Why a Startup is Like your First Girlfriend…
…they leave you but it's - probably - not your fault
“We need to talk…”
Uh oh.
“It’s not you, it’s me”
Hopefully, it has been a while since you last heard these traumatizing few words, but for the Incubateur HEC Paris team, that’s a regular occurrence…
Out of the 200+ desks that we have in our space, about 150 new residents come and go each year. Although most of this turnover is made of interns and quickly rotating employees, that also means that incubated startups decide to leave our program on a regular basis.
As you know from experience, when someone leaves you, you can be angry about it, you can get depressed, or you can admit that they could have a point.
So, how do we deal with breakups?
Let’s ask ourselves some tough questions:
What kind of boyfriend are we?
From our own - unbiased - opinion, we believe ourselves to be a pretty relaxed partner:
We aren’t self-centered
Our academic origins make us focused on teaching and empowering others, and thus we want the benefit to startups to be at the core of every decision we take.
We don’t do one-night stands
We don’t believe that you can deliver sufficient value in only a short period of time with an expiration date, so we decided early on that incubated startups could stay for as long as they wish.
We aren’t controlling
Rare are the occasions in which one size fits all, and in our case, we let our incubees pick and choose what they need.
We aren’t jealous
Nobody ever succeeds by relying on a single resource, so we always push startups to get what they can wherever they can.
Maybe that’s the wrong question, let’s try another:
What kind of ex are we?
“Let’s stay friend!”
That’s the usual departing startup farewell, regretting to leave and willing to stay in touch.
So it seems that staying friend is not without merits.
We care about our friends
Since our key tenet is to always do what’s best for startups, they know that our door always remains open, and that we will always do our best to support them.
Our friends care about us
Since our program is participative, our incubees are all used to giving back to the community by sharing knowledge and resources with their co-residents.
So it’s not much of a stretch for alumni come back to the Incubator to act as experts, speakers, or business angels for the new generations.
So we care about each other but - eventually - we don’t need each other anymore…
How did we get there?
At first, it seemed like a perfect match
When new incubees arrive, they are young, so they need to build most of their organisation.
Their founders can be new in their industry, so they need to develop a personal network.
Their product-market fit is not validated, so they need to build and iterate on their product.
Their company is mostly unknown, so they need to sell and to recruit it in spite of it.
While we can offer knowledge, in the form of mentoring by our selected experts.
We can help them build the foundation of a network, by sharing our contact database and conducting introductions.
We provide workforce to build and sell, by leveraging our partnerships with schools and corporations.
And we lend legitimacy, by endorsing startups and sharing the power of our brand.
And then everything changes…
Startups grow (we won’t complain), and they get bigger.
They expand their team, and then want their own office to build their own culture.
They become known in the industry, and they have developed their own network.
Their brand becomes intrinsically recognized, and they don’t need to borrow your own to attract talent.
And there’s the rub, for it seems that we are good at nurturing budding relationships, but while startups change, we remain a starter boyfriend.
So they leave.
But is it over?
Leaving has its drawbacks
When startups leave, their founders experience the honeymoon of inaugurating a new location they can call their own. However, after a few weeks, the loneliness of being a founder can make itself known anew.
Alumni startups still have needs
It’s not that startups that leave the Incubator don’t need to recruit anymore, but they switch from primarily hiring interns to recruiting senior profiles.
It’s not that the experts who come do Office Hours cannot bring them anything anymore, but they would be more useful as investors or board members than merely as mentors.
It’s not that they don’t meet problems anymore, but that these problems are increasingly complex and need more in-depth focus than an hour meeting.
Now for the hard thing:
How do we become lifetime material?
Time to hit the gym and become a better partner
At HEC, we started our entrepreneurship journey 40+ years ago when creating our first Entrepreneurship Master’s, and today our goal is to support entrepreneurs their entire life, from ideation as a student to selling your umpteenth company 40 years later.
The Incubateur HEC Paris is always mutating to better fit that purpose, and its current form is just one of the manifestations of HEC Entrepreneurship support approach.
Hopefully, the longer we exist, the more we grow, and more we broaden our domain of competence.
The magic of our community was inside us all along
One of the main aspect of our current incubation program is its universality: startups founders and employees can benefit from resources equally and can all fetch the means to thrive in their time spent with us.
However, the more companies grow, the more the needs of founders and employees differ:
Founders come for the Incubator, but stay for their peers, finding them a panacea for the lonesomeness of entrepreneurship, counterparts with whom to share and to expect understanding.
Employees come for a project and a job, but stay for the quality of the training they can access, knowledge they gain at no cost to their startup, but which ultimately benefits it.
That’s a good reminder that our job is not one of real estate, it’s one of service and community-building, and that’s the point of which we have been reminded these past few months.
So you won’t need to move in with us for life, we can do long-distance relationships too…
That’s what we are working on, so stay tuned…
(Obviously, when reading this article, feel free to genderbend every metaphor to your own tastes. This is where poetic licence hits its limits…)