Alize Zagury

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I love impulsive people who design beautiful and emotional products because they couldn't dream of doing anything else. When we started TheFamily, Nicolas, Oussama and I wanted to kill the toxicity of the French tech environment. How? We looked to design an ambitious infrastructure for startups, by scaling education, tools and access to capital in order to create billion dollar startups. With TheFamily, I work tirelessly to make changes to a landscape ruled by elitism, where neither youth nor diversity are welcome. We’re driven by a strong belief in the ability of local talent - no matter where it comes from - to build international champions. I was born in 1984 to an open-minded and loving family. With a father from Casablanca and a mother from Paris, my siblings and I grew up around plenty of music, drawings, and culture. They pushed us to find our own quests for meaning. For me, having grown up in a suburb of Paris, part of my quest came from always being aware of the discrimination and racism that was present yet largely ignored in France.  Throughout my life, I enjoyed developing my artistic skills, but a strong desire to compete with decision makers made me choose business studies. So for university, I selected a French management school, EM Lyon. After university, I ended up discovering the tech culture by pure chance. After spending time in art galleries and with artists’ collectives, a friend forwarded me a job posting from a non-profit organization involved in digital innovations. I immediately fell in love with this new world. Artists, engineers, and doers were all fighting the same battle. Digital was providing the tools necessary for breaking down the walls that prevented them from working together. In 2009, YCombinator was already a big deal. I travelled all over Europe, discovering different ecosystems and using this experience as an inspiration to create something new for the French market. I launched Le Camping - the first startup accelerator in France. After 3 seasons, 36 startups, and 18 fundraising rounds, I left for a new adventure - serving as CEO of TheFamily.