Our Team

Entrepreneur First was cofounded by Matt Clifford and Alice Bentinck on the premise that the world is missing out on some of its best founders. We're led by experienced former founders, operators and industry experts in our four hub cities across the world.

Our leadership team

Alice Bentinck headshot

Alice Bentinck

Cofounder and CEO
Alice Bentinck headshot
Alice is cofounder and CEO at Entrepreneur First, which she started with Matt Clifford in 2011. With Matt, Alice is also the co-author of ‘How to be a Founder’, the essential guide on how entrepreneurs can identify, fund, and launch their best ideas.

She also set up Code First Girls, which has taught over 25,000 women to code for free while at university.

Alice started her career at McKinsey & Co. She was awarded an MBE for services to business in the 2016 Queen’s Birthday Honours.
Matt Clifford headshot

Matt Clifford

Cofounder
Matt Clifford headshot
Matt is cofounder of Entrepreneur First, which he started with Alice Bentinck in 2011. Matt is focused full-time on advising and funding EF founders and startups, particularly in AI. With Alice, Matt is also the co-author of ‘How to be a Founder’, the essential guide on how entrepreneurs can identify, fund, and launch their best ideas.

Matt is the Chair of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), and sits on the board of Code First Girls, which he cofounded in 2013 to teach young women how to code. Matt is co-lead for the UK’s preparations for, and co-chair of, the first Global Summit on AI Safety, which the UK is hosting in November 2023.

Matt started his career at McKinsey & Co. and holds degrees from Cambridge and MIT, where he was a Kennedy Scholar. He was awarded an MBE for services to business in the 2016 Queen’s Birthday Honours.
Tom Shinner headshot

Tom Shinner

Partner and COO
Tom Shinner headshot
Tom is COO of Entrepreneur First, which he joined in September 2019. Tom joined EF from the UK Civil Service, having served on the main board of two departments - as Director of Strategy at the Department for Education, and for the last three years as the director at DExEU coordinating the UK Government's domestic policy and technical implementation of Brexit.

Tom started his career at McKinsey & Co., serving in the London and Middle East offices. He studied at the University of Oxford, where he was shortlisted for the All Souls prize fellowship, and in 2010 he cofounded a thriving Free School in south London.
James Meekings headshot

James Meekings

Partner and Chief Platform Officer
James Meekings headshot
James is the Chief Platform Officer at Entrepreneur First, where he is responsible for building the global platform to allow Entrepreneur First’s Talent Investors to hone their craft and be world class in everything they do.

In 2009 James cofounded Funding Circle, the global small business lending platform, where he was UK Managing Director. He grew the platform from a kitchen table with two university friends to facilitating more than £10 billion of loans, helping hundreds of thousands of small businesses and creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. Funding Circle listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2018.

Prior to his founding journey James worked at OC&C Strategy Consultants and studied at the University of Oxford.
Coralie Chaufour headshot

Coralie Chaufour

Partner and General Manager, Paris
Coralie Chaufour headshot
Coralie is the General Manager of Entrepreneur First in France. She joined EF from McKinsey & Co., where she was an Engagement Manager, after previously starting her own company and working as a corporate lawyer at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, a leading U.S. law firm.

Coralie was educated at Sciences Po Paris, Wharton and Harvard Law School and is a member of the New York Bar. Outside of EF, she rides her horse four times a week and competes in eventing and showjumping.
Rahul Samat headshot

Rahul Samat

Partner and General Manager, Bangalore
Rahul Samat headshot
Rahul is General Manager of Entrepreneur First in India. He joins EF following six years at Swiggy, where he created and grew their private brands business from pre-idea to a business unit that scaled into tens of millions of transactions.

Prior to his founding journey, Rahul started his career on Wall Street with Barclays Investment Bank and Capital One Financial Corporation. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and is an ardent football fan with a particular interest in exploring food from many different parts of the world.
Max Neuberger headshot

Max Neuberger

General Counsel
Max Neuberger headshot
Max is General Counsel at Entrepreneur First and is the Head of the Legal and Compliance Teams. Prior to EF he was General Counsel at Bloc Ventures, a deep tech venture capital company.

