YouSaid · the spoken record

Alice Bentinck

lines on the record: 61
first: 2022-07-12
most recent: 2022-07-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I first managers in McKinsey, I definitely had huge imposter syndrome when I first joined. And McKinsey is very good at throwing very young graduates into situations they're definitely not qualified to do. We would be walking into meetings and she would just say, cool, you do this one. I remember and it would absolutely terrify me. And then afterwards, I remember saying to her, you know, it'd be really great if you could just give me some time to prepare. And she was like, no, the beauty of this is that you need to do it on the fly. And it felt horrible at the time. It was really uncomfortable, but I will forever be grateful to her because I think that ability to conquer imposter syndrome, think on your feet, form on your feet has been a vital skill for the rest of my career. Yeah, a shout out to all the managers out there who really genuinely try and push the people that work for them to greatness.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Common reason to reject is to stay in the status quo. Now, what you could say is, well, we didn't want those people anyway. There weren't any good. Like if they didn't want to be a founder, then they're not for us. But I think that is too closed a mindset. It undervalues how strong the status quo is. If you think about the mindset shifts that somebody has to go through, they spend the first 25 years of their life being told that life will look one way. And then suddenly EF comes in and is like, hey, no, your job doesn't matter. Sucks being an employee. You want to have real impact in the world. Actually, you need to do this other thing. That's a very hard mindset shift for somebody to go through very quickly. Now, we are seeing it change if you look at somewhere like London, becoming a founder is becoming more of a aspirational, default aspirational career path. But most people are still default employed. And that is still our biggest challenge.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very simply, the biggest competitor that EF has is the status quo. The status quo is so strong. The status quo of how people spend their lives, what they expect from their careers, how they think about what they want to achieve with their lives is very, very strong. What Silicon Valley has done so brilliantly is because the culture there is so homogenous and so defined if you transplant an individual there, you can very quickly change their perspective on what the status quo of their life is going to be. It's really hard to do that in these sort of multi-industry cities that we're in where actually most people aren't starting startups. Most people are waiting for their bonus. Most people are waiting for that promotion to get to partner consulting firm or a bank or whatever it may be. So when we look at who rejects EF's offer, the most”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What they thought they were going to do when they, in the beginning, early stages of thinking about applying to EF is genuinely transform their lives. And I think I'd find it very hard to now build another startup that didn't have that same sort of monumental impact on the customer. And I think Matt and I are just very aligned on our addiction for that and love for that.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is it, Matt and I are very clear on a couple of things one is that we talk about the idea being a product of the co-founders yes is a product of us. Neither of us have software backgrounds. EF is not a software company. And there is a cost to that. I'm sure if we'd spent 10 years building a different company, possibly with different people, maybe we would have created far more value. And we say this very openly to the people coming through EF because there was like EF always says, you know, find somebody with complementary skills and then you and Matt are very similar. And we are. But like it has dictated the kind of company that we could produce. We've been very, well, I still feel very lucky about is that 10 years in, our mission is as enduring and as exciting to me. I can't imagine doing anything else for my life that would be more exciting than helping the next generation of entrepreneurs to come through and meet their level of ambition, whatever that might be, meet their potential. The product that we're selling is genuinely life-changing. When I look at the outcomes of our alumni and what they've achieved and gone on to do.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Managed to end up on the scene of his music video where we managed to drive right onto the set and I was driving, I'm not a very confident driver, don't love it. We just ended up having about 20 people shouting and screaming at us with Robbie Williams. You kn”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“PowerPoint, whatever happened to those. But then the biggest challenge we had in the early days is for three years, no one would fund us. So for three years we were a not-for-profit, a registered not-for-profit. We actually tried to incorporate as a charity. But Matt and I had to do everything. And fitting out our first office was haggling to try and get a free space that was condemned, that was about to be knocked down. The furniture we got from another building that was condemned and we managed to convince Zipfan basically to give us a free membership so we'd get free van to pick up the free furniture and as we were shipping that furniture from old office to this new place we managed to end up on the scene of do you know who Robbie Williams is he's like a massive hot star in the UK”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel very lucky and I have been co-founders now for 10 years and had a pretty harmonious decade together. I think if anything, because EF is such an unusual business, the fact that we have two very chunky parts of our business, one which is very operationally complex, which I run, and one which is the investment side of the business, which Matt runs, there is so much to do within the company and it's very easy for us to have clear ownership. I think that has made it pretty easy to have two highly ambitious, reasonably A-type personalities working together for such a long time. I mean, the early days of EF were such a scrappy, intense time. I think we were both coming out of, we met Dem McKinsey, we met our first day of working there. And when we left, I think it took us a little bit of time to shake the shackles of being a consultant. We spent a lot of the early days of EF making PowerPoints. Don't know if anyone ever read those.