Entrepreneur First London: Finding a Co-Founder in 12 Weeks

The first thing they tell you at Entrepreneur First is that most of you won’t make it to the end. This is meant to be motivating. I think about 60% of the room found it motivating. The other 40% looked like they’d just been told the restaurant was out of the fish.

I joined EF’s LD12 cohort in London, which for the uninitiated is a programme backed by Reid Hoffman (yes, the LinkedIn Reid Hoffman) that inverts the normal startup model. Most accelerators want you to show up with a team and an idea. EF wants you to show up with neither. The thesis is simple: talented people, thrown together with enough structure and pressure, will form better companies than friends who had a pub idea. It’s speed dating for nerds, except the commitment is a company, not a second date.

There were the bones of 80 people in our cohort. PhDs, ex-McKinsey types, a few engineers who’d left Google, and me, fresh-ish from submitting my thesis at Imperial and wondering if I was supposed to be doing a postdoc instead. The backgrounds ranged from machine learning to biotech to fintech to “I’m not entirely sure what I do but I have strong opinions about it.”

How EF Actually Works

The programme runs in two phases. Phase one is “Edge,” where you figure out what you’re good at and what problems you care about. Phase two is “Form,” where you pair up and try to build something. In between, there’s a terrifying checkpoint where the EF team decides whether your nascent team is worth continuing to invest in.

Every week, you have check-ins with an EF talent investor. These are 15-minute conversations that range from genuinely helpful (“have you talked to Sarah? She’s working on something adjacent”) to existential (“so what is your unfair advantage, exactly?”). The talent investors are good. They’ve seen hundreds of teams form and die, and they can spot a doomed pairing from across the room. The problem is that you can’t, because you’re inside it.

I spent the first three weeks having coffee with everyone. Not exaggerating. I think I had something like 45 one-on-one coffees in 15 working days. My caffeine tolerance has never recovered. You’re essentially running a parallel job interview process where you’re simultaneously the interviewer and the candidate, and the job description changes every conversation.

The Ideas That Came and Went

Here’s a tangent that I think is actually the point: the ideas don’t matter as much as you think they do at the start. In week two, I was convinced that the future was in energy harvesting for IoT devices (because, you know, PhD). By week four, I was sketching out a computer vision product for construction sites. By week six, I was looking at planning applications and geospatial data.

That last one stuck, though not at EF. More on that later.

The thing about EF’s model is that it optimises for speed of iteration. You’re supposed to kill ideas quickly. The failure mode isn’t picking the wrong idea; it’s spending four weeks on an idea that needed to die in four days. I watched a few teams do this. They’d find an interesting problem, build a slide deck, talk to two potential customers, and then spend three weeks refining the slide deck instead of talking to more customers. The EF team would gently suggest they were “polishing the wrong thing,” which is a very British way of saying “stop.”

Finding (or Not Finding) Fit

I didn’t find a co-founder at EF London. That’s the honest bit. I had two near-misses: one where the technical skills overlapped too much (two people who can build the thing but neither wants to sell it), and one where we liked each other fine but couldn’t agree on a problem worth solving. Both are common failure modes, and both feel personal even when they’re not.

What I did get was a network that’s been worth more than most people’s MBAs. The LD12 alumni include people who’ve gone on to raise serious rounds, and the WhatsApp group is still active. There’s something about shared intensity that creates bonds. You don’t forget the people who were in the trenches with you, even if you never built anything together.

The programme cost me nothing financially (EF invests in you, not the other way around, taking 8% equity in any company that forms). It cost me about three months of my life and a not-insignificant amount of ego. I’d do it again.

In fact, I did do it again. But that’s a different post.