Max has been practicing law for more than 15 years, initially as a M&A lawyer at Herbert Smith Freehills before moving in-house to Virgin Management, the Branson family office.
Elspeth Lawson headshot

Elspeth Lawson

Partner and Deputy CPO
Elspeth Lawson headshot
Elspeth is Partner and Deputy CPO at EF. She joined in 2016, working on the first programs in London before moving to Paris to set up and lead the Program team. After returning to London, Elspeth led the Program team and then transitioned to Deputy CPO working alongside Alice to build out our programs in new locations.

Prior to EF, Elspeth worked for Clifford Chance in Paris and at Change.org. In her spare time, Elspeth loves fitness and regularly takes willing team members to new crossfit and spin classes across London.
Mike Phillips headshot

Mike Phillips

Principal, London
Mike Phillips headshot
Mike is a Principal in London, running our Core Talent Investing team responsible for finding and backing the most exceptional individuals to become the next generation of founders. Since joining EF in 2019, he's helped hundreds of entrepreneurs find their cofounder and build world-changing companies, like Omnipresent, Gensyn, Opply, and Ochre Bio.

Before EF, Mike spent time across enterprise sales and partnerships at Dext, a Series C Fintech, as part of the founding team of a cross-continental P2P lending startup, and in management consulting.
Joe Ros headshot

Joe Ros

Partner and General Manager, North America
Joe Ros headshot
Joe is the General Manager of Entrepreneur First in the US. He’s responsible for identifying the most ambitious talent in the country, investing in them, and building startups with them from scratch. He has been at EF since late 2017, initially responsible for creating and expanding our company funding programs in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Bangalore. In 2019, he took responsibility for our Seed SPV, providing capital at speed and global ambition to top companies created by EF in emerging ecosystems. In doing this, he’s deployed over $20M of capital for EF, and worked with some of EF’s top companies including FarmLend, Scarlet, Seppure, Green Li-ion, Fello, Drip.ai, and Neptune Robotics.

Before joining the EF team, Joe was a founder, software engineer, and early stage startup employee working in online games, edtech, and legaltech. He is also an EF alum, founding HowCloud as a member of our third cohort in London.

Clémence Bellanger

Principal, Paris
 Clémence is a Principal in Paris, running the Core program. Her journey with Entrepreneur First began in 2017, co-launching the Paris site, where she worked with over 200 entrepreneurs, including the founders of NeoPlants, Chipiron, Plantik and Lynceus.

She then joined Core Biogenesis, a biotechnology startup pioneering the production for cell therapy manufacturing, founded on the Paris program. As Head of Operations, her expertise spans finance, HR, supply chain management, and sales operations.

Today, her focus centres on advancing biotechnology and climate tech.
Urmil headshot

Urmil Shah

Principal, Bangalore
Urmil headshot
Urmil is a Principal in Bangalore. He runs the Graduate Talent Investing team responsible for finding and backing the most exceptional individuals to become the next generation of founders straight out of university.

He is the cofounder of Carnot Technologies, an automotive IOT startup, now acquired by Mahindra. Previously, he played a key role building Swiggy, the leading grocery delivery startup in India. He started his career at Bain and Company and is a graduate from IIT Bombay.
Jonny Clifford headshot

Jonny Clifford

Partner and General Manager, London
Jonny Clifford headshot
Jonny is General Manager of Entrepreneur First in London. He has been at EF since late 2016, initially leading on building out their corporate network before taking over the running of the London programme in early 2018. He has supported companies that have raised over $100M in seed funding such as Atlas ML, FabricNano, Intropic, Sonantic and Unitary.

He previously ran the sales team for Satchel, a Series A funded edtech startup in the UK, having joined them as one of their first employees.

Dominik Diak

Principal, London
 Dominik is a Principal in London, operating out of Berlin. He works alongside our Core & Graduate Talent Investing teams and is responsible for identifying & attracting exceptional Talent from across Europe to build globally important companies at EF. He has recently rejoined EF to strengthen EF's presence in continental Europe. He originally joined EF in 2017 and has spent four years working with EF portfolio companies, across London & Berlin, and supporting their fundraising efforts with Europe's best early-stage investors.

During his hiatus from EF, Dominik picked up software engineering and worked at a Berlin-based, VC-backed startup building a product to enable large enterprises to track carbon emissions across their entire supply chain.

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We’re looking for the next generation of Talent Investors to join us and enable the world’s most exceptional people to fulfil their potential.

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