targeted really towards early stage companies, we tried to fit the responses that came from that crowd. But actually when we asked them what are the things that you find the most valuable, it isn't, you know, the office space, the tools, the mentoring, the things like that, none of that came back. It's really when I have a problem, I want to find out, did another entrepreneur have this problem? How did they solve that problem? So really the number one thing that people find valuable at Station F is the entrepreneurial community. You're surrounded by 1,000 other companies that are facing the same issues as you. You can share contacts, you can share, you know, all the different resources that you have. And I think that's really what people are finding the most valuable. And I understood that correctly. You actually also live there. You're like really part of the whole ecosystem, right? Yeah, you can live there starting January. Wow. We'll have housing for about 600 of our entrepreneurs. Amazing, very cool. And it's free. And not the housing, no, and neither is the working at Station F. We have one program that's free, so it's for underprivileged entrepreneurs. Sorry. Yeah, perfect. Could you maybe also give us like this one tip of? Look, I think there's accelerators. There's the, you know, Y Combinator, Techstars, Station F. You have to find what you need. Our models, you want a co-founder. That's us, right? You get a team of people who have built things at scale. Whether it was Dollar Shave Club or Dog Vacay, we currently have two of the top 100 apps in the app store. So if you're building a mobile app, they're upstairs. And I'm looking at the data every single day. I can tell exactly what you need to accomplish. And I think we all agree, which is fundamentally, you're trying to save time, right? It's like point A to point B as an entrepreneur. Like, let's figure out if you're wasting your time working on something that is never going to work out. I'd rather everybody figure out that that's not their thing and go do something else. Is that something that you have happened before, also for you guys? We've probably seven years now, 100 plus ideas. Ideas. Maybe half of them became actual companies, meaning we incorporated the company. We built the products. A lot of it's, we're just testing ideas. From there, maybe 35 actually got funded and maybe 20 something are doing well and to us scale is millions of users or dollars in revenue. And so, it all depends on what you're looking for, what you need, what your gaps are. If you're just a vision person or just a product person, I think it's important for you to find a founder that is either going to accomplish the technical aspects, the product aspects, the operational aspects. Building startups are hard. And there's going to be highs or high, lows or low. And you have to surround yourself with smart people. I think every market is slightly different, right? And for us in LA, we're so close to Silicon Valley, it's different. I'm learning a lot about how like, it's amazing the volume that you can put out in France, which I just assumed you can't fire people. Can we just jump into that for a second, especially that point of, you know, Silicon Valley being different and all that? Just could you explain of how, for example, LA Silicon Valley is different from what we have here in Europe? We get a lot of transplants. I mean, the ecosystem for us has changed significantly in the last couple of years. We had Snapchat. Tinder was built in LA. Hulu is in LA. Riot Games, which is League of Legends. Then, you know, we sold Dollar Shave Club. Then Ring exited. So we have lots of exits and kind of these multi-billion dollars size. And so success would get success. And, you know, one employee becomes Angel Investor and CEO. And so the ecosystems develop, and then you get this cascading effect. It is true. SF is, it's bad. Like, it's bad. It's expensive. People are leaving San Francisco's syndrome. Mostly because, look, the money is talent everywhere. I totally agree. There are brilliant people everywhere. You can build a company everywhere. LA, we get lucky enough where we get talent. Kind of moving from the Bay Area to LA, Bird was started in Santa Monica, right? The CTO actually started in our offices at Science. So the talents there, the money, there's 110 flights a day between the Bay Area and LA. 110. Think about that. It's not, you know, it took me almost 40 minutes to get my hotel from here. It's a 50-minute flight. So the money has transferred, the talent has transferred, and it's really starting to grow. So you get that flywheel effect. For us, obviously, we are in Helsinki here in an innovation hub in Europe. Now we do hear a lot of success stories, obviously, coming out from Silicon Valley in LA. But what makes Europe unique? I have my two lovely ladies from Europe sitting next to me. So what is it? Why should founders here joining us today decide to stick around here? You want to? Okay. So I really like this because the thing is, he explains that well. Silicon Valley, California, Los Angeles are very mature entrepreneurial ecosystem. And it's so strong that they can create kind of industrialized infrastructure that creates startup, Y Combinator, your program. So you see, they just have to ask to anyone, you want to do a startup? I'm caricaturizing it almost. Seven years ago, it was nothing. Although simplifying the thing. But the thing is, there is the mindset there. There is the money. So you just have just to select amazing people, train them for a long period of time, let's say three months, and then put them in front of investors. This is an industrialized way to create innovation. We in Europe, if we compare ourselves and if we try to do the same, we'll lost. We can't. Obviously, Europe is a fragmented market. It's a broken infrastructure. But if we look at it as a problem, it will be a problem. Maybe we can reverse it. We don't have the same maturity in terms of entrepreneurial mindset. There are tons of things that we're missing, the give back mentality, paid forward, being able to share with anyone their contact, to be optimistic. We're less on that side. We need to work on that. But still, we can leverage our own differences. That's what we try to do at the family. You look at Europe and you think that actually you have one piece of all of the ingredients that you need that are distributed all over the place. Money in London, operation and logistics in Berlin, designers and cool lifestyle in Paris. You can go on and on and on like that. And what we need to do is to help the entrepreneurs to navigate and to pick and to take and not to be narrow minded like, oh no, if I'm in Paris, I stay in Paris. It's hard for French entrepreneurs to do business in the UK. Seriously, whereas for the guy in Silicon Valley taking a flight and going to New York, it's okay. It's natural. So we need maybe to work on that to reverse these barriers. And that's really what we're