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really understand and assess how a co founding team is doing, you do need to speak to them in person, or at least on Zoom. We did actually have a very long conversation at one point. My co-founder and I about should EF be a software business or should it be a people business software can be our infrastructure, it can be our backbone, but it can't be the product.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is the most powerful thing that we did in the last couple of years is building an internal data and insights team. So we actually have pretty good tooling across most of the company. The really hard bit is the human bit. And I just don't know how much you can digitize that. So we've done a bunch of experiments in the past and we have a bunch of automations that nudge people into teams. One of the most important things for team building is how in clarity about who is and who isn't in teams. We have a really simple Slack automation that basically lets everyone know when a team gets together, when a team breaks up. That stuff is really useful. But actually a lot of the labor intense work that we do is EF is a very emotional people process. And we did actually do an experiment once a couple of years ago where we tried to strip out as much of that as possible. And it didn't really work. There's only so much that you can capture from digitally inputted information.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About growing EF, there are various ways that we can think about doing that one is we can grow geographically, but it could be that we also just grow existing sites and think about growing our product suite. So how do we offer different products to individuals at different stages of their career that enable EF to grow, enable us to catch more value from our customers without actually opening new sites as an operating company without a software product, we have to think very carefully about how we scale. It can be very easy to scale very fast, but actually so much of EF is about effectively delivering playbooks about understanding the nuance in delivering those playbooks and that is pretty hard to scale. It's not an easy model to scale. One of the things that we're looking at is we've got some shorter form versions of EF that we can use to test new locations. And so we're pretty excited about rolling that out over the next year or so and using that as a way to understand where we should be going.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the questions for us is what is the right number of EFs to have? You know, what is the right number of EF locations to have? We want EF to be accessible to anyone who could be a globally important world-class founder. And there's different ways you can do that. You can do that through relocation. And we've had some great success relocating individuals from a region to one of our hubs. But one of the things we're looking at is what are the regions where we don't necessarily have an easily accessible EF hub? I think there's still more that we can do in Asia. It was interesting being out in the US for a couple of months and just hearing how the view of Latin America has changed so much in the last couple of years. Latin America seemed to be the location that everyone was suddenly putting capital into, whether it be in Colombia or Brazil or Argentina. So I think there's something interesting happening there. And then it's interesting to see more noise around Africa, whether it be Nairobi, Cape Town or a variety of different places.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A real time depiction of your voice in whatever you choose your voice to be, and that is an NFT attached to you, which is pretty cool. That company wouldn't have existed otherwise. So yeah, I'm very excited about different ways to help create and generate companies that wouldn't exist otherwise, largely through the medium of helping people find the right co-founder for them.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To find their co founders in different ways. So, using the EF methodology, selection process frameworks that we know work and we know succeed, but in different formats, you might not want to do a 14-week program if you've already founded a company once. A lot of the content might be a relevant for you. So as you were mentioning, we're doing this program called Reform, it's test at the moment, it's for our alumni to meet each other and experiment with co-founding teams. We've got some great teams coming out of it. We've got one called MetaVoice that was actually two individuals from one of our previous programs that joined up with an alum who left EF six years ago, five years ago, something like that. It's a really cool product where they are building real time on-chain voice NFTs. So if you're a pseudonymous, for example, you can participate on every part of the internet, apart from vocally, because you would be displaying what your voice was. And they can generate a voice, or they have a product that generates.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“ES can be the owner of this behavior explosion. We can basically own that precede talent investor market. I think that's super, super exciting. Now I think there's a bunch of different products that you could provide to people so that at the moment we are focusing on early career first-time founders, but actually finding a co-founder is something that you experience throughout your co-founding journey. I very much think that for most people who take up the founding journey, they see it as a career path. It's not that I do one company, it's this is my first company and this is my second company and I'm building on this great book by Ali Tamasab called Super Founders which basically looks at what are the indicators that somebody might end up being a billion dollar founder and one of them is that they've had a reasonable success in the past and we want to be part of our customers founding journey the first time around the second time round the third time round and so as you were saying we're building a bunch of products and testing a bunch of products this year to enable people”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's strange, and what you couldn't find your own co founder, you couldn't find somebody. I think what is really powerful is over the next 10 years, however long it takes the shift to happen, I believe we can get to the point where your best friend turns around to you and says, hey, we should co-found a company together and you go, actually, I think I'm going to join EF because I really want to find the right co-founder for me and I want to have the opportunity to experiment with different people because I believe that's the optimal way to find a co-founder, not the alternative way to find a co-founder. If EF can be the creator and owner of this new behavior explosion where more people can find the right co-founder for them that enables them to get to the best possible outcome, that enables more people to become co-founders because they finally have that option. Like what happens if you don't know somebody you've been brought up with since birth who can be your co-founder who's ready to go right now and interested in the same ideas? It basically means you're out of the market of being a founder.