We exist for exceptional individuals. We amplify their potential as they found a globally important startup.

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We back outliers

You have high expectations for yourself and the people around you. You’ve excelled in all the games others told you were critical to play, and realized the work worth doing is to be found elsewhere.

You are restless; impatient to make an impact, and dissatisfied with the pace and trajectory others have suggested for you.

Your achievements and the challenges you’ve overcome make you confident you have talent, but you haven’t yet found your limit.

You believe you’ve found the direction which will give you the agency you’re looking for: you want to start and grow a company, but who to start it with and how to start it still feel like open-ended questions.

That’s why we’re here.

We reframe what’s possible for exceptionally talented individuals. We look for the builders, technologists and early professionals from diverse backgrounds, who are tired of winning at the wrong game. 

We identify outliers, and help them find their way. 

We believe specific intrinsics can enable these outliers to harness their talent as the founders of globally important companies. We call these intrinsics force amplifiers

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Force Amplifiers

AMBITION

We never judge our founders on their initial ideas; only the magnitude of their thinking

Ambition amplifies an outlier’s talent, enabling them to build at a scale most others don’t think is possible. We know this because we’ve seen it. Our founders have an innate, determined urge to build, they are obsessed with big ideas, and bored by anything overly obvious. 

We look for these ambitious outliers, those with the capacity to visualize how technology will shape the future, and the agency and skills to make it happen. 

FOUNDER APTITUDE

Founder Aptitude is the combination of intrinsic characteristics that transform an outlier into a founder.

Those who have had others follow their actions and decisions, who have extreme bias to action, and who respond to new challenges by building.

We’re for those with the intellectual excellence to anticipate, reimagine, and build the technologies of the future. These are the outliers with the Founder Aptitude to build a globally important startup. 

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Chris Butcher
Cofounder and CTO Pave (formerly Portify)
“What Entrepreneur First offers is insane. I can't even believe it exists.”
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