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The founder formula
Founder fall outs are all too common. We’ve all seen The Social Network and Mark Zuckerberg’s spectacular million-dollar fall-out with best friend and co-founder Eduardo Saverin, so finding the right co-founder to share your entrepreneurial journey is vital. Talent investor Entrepreneur First, have found the formula …
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ounded in 2011, Entrepreneur First has turned the standard accelerator model on its head, investing in people with ‘the edge’ rather than big ideas. They bring together cohorts of the world’s brightest future founders and allow them time to develop co-founding relationships, and a business idea, whilst on the cohort. This ‘inorganic’ founder relationship building, was the brainchild of Entrepreneur First cofounders Alice Bentinck MBE and Matt Clifford, and it has successfully nurtured over 2,000 people to create more than 300 companies worth over a combined $2 billion. Alice Bentinck definitely has ‘the edge’. She quit her job as a management consultant at McKinsey and turned down a role at Google to start Entrepreneur First, challenging the investment status quo, and has gone on to receive numerous accolades including a place in the Top 50 Most Inspiring Women in European Tech, an MBE for services to business and was named one of London’s most Influential People by the Evening Standard. D/srupt spoke to Alice about finding people with ‘the edge’, striving for diversity in tech and why founder break-ups aren’t necessarily a bad thing …
Did you always want to be an entrepreneur? The thing that really cemented it for me was doing Young Enterprise in sixth form. My family weren’t particularly businessy, having military and medical backgrounds, and I didn’t really know anyone who was in business, but doing Enterprise in sixth form, suddenly I was like: oh wow! This is really interesting and being able to create something from scratch that’s creative and new and exciting, and having the opportunity to sell it and make money from it really opened my eyes. I think that was probably the moment where I realised that I wanted a career, not just in business, but in doing my own thing.
The founder formula
Where did the idea come from? After a couple of years working at McKinsey, Matt and I both realised that we weren’t going to be lifelong management consultants. At the time, around 2008/2009, there really wasn’t much infrastructure around starting a startup, and the new Silicon Roundabout was being heralded by the government. McKinsey did a piece of work on how to build Tech City and one of the footnotes said it would be great to have a graduate scheme for entrepreneurs. We took that, having recently been graduates ourselves, and thought: okay, how do we turn that into a business?
D/srupt The magazine for innovators & entrepreneurs
Issue 3 / 2020–21