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think EF can do that for how startups are created. And the analogy I would use is if you look at something like online dating, match.com, what came out 1995, still around today. But 1995 online dating was very different from 2022 online dating. 1995 online dating was for individuals who maybe seem to be a bit weirder. It was definitely something that was socially frowned upon. It was seen as a suboptimal way to find somebody to spend the rest of your life with. That was what you were looking for. 2022 has become the default way to find a partner. It's become the optimal way. Why would you waste your time sitting in a bar waiting for somebody to come and hit on you or hitting on somebody in a bar? When you don't even know if they're available, it feels like the most crazy use of time. I strongly believe that we will see the same shift happen with co-founders. Right now, finding your co-founder through a program like Entrepreneur First, it's a bit weird. Yeah, people think.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things I love is this feels like something that can't be a product, turning strangers into co-founders, how can you create a structure that reliably does that? I have to say, for the first three years of EF, it really wasn't clear that we could do that. It took us a while to hone that. When I think about the best startups in the world create a behavior explosion, they create a new kind of behavior that didn't exist before. And then you just see the platform, the product, the startup enables an explosion of behavior that didn't exist.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We put a pound or a dollar into an investment or into growing EF, changing our product suite, experimenting with new initiatives. So I think we've been very, very lucky to have some amazing LPs that have taken a big risk on a new model over the last seven years. But as we're very excited with this new model where we can really behave like the company that we are rather than the VC firm and use that capital to truly delight the next generation of entrepreneurs through expanding, developing and honing the model that we have created.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just raised $150 million onto Really, it's the coming together of some of the world's best founders to support the next generation. And the reason we made this shift and why we're so excited about it is, first of all, our investors understand that what we're trying to build is a long-term talented institution. You do that with a product. And as anyone who's listening who is a founder knows or who's been in operational role, products change. They need to be flexible. They need to adapt to different market conditions, to different customer expectations. And a fund structure is pretty rigid. When you raise a fund, you are three, four years ahead committing to what your operational expenses will be. We were committing in our previous fund to where we did invest the capital in terms of locations. It's a pretty rigid structure. One of the things we're really excited about is we want to make EF the best place in the world to find your co-founder every stage of your founding career. The new structure means that we have a lot more fungibility with the capital that we have. We can decide”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something like yeah, where you are looking to try and optimize your AUM. Again, it doesn't make sense to deploy so little capital so early where it's high risk. You need to have a pretty significant feed burden to pay for all the operational costs. If you can, you might as well try and move market and take the seed or series A stage. So where we see barriers, I suppose, is that ES is a company that is creating a supply of startups that wouldn't exist otherwise and as a company, we are willing to upfront invest the operational capital and to take on the operational complexity to make that happen. I think if you are trying to get into this as a VC, there's a bunch of operational crap there. You just don't want to deal with.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a way of getting around the crazy seed prices, we're not even pre seed. We are one stage before that. To do a pre seed, the other company has to invest and do one stage before that. And that one stage is the really difficult bit. It is operationally incredibly intense. It's interesting to see a couple of companies now trying to replicate the EF model that they reliably struggle with is, okay, you can find the talent, you can have the capital, but how do you actually get them into teams? And there's so much we have a very strong methodology. There's a lot of nuance in that methodology. There's a lot that you have to get right to create a dynamic where strangers turn into co-founders. And it seems to be something that others have really, really struggled to replicate. I think you also have to be in company building mode rather than AUM building mode. Yeah, a VC model does work very well for the kind of thing that we're doing. We've used a VC model, we used a VC model for about seven years. We're now coming out of that and going to a company balance sheet model again. But if you approach”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stancy your question about valuation. So, Angelist has an amazing data set on valuations. I think it was showing that 2021, 2022, a 75th centile startup would be raising precede post-money valuation at something like $15 million. If you look at most EF locations, that'd be more like $5 million. For seed in the US, Angelist is saying it jumps to something like 30 to $40 million. In most of EF's locations, it'd be more like $10 to $15 million at seed. And those would still be considered very good valuations. Why don't more investors do this? Well, for a long time, this was seen as a very, very counterintuitive model. Taking individuals, building teams from scratch, taking people without firm ideas, evaluating individuals on their behaviors rather than on their idea, all of this stuff was seen to be very counterintuitive. I think now a lot of this is becoming more status quo, and we are seeing lots and lots of investors rush to prove.