What it’s like to start a business with eFounders
Disclosure: this post is not in any way written or sponsored by eFounders. I’m the founder of @slite, the new way of writing in teams, which I launched with them. I wrote Slite’s first lines of code just a year and a half ago, we’re now a team of nine, have left eFounders and are currently accelerated by Y Combinator. I’ve heard a lot of things about eFounders before, during & after our time there and thought it was worth sharing my thoughts and take on this exceptional model.
Summer 2016 was a key moment for me: I had just stopped my second company, and while my first failure had been super healthy and brought a lot of learnings, the second was really harsh. While all I could think of doing was starting something up again, I was not ready to bootstrap a project on my own right after that.
That’s how I came to meet with Thibaud, the co-founder and CEO of eFounders. He’s this tall guy, charismatic, super energetic and always on the move. And he is the number one reason I launched Slite with eFounders as he radiated exactly what I was looking for: an incredible dynamism, the kind of charisma you need to kickstart a project & a super high level of ambition backed by an experience of world-class startup success (Fotolia, his company, was sold 800M$ to Adobe).
Just to refresh your memory, Thibaud & his cofounder Quentin are building a special model with eFounders: they find founders, finance them, host their startup, participate intensively in their product’s development, help them grow the team and open their networks to find the products’ first beta testers and investors. After roughly 14 months, the projects and team fly the nest. For this, they take a third of the company. They are now quite famous in the Parisian ecosystem as they’ve been behind a bunch of great products over the years, among which Front, Spendesk or more recently Forest.
You have to expect the right things from eFounders
A startup is something by nature original (or at least the good ones are), and they can’t be moulded. It’s important to keep in mind that eFounders provide a lot of things but they won’t be the ones bringing the sparkle that makes a startup outstanding.
What expertise eFounders brings
First of all intangible things I mentioned earlier: a super high level of ambition and dynamism. Those are carried by the core team and by the other startups at eFounders: the energy at the studio is unique.
Second, their team is very operational and brings concrete skills to each project especially in product, design & marketing. Working from day one with highly talented experts is absolutely game changer (special kudos Jonathan, Didier, Meghan & Axel you 🤘😘). I can currently compare with Y Combinator’s help and I can honestly say eFounders’ deep implication in the product makes it at least as valuable.
Eventually, eFounders gives projects a label which helps them gain the trust of first users. We built a pool of ~500 active users during our first four months of private beta in large part thanks to this.
What you need to bring as a founder
Spoiler : basically all the “founder” part. Here are 2 key things.
One of the trickiest parts might be related to building a team culture. eFounders has a pretty strong culture, which as founder you have to embrace. At the same time it cannot and should not be your team’s. Founders are really founders: they are not there for the employee ride. They must have the will to build something unique, something that they’ll truly bear and therefore, push for their own teams’ culture. For example, even when we were as small as four people, we regularly went on our own team retreats, a chance to get away from the studio and focus on building our own culture (sneak peek of the last one in Amsterdam👇 😉).
The other thing that is mandatory in this context is a good mix of management, assertiveness & leadership. It’s your team, your product, and eF should not be the one calling all the shots. I’d go further : it is a super bad sign if they start calling all the shots. This is difficult because you have to build super fast during your time at eFounders and at the same time prove your legitimacy. But this is key to ensure the company will survive outside eFounders.
What eFounders brings as an investor
Now on a more practical point of view : basically, eFounders invests in your company for 14 months and takes 33% of it. The average cost for them is around 500k€, including your entire team’s salary as well as the core team’s. For people who’ve raised before, this can seem huge, especially as you have no legal control on the company before leaving.
However, you should bear in mind that this is funding before anything exists. To me, the amount of ambition, energy and time we gained during Slite’s first 14 months made it entirely worthwhile. Not to mention the incredible network we are lucky to be a part of and the valuable relationships we’ve built.
I wrote this article to help future founders join eFounders knowing all the facts. I hope I’ve made it clear: it was super valuable for me, as a founder, and for Slite, as a team. It might not be the perfect or obvious choice for a few already successful entrepreneurs, but it is no doubt an incredible opportunity for a lot of new entrepreneurs.
If this speaks to you don’t wait a minute 👉 apply, even if you don’t end up doing something with them, meeting the team will be worth your time!
And as always check out www.slite.com, the new way of writing things in team. It will replace your docs & wiki like Slack replaced your emails.
