An overview of Entrepreneur First - why we exist, what problem we're solving and what we're learned

1. How to actually build startups with graduates
Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford 2013
@matthewclifford // @EntreFirst

2. What is EF?
In Year 1:
33 individuals
-> 11 startups
-> $11m raised in seed
We start with recent grads, pre-team and pre-idea, and achieve top-tier acceleratorlike funding outcomes for the companies they create

3. An uncontroversial premise...
More students should start startups
when they graduate
It was hard to find people who disagreed with the premise…

4. … with some implementation “challenges”
Only two problems with students
who want to start startups…

5. … with some implementation challenges
They don’t have teams
1
and they have bad ideas
… and hard to find people who thought it was possible
1 I’m going to focus on how we solve the first problem today, as it’s the harder one to solve

6. The existing infrastructure isn’t the answer
Accelerators don’t solve
the problem
Find a good accelerator who will take you pre-team and pre-idea

7. The existing infrastructure isn’t the answer
(and actually accelerators
are broken)
An accelerator for graduate startups wouldn’t be any good

8. How new accelerators imagine the market for
teams1
Team at 100th percentile
Team at 90th percentile
Exit value
Team quality
The 10th best football player is a little bit worse than the best
1 Maybe they don’t imagine this is true, but they act as though they do

9. How it actually works
Team at 100th
percentile
Exit value
Team at 90th percentile
Team quality
The 10th best startup is a LOT less successful than the best

10. The existing infrastructure isn’t the answer
Picking first matters a lot
This is true fractally. A massive proportion of YCombinator’s value is in two
companies.

11. The existing infrastructure isn’t the answer
EF is YC for individuals
We want to pick first – e.g. before Google, Goldman Sachs, etc

12. How EF works
1. 6 months team building
2. 3 months validation
3. 3 months acceleration
Team building is part-time, starting in the February before people graduate. Validation
and acceleration are full-time, starting in September.

13. How team building works
We treat teams the way Lean
treats ideas
TEAM
People start with team “hunches”. We require them to test these hunches repeatedly
by building real products in multiple team permutations over the summer. The idea is
to fail the team fast.

14. Some case studies
Felix
CompSci
Imperial
Andy
Management
Manchester
 Mobile and web app for mobile mechanics with realtime bookings and quote engine, drawing on
massive dataset of repair times
 Growing revenue 40% per month

15. Some case studies
Rashid
CompSci
Sussex
Elia
CompSci
Warwick
 Models billions of desktop, mobile and tablet
datapoints to create a single customer profile for
mobile advertisers
 Raised one of the largest seed rounds in Europe
(£1.5m) earlier this year

16. Some case studies
Leo
History, St Andrews, selftaught hacker
Zefi
English, UCL
 Version control for everyone and everything (First
step: git running inside MS Office)
 Funded by YCombinator

17. Why it works
1. Everyone is awesome
2. Everyone is determined
3. Everyone commits a full year
These three conditions have to be in place – and it’s hard to put them in place for
people other than recent grads. Who else can commit a year?

18. We’re recruiting now for 2014
Apply now: entrepreneurfirst.org.uk
@matthewclifford // @entrefirst
Any questions?