While considering a move to France, one of most interesting organisations I stumbled across was The Family (https://www.thefamily.co https://www.thefamily.co).

While considering a move to France, one of most interesting organisations I stumbled across was The Family (https://www.thefamily.co https://www.thefamily.co). They exude a really good ethos - or have really good copywriters, at least - and show self-awareness of some of the reservations that come up on HN when somebody mentions Startup and France in the same sentence. Their 'Toxicity' post damn well near seduced me (pesky Frenchies!) and is worth a read: > France is full of incubators, there’s news coverage, there’s this startup out of Bulgaria that just raised 2 million, everybody’s a software engineer, hell, in some countries, everybody’s a CEO! But that’s the difference between hype, which is useless, and hope, which is useful... > ...If you rely on TechCrunch and Medium to give you hints on how to be an entrepreneur, you risk three things: the first is that you believe it’s all true. The job of any good entrepreneur is to sell a good story. Nobody sells you the horrible things going on with the company (at least not until after the company is well on its way to being dead). The second is that you miss critical information filters ...The third risk is that you start to think it’s easy...that growth is just a matter of deciding when it’s the right time. > Money and people are needed to make any project work, but they are replaceable: there’s always someone willing to write another check, and there’s always someone who you can find to take over a particular job. But you can’t get back time. A bunch of people sitting around, saying that they’re working, talking about new projects every two months, focusing on getting a grant rather than getting a sale, those are people in a toxic ecosystem who are just wasting time. > Learn to recognize fake work — anything that doesn’t bring you closer to more customers, that doesn’t bring you closer to a better product, that doesn’t put people in contact with your solutions. Applying for public money, going to conferences, taking meetings, this is fake work that doesn’t help you with your business model, doesn’t identify problems and solutions, doesn’t show you the actual goals that you have to achieve in order to have success. Real work does all of those things. > If you can make money, you’ll have time to figure out the right business model. You won’t have to rely on investors who don’t understand your goals. Finding bad investors can be worse than having none at all. https://www.thefamily.co/toxicity https://www.thefamily.co/toxicity Anyone have any experience with these guys? Algolia and Crisp.im passed through their doors, and they seem to be doing well.