It’s a bright Wednesday afternoon in Kings Cross and the area is abuzz with the possibilities of new tech as Entrepreneur First gets ready to kick off its first demo day of 2019.
If you’ve never heard of EF before, it’s an incubator that invests in people in order to find the big ideas of tomorrow. Whereas programmes like Google Startups will take on companies with fully formed ideas and products, EF brings in people, who don’t even need to have an idea, let alone a business plan.
“The core belief of EF is that it really matters what the most ambitious people do with their lives,” explains co-founder Alice Bentinck.
“Why hasn’t there been a Google in Europe? The answer isn’t about seed funding or any of these things, it’s that for a long time the most ambitious people in Europe have gone on to work at Goldman Sachs.”
What you need to know about Entrepreneur First
Bentinck started EF with her co-founder Matt Clifford back in 2011 as a way to invest in people. Now this has a term, ‘talent investing’, but at the time it was a radical departure from anything else.
“When we went around the London venture capital (VC) ecosystem in 2011, they were very polite but basically said, please don’t do this,” laughs Bentinck.
The bet Bentinck and Clifford made on investing in people has paid off – over the past eight years EF companies have gone on to raise hundreds of millions of dollars. EF companies have gone on to be sold in major deals, known as exits, such as visual machine learning company Magic Pony to Twitter and natural language processing start-up Bloomsbury AI to Facebook.
From that one office in London, there are now five other EF offices around the world in Paris, Berlin, Hong Kong, Singapore and Bangalore. Bentinck and Clifford themselves raised $115 million (£88 million) earlier this year to invest in the future of tech.
So what makes a person fit for EF? According to Clifford, there are four key ingredients: ambition, problem-solving, determination and having an edge.
“What edge means to us is the personal competitive advantage. We want to people, who even though they don’t have an idea to show us at that stage, we want to imagine them at demo day. Standing on the stage, what are they going to say about themselves that makes them an obvious founder for a company?
“If we can identify that, that gives us confidence there will be an idea.”
Why Entrepreneur First works so well
Part of the magic of EF comes down to what Bentinck calls “combinatorial innovation”. “If you think about the ideation process – when someone comes to EF, they’re constrained by their skills and experience in terms of which ideas they create,” she says.
“When you combine two, sometimes parallel, sometimes far apart skill sets, and bringing together committed, super smart people together, and then it’s seeing what comes out of that.”
Take the example of Neoplants, pitching in this afternoon’s proceedings and almost certainly a company to watch. The start-up wants to create a new breed of plants that can detoxify your indoor environment, removing the volatile organic compounds in the atmosphere. One founder has a PhD in genetic modification and the other has a background in new product launches at Google.
“If you’d told him 12 months ago, you’re going to start a really important plant company, he’d be like what?” says Clifford. “But without his expertise in product innovation, how do you create a new category? Neoplants wouldn’t exist.
“The thing I love, and will never get old, is you never know what you’re going to get. It’s all about these incredible individuals,” he adds.
Today’s demo day is different to previous iterations in that it is bringing together the cohorts from all three of EF’s European offices for the first time. Bentinck says this is because London is the VC capital of Europe – in 2018, the UK brought in more than 1.5 times the level of funding than Germany.
Part of this is due to the city starting to mature now in terms of tech. “We’ve seen big companies come through like TransferWise or Babylon, who have trained up the next COOs and product leads,” she says. “It’s making a really big difference and helps to cement London as the best place in Europe to start a company.”
The future of Entrepreneur First
Hot on the heels of London’s medtech successes like Babylon, there are a few medical-focused start-ups in the EF Demo Day cohort, including four companies focused specifically on solving issues around cancer.
One start-up, Blazer, wants to use machine learning to predict responses cancer patients will have to immunotherapy to boost the potential of treatments. Another, Panakiea, uses deep learning to speed up the diagnosis of cancer from biopsies, to bring the process down from 20+ days to only a handful.
Clifford also says this has been one of EF’s most diverse cohorts, with at least one-third of teams with a female founding member.
Diversity is something the duo are passionate about. In 2012, they set up Code First: Girls, which has now taught 10,000 girls to code for free, in order to improve the diversity of people going into the industry. According to Bentinck, CFG has been instrumental in getting more women into software roles, but as EF has an emphasis on technical talent, particularly founders with PhDs, it will take a while before more of the programme’s graduates make it to EF.
“My guess is in five years, we’ll be talking about the huge numbers of CFG grads doing EF,” says Clifford.
The EF founders’ other big bet is that in the next five years Europe will have its very own Google-sized company, and that it’s going to come from EF. “The oldest companies in the EF portfolio, from the current model, are about four years old. Even if there is a Google in there, it’s probably going to be another five or six years before its obvious, but it is coming,” says Clifford.
“There’s a lot of optimism at the moment. The well-documented British scepticism is beginning to disappear,” adds Bentinck.
The three London companies to watch in the EF Europe cohort
Neoplants
Using the power of synthetic biology, Neoplants is creating new plants to improve the air we breathe indoors.
Speak AI
Expressive and realistic artificial voices are here and Speak AI is already providing its tech to games studios.
Vine Health
A patient care app, the platform uses behavioural science and AI to increase the survival of cancer patients.
Subscribe to Women Tech Charge, a new podcast from the Evening Standard.
From fashion to finance, technology is revolutionising our lives. Meet the extraordinary women who are leading the charge.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
