Taking Entrepreneur First to Germany
I have been working at Talent Investor Entrepreneur First for almost a year now. I’ve had many aspiring entrepreneurs, VC enthusiasts, investors and friends ask me about my time at EF, and particularly about exporting EF to Germany. After working with two cohorts in the capital of techno and blockchain, now seems like a good time to stop and reflect.
This is not meant to be a post about the EF model: if you’re looking to familiarise yourself with EF, there are many better posts out there, written by our founders, team, investors and alumni.
My first week at EF felt a little like stepping on a rocket bound for space, and doing it during the last 10 seconds of the countdown to launch.
During that week, we were meeting with teams formed in the first part of the programme to select the ones we’d make our pre-seed investment in and work with during the next 6 months. Crucially, this was the first time the selection process was running across two locations. I spent Monday and Tuesday meeting teams in London, Wednesday meeting teams in Berlin, and Thursday and Friday listening to our Investment Committee making decisions back in London. Then, I was asked whether I wanted to work with the teams we selected in Berlin, and off I went.
10 months later, I’m working with the second batch of Berlin-based teams to prepare for our 11th European Demo Day this Wednesday (watch here). A lot has changed in 10 months, and I’ve not only learnt how EF works but have had the chance to play a role in one of EF’s current key missions: adapting the model to new geographies.
EF is a wonderchild of the London ecosystem, one with very specific characteristics: a centralised talent pool (yet one where people are not finding co-founding opportunities as naturally as in Silicon Valley), a deep capital pool that is comfortable with the stage EF teams tend to be at, a legal system that’s very friendly to first-time founders who are short on cash.
In Berlin, we are faced with a very different reality: a talent pool disseminated throughout the country, a capital pool perhaps unfamiliar with EF’s months-old co-founding relationships and products, a legal system that involves notary appointments and paper forms, where incorporating a company can be unaffordable for first-time founders fresh out of academia.
You may ask: is blitzscaling even possible or advisable a) for a company like EF, where so much is based on people rather than technology and b) when locations are so different they require changes to the core product?
One of the companies that worked with EF on branding offers what I think is insight on why the answer to this question is yes: EF recruits people to a cause — that “It matters what the most ambitious people do with their lives” — and is predicating a “new way to do things”. Essentially, that means EF is incredibly mission-driven and can go into new locations with the comfort of:
Yet, the differences between London and Berlin remain undeniable. While talking about how EF is tackling this would require a lot more words and a bit of secret sauce, my personal iteration between Germany’s first and second EF cohorts has had me:
Ultimately, EF’s expansion will only be proven by the teams themselves and their exceptional ability to thrive in spite of a difficult legal system or an unfamiliar investor landscape. And our teams are already at work: I’ve seen people make hundreds of phone calls in a day, sneak into their old uni lab at night and many of the other little things that only the most ambitious people in the world do, in London or anywhere else.
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Taking Entrepreneur First to Germany
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