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What would it take for them to start investing internationally? London gets a lot of noise. Toronto is a very well known ecosystem, but places like Paris where the talent is unbelievable. The talent there is so deep, so rich that it's still a relatively untapped ecosystem. Same with somewhere like Singapore, where you really do get the best of Southeast Asia all coming to one country and city-state. And there's relatively little competition there in terms of early stage investors. There's masses and masses of opportunity. We're very excited about making this happen. I think it would be much better for our customer, much better for their long-term prospects, but I also think there's a big opportunity there for US-based investors.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Berlin or stay wherever your local network is where talent is much cheaper and much stickier. So I think there's a real benefit to both US investors and to our startups to say, hey, US investors, if you want your capital to go further and if you want to access startups that are much more reasonable valuation, start looking outside of the typical startup ecosystems. And for our startups, having that link in the early days to the US, we've seen it does great things for their Series A. having a local US fund that can provide signal for the Series A, but also in terms of giving them access to the Silicon Valley mindset. The Silicon Valley mindset is unbelievably powerful. I think it's one of the things that YC has done so well where they very much basically transplant a Silicon Valley mindset into all these international companies that come and join YC. And really, we want to do something very similar at a much, much earlier stage. So for investors listening to this, I would encourage them to think about”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You do your Zoom and then you get in the room has changed things so that founders who aren't based in the valley aren't disadvantaged in the same way that you used to be. And I was amazed at the openness to international investing and how many of the investors spoke about 70 precede investors and how many of them had done deals in Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America in the last couple of years. Now, I think that has been largely driven by the crazy evaluations they were seeing locally and maybe that will temper it a little bit going forward. I think there has been a realization that the quality of talent outside of the US, building companies, is fantastic. And there's actually a real advantage to investing in companies where they are based locally, largely a talent advantage in the talent war in the US and Bay Area is so vicious, both in terms of salaries and retention. And that problem is you're at a far greater advantage if you stay in London or stay in London.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Typically companies leave us three months after our investment committee. So the startup We're lucky that we have some great relationships with the BCs and our local ecosystems. But one of the things that we are keen to do is to support our companies to tap into US capital. So if you look at the time it takes to raise a seed round in Singapore, it wouldn't be unusual for it to take six to nine months to actually close the term sheet and get money in the bank. That's a massive cost to our founders, a massive cost in having your CEO spending the majority of their time for six to nine months just trying to close funding round one of the things that I've been spending a bunch of my time on is just spent the last couple of months in San Francisco meeting with early stage investors to try and understand what does it take to support more US-based and Bay Area investors to find and see and get access to these incredible deals that may not be based right under their nose. The world has changed during COVID. I think this move to”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much as to our investors and LPs, that if we invest in you, we're going to want you to keep running that company. So if we don't think that it is the right co-founding team, if we think there are cracks in that co-founding team, or if we think you're wasting your time on a market or area that doesn't make sense, it's actually in your interest for us to have all of that data so that we can say no investment committee and the opportunity costs of being trapped in the wrong startup is really high. So come back and do EF again. I think what I love is that by the time we do investment committee, which we have an investment committee process, each startup meets with three individuals for half an hour, ask a bunch of questions. Really what we're doing is signing off what we've learned about these individuals during that 14-week process rather than coming up with an independent investment decision. I do not envy funds that have to make a decision based on one or two interactions with the founder they've only just met. It terrifies me. We're very lucky that we're investing in individuals that we have a deep”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“His company wasn't the best route. He should come and join EF. So actually, by the time he applied, I knew him really well and I knew what his strengths were and where his weaknesses might be. So he collected a bunch of data points during the selection process and then that feeds into this first product which we called form and that's where the teams are built. Every week the individuals are checking in with someone from our team and the companies are checking in with someone from our team as well, our venture partners who are all external entrepreneurs who do the advisory work of EF. So by the time that they reach our investment committee, which is 14 weeks after the program starts, so some startups might be as young as six weeks, the oldest will be 14 weeks old. We're going in with a huge amount of information about the individuals and their backgrounds, but also how they performed during the program, how productive were they, how stable are their teams. And we're pretty transparent with our customer about this is what we do because we feel we have a duty of care to our customer.