A warm welcome to The Family

As highlighted on the blog last week, Martyn and I recently had the pleasure of spending some quality time with the Paris startup community. After spending our weekend at Music Hackday Paris, we had a full Monday to enjoy the city, so we did what we do in such a situation – we met some awesome people and discovered how we could help them be even more awesome…

Just a week before our Parisian journey, Mr. Jim Franklin introduced me to the kind folks at an up and coming accelerator called The Family. “TheFamily is an accelerator for early-stage startups to drive them from [0] to [1] through education & unfair advantages.”

That last part – the “unfair advantages” – is where SendGrid comes in. Over the past two years, we’ve been quietly and organically growing a program we call SendGrid Accelerate – a dedicated startup outreach initiative, aimed at doing whatever we can to help startups succeed.

At the most basic level, we offer our email products and services for free for a limited time to all members of the program. These discounts are available to thousands of startups around the world, via accelerators, incubators, coworking spaces, venture capital firms, online and offline communities, events, and more.

But we want to go much further than money-saving and ensured email delivery. We want to share everything SendGrid has to offer, through the collective strengths and experiences of its people, and we want to share that with every startup we can possibly reach. We do this through general mentorship, technical workshops, hands-on training, connections within an extensive and helpful network, and casual office visits. We’re dedicated to supporting startups the same way we were supported in our formative days, before, during, and after TechStars.

Now, back to The Family. Our time with them would fall in to the “casual office visits.” We met the staff and the founders, took a tour of the beautiful accommodations, heard a pitch from each of the startups, and had a quick chat, shared startup stories and email tips and tricks, and enjoyed a delicious lunch from a local Japanese restaurant – that’s right, Paris does sushi right, too!

Martyn and I thoroughly enjoyed our time in their home – quite literally, they work out of a fabulous, old French house, and it’s as cozy as can be! The people who make this unique accelerator tick are clearly driven by the right motivation: to help entrepreneurs succeed, through a trusted and dedicated support system. And the founders who are building the companies in this quaint little startup sanctuary are obviously hungry to change the world.

The Family is just getting started – as is evidenced by the URL to their website alpha.thefamily.co  🙂 It’s a promising young startup in its own right, and I strongly believe they’ll accomplish their mission of fostering successful businesses, while establishing a more family-oriented approach to a mission that’s common to so many organizations (read: accelerators) in the world today.

If you’d like to learn more about The Family, connect with their wonderful people, and/or see how they might be able to help your startup grow, watch the video below, tweet them on Twitter and like them on Facebook. We’ve also posted some pics that they shared with us, to give you a little inside look at the place they call home.

We’d like to thank everyone at The Family, for welcoming us with open arms and for hospitably inviting us to visit them whenever we’re in the beautiful city of Paris, and we congratulate the Parisian startup community for yet another contributing member who’s doing their part to make it better for all.