Programs | Entrepreneur First

We fund exceptional individuals to ditch the status quo and build startups from scratch. Our programs give you access to a carefully curated selection of potential cofounders who are committed to building a globally important company now. You’ll learn from some of the most renowned founders and investors across Silicon Valley as you prepare to launch and scale your startup.

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WHO YOU’LL MEET

There is no hiring criteria for a founder. We don’t look for particular badges or achievements.

Exceptional talent can take many forms. Maybe you’re frustrated by building another founder’s vision at a scale up. Perhaps impatient to see your PhD research get applied. Or bored of building hacky products in your bedroom. We help you understand your potential and turn it into something exceptional.

Often referred to as outliers, we select those that have already achieved exceptional outcomes relative to their peers. You’ll likely come from a technical background, and have been building and creating throughout your life. You’re ready to surpass your early achievements and the limits placed on you by others. You’re an optimist obsessed with shaping the future, and you want to have globally important impact through founding a technology startup.

Who We Invest In

Sasha Haco
Cofounder & CEO, Unitary

“When I entered academia... I realized that it would take maybe my whole lifetime or more before anyone realized the impact of anything I would do. The universe of unsolved problems is so big. Building Unitary to make the internet safer is tangibly changing the lives of users and moderators around the world.”

WHAT YOU’LL DO

See what you can build surrounded by a carefully selected group of ambitious peers. Each committed to finding a cofounder and building a startup from scratch. Right now, your ideas are likely constrained by the status quo, limited by your skills, and what you know. This new peer group will reframe what’s possible.

We bring you together in a curated cohort, starting with an unforgettable Kick Off Summit. Where your beliefs and ambitions will be pushed further than ever before.

Learn more about our program structure below.

Barney Hussey-Yeo
Founder & CEO, Cleo

“Entrepreneur First completely reframed what I thought I could achieve so early on in my career... it put me on a different trajectory.”

Program structure

The program has two stages: Form and Launch.

01

FORM

The first 12 weeks

You’ll be pushed harder than ever before in this full-time period of team and idea formation. Dive deep into your unique advantages as a founder, identify the cofounder who enhances your abilities, and accelerate beyond imagination.

When you join our community, you will receive a Talent Investment (amount variable per location). You can use this money towards your living costs or any company costs during Form. If you later don’t form a company or we choose not to invest further, we don’t take any equity and you don’t owe us anything. You can find more details about the Talent Investment and our broader investment terms in our location specific FAQs.

You will test cofounder partnerships and ideas as you build from day one, supported by a team of Talent Investors and our global network of advisors, who will challenge your ambitions and vision of success. You’ll get credits for OpenAI and AWS, plus access to over a hundred partnerships with leading tech products and services.

Around 80% of people will find a cofounder and hone in on an idea within eight weeks. You then start building your company with weekly support from your dedicated advisor, and prepare to pitch to our Investment Committee.

If your team receives funding by our Investment Committee, you’ll get investment of up to $250,000. This is made up of a $125,000 investment from EF, and the opportunity to receive a further $125,000 investment from a partner of EF, Transpose Platform.

Founders who do not receive funding finish the program and join our powerful global community of alumni. Many receive job offers from our portfolio companies, and all consider their time at EF a transformative period in their lives.

02

LAUNCH

The second 12 weeks

The second stage of the program is when you’ll rapidly grow what you’ve built into an early stage company. This means something different for every startup, but typically involves releasing an MVP, onboarding customers, or accelerating research and development. The best founders on EF move so fast that when they raise their seed rounds they’ve effectively created $1M of value every single day.

As you build you’ll be invited to relocate to San Francisco. Here, you’ll have the opportunity to continue your journey on Launch in San Francisco, growing what you’ve built into an early stage company while gaining access to the world’s most important startup ecosystem.

You’ll be matched with a Silicon Valley advisor, join regular Happy Hour events and attend weekly conversations with experienced founders, operators and investors.

This twelve week stage of building culminates in EF’s Demo Day, where we introduce you to our global network of investors and support you to raise your seed round. For those in San Francisco, founders will pitch in-person to some of the best investors in Silicon Valley and the world.

You can read more about Launch in San Francisco here.

WHAT YOU’LL CREATE

Our founders have built some of the world’s most impactful early-stage technology startups. They are now worth more than $10B.

When Sasha Haco joined EF in 2019, she had recently graduated with a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Cambridge, specializing in artificial intelligence. During her PhD she spent a year as a visiting fellow at Harvard, and worked with Dr. Stephen Hawking on the black hole information paradox.

Sasha met her cofounder, James Thewlis, a computer vision PhD from Oxford’s Visual Geometry Group. At EF they founded Unitary, a content moderation platform using context-aware AI to keep content online safe. Unitary secured $8 million in Seed funding from Plural, a European fund led by unicorn founders, to further automate content moderation with context-aware AI. They recently raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Creandum.

To see what you could build on one of our programs, apply below.

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FAQs

Learn more about our programs in our site-specific FAQs.

EF Find

Apply to Find, a weekend-long accelerated taste of our startup building program.

Network on demand

When you join EF, you’ll join a network of some of the world’s best founders, investors, and operators.