trying to do at the family. We're in Paris, Berlin and London. And we're creating this single platform to help any funders actually they can be anywhere in Europe, having access to the gems that are all over the place. Perfect. Yeah, I just want to jump on the back of that. I love this idea of finally leveraging the differences between the markets. I also can't stand this whole US versus Europe. Like that's so 10 years ago. We cannot have that discussion anymore. And I think also this morning there was a panel that presented the state of tech in Europe by the study that Atomico just released this morning stating that Europe had 17 billion dollar companies this year. We have a much larger developer pool than the US 5.5 million or 5.7 million and growing, which is not the case in the US. Three of the biggest IPOs that happened this year, including the IPOs in Silicon Valley were European companies. So I don't think we need to convince people anymore that something is happening here. No, I don't think so. I mean, there are amazing things happening here in Europe. Absolutely. And what I would like to do is jump into the questions in a second. So also for the audience, kind of a reminder, we are using Slido so you can pop in your questions. But I would love to just jump on that notion of building something bigger of this platform idea. So if I may ask you guys, where do you see maybe your startup services in five years, but generally a bit bigger the ecosystem? And since we don't have that much time, let's try to keep it short. Bigger. I think LA for us, we're going to stay in LA. We're going to keep building companies heavily focused on e-commerce, marketplaces, mobile media. It's like our sweet spot. And I think as the ecosystem develops, it's just scale around dollars, companies, ideas. E-sports is a big thing, which is when we just raised money for, we're a huge focus in right now. You'll see us launch probably a dozen e-commerce companies next year. Perfect. Okay, just bigger as a keyword. Volume for us. Probably from 12 a year, we'll probably go to 25 a year. Perfect. But not this number. I can't remember the names of my CEOs anymore. So yeah, I'm here for the long term. I hope I'll be with the family in the next 20 years. I'm doing this because I care not only for the tech, for the entrepreneurs, but really for the emancipation of a world generation. And I wish that more and more and more and more people will be able to become entrepreneurs thanks to education. And voilà. Yeah, that's it. Perfect. Great. Super. Yeah, I think aside from just sharing big numbers, because there's a lot of big numbers in what we do at Station F, we also really believe in pushing diversity to the max. And we have one third of our entrepreneurs coming from outside of France. I'm hoping these numbers will grow. We have programs on campus that have 40% of the companies founded by women. Again, I'm hoping that number will grow. But really what I'm dreaming that we'll see is we have a program on campus that's dedicated to underprivileged entrepreneurs. These are people who don't have higher education. Some of them are MBAs. We have today a former prisoner starting a company. And I'm hoping that we'll see a success come out of that program. That's really the one that we're trying to push. Perfect. Thank you so much. Now, since we just talked about this vision of what's coming up in the future, we have one question of how can the local government help startups in the future, especially to grow and prosper? Money. It's always money. We get approached by, I've talked to about four to five different countries thinking about how did the ecosystem in LA kind of grow? It was actually seven years ago, there was really nothing. Bringing science in different places, it's always the money. Funding solves a lot. But with the money, you have to have the responsible people putting the money to work. Because the worst thing that can happen is putting money into a bunch of startups that don't work. And then it's a bunch of I told you so. So it's that combination of finding the right talents, finding the right people to pick that talent and then deploying the capital and it's just patience. But there's a lot of pieces around the ecosystem that are important where you're collaborative. So LA, it's still a small community, rising tide floats all boats for us. Every startup I'm rooting for. Every investor coming in, every startup because one will exit, they will have a trickle down effect. So it's a long-term game for us. Yeah, I think if you actually want to know how governments should get involved, I don't want to say they shouldn't get involved. But I think sometimes they also need to know where's the limit. We see so many government initiatives today and they want to send companies here and there. And they have all kinds of different support programs that are in place. A lot of people come to Station F and they think it's government funded. We have no government funding. And I see a lot of governments say, oh, we should build one in our country. And I'm not sure that that's the solution. So I think also governments need to know where do they draw the line. And I also think, yeah, maybe I'll just leave it at that. Yeah. Who they're giving the money to. Yeah, perfect. Focus on Europe. Create a simple and harmonized market. And Index Venture today released, you know, their news about the options. How to share equity without it being a nightmare when you have employees all over Europe, for instance, is start by that simple, harmonized rules. Just very shortly, maybe follow up to you as well because you somebody is asking because you talked about this European entrepreneur collaboration. In what way is that being realized? Maybe could you give us a short example? To make the most out of Europe. Yes, the collaboration between the entrepreneurs. Yes. Basically, we need to force it, right? I mean, I'm not inventing anything. I was meeting with Farfetch. He's here as a CEO. He was explaining to me that part of his team is in Portugal because there are tons of advantage of having the developers in Portugal, whereas the management team is in London. But I think we should start having this mindset at the very beginning, at the very early stage. And yeah, that's it. Is it answering your question? In a sense. I hope so for the audience. No, absolutely. No, it makes sense. Now, I would like to, because unfortunately, we run out of time. So as a last, last, short, quick lightning round, since we have this amazing founders with us today, so what would you tell them in a word that kind of characterizes your service? Who wants to start? Diverse. One word. That's all we get. Perfect. Diverse. Family. Family. Perfect. Co-founders. Amazing. Guys, you have been amazing. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for sharing your knowledge, your tips and expertise. And we hope to talk to you later on in the networking sessions and to hear more. Thank you. Thank you.