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've always seen yes as a machine we're building rather than a fund. The reason why these data points are so important is A, it enables us to make better investment decisions, but B, it also means that no single individual at EF is making the investment decision. We believe in the power of the machine. We want to make the EF machine the EF product as strong as possible rather than relying on me or Matt or anyone of, we do have GPs because the funds that we manage. But the GPU decision, the general partner decision, is sign off rather than a deciding factor. So we start collecting data about the individuals we work with from the point where they first apply and often actually before that we often have reasonably long-term relationships with the individuals that we work with. I remember one guy who's now running one of the biggest companies in our portfolio who I spent two years having coffee with him trying to convince him that actually the internal entrepreneurship thing that he'd been offered.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up building a startup, it is this intense life experience that changes the way you think about what you can do, your career and how startups might fit into that.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Person. The key role that the office plays is that we talk about having a liquid pool of founders. So at any one point in time, there'll be a group of founders who aren't in a team. And actually the important role that the office plays is having a space where those founders can have the serendipitous interactions where they bump into each other, have the opportunity to talk about how their edges, how their backgrounds might intersect, and have the opportunity to form teams. I mean, he has this amazingly robust that even across cohorts, across locations, and even during COVID, we typically hit about 80% of people finishing the eight-week period in a co-founding team. The other 20% they leave at that point. But I think one of the nice things is that often they leave because they've just done eight weeks of going through this pretty intense process. And for some of them, it's very clarifying. Actually, I don't want to do this. Actually, it's not the right time. I don't want to commit to someone right now. And I think the great byproduct of EF is that even if you don't find a co-founder, even if you don't...”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have offices in all of our locations. The offices are largely a gathering spot for the cohort, particularly in the early weeks of the program, where because we want individuals to get into and out of teams as quickly as possible, there is a spot that if you aren't in a team for whatever reason, you can go and hang out there, meet other individuals. We are big, big believers in person. We did yef remotely during COVID. Did actually work way better than we thought it would, but there was some impact on team building outcomes. But largely, I would kind of compare it to online dating in that with online dating, you do your sorting your search online, but as you do your testing in person, be very rare, weird to commit to the marriage if you've only ever done online testing. I'm sure that happens, but very rarely. And the same is true with EF that ultimately we don't really mind where the founders go and test their relationship wherever they go and work, but we do want them to do that.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You begin to have doubts. So, one of the things that we do is the first weeks of the program, we sit down and as a big group, as a cohort, and we teach them how to have difficult conversations with their co-founders. And then live, they will sit in their pairs and they will have difficult conversations with their co-founders. And then at the end, we say, who's ready to break up? And a bunch of teams will put out their hands and they get a massive round of applause. And so it's beginning to show that actually the process of breaking up is a positive thing rather than a negative thing. And the speed that you do it should be celebrated. And you know, there's a lot of lovely social norms that have been developed by the cohort that we now push to every cohort. So I can't remember which cohort it was a number of years ago, that they broke up. One of the co-founders put on Slack.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Suppose we've talked about the people in the cohort, we've talked about methodology. I suppose the final bit is social norms. So those would basically be the three ingredients to making a cohort successful where you turn these individuals, turn these strangers into companies. The social norms around yeah interesting and basically regardless of where you're located, whether you're in Singapore or Paris or Toronto, there are a bunch of social norms that stand. In life, it's hard to have difficult conversations with people. It is hard to say to somebody, I don't want to be with you. It is hard to break up with a co-founder. What we've done with EF is basically when every cohort joins us, we create new social norms, a new culture that is EF specific. The primary thing that we focus on is how to have difficult conversations with your co-founder. And the reason we do this is because we want individuals to get into and out of teams as quickly as possible. So we want to get you into a team before you feel ready. And then we want to get you out of a team the moment.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those interactions with a co founder, we have this framework that we use called Edge, which is basically to find a co-founder and to develop an idea, you need to know where you have advantages. What are your personal competitive advantages? These are your edges. It could be in the technology, it could be in a market, it could be certain behaviors that you have. The more that you understand yourself and the more that you can use that language to then communicate that to your potential co-founder, the faster you can then get to this point of combinatorial innovation. So this is definitely one of the things that I find most exciting about what we do and why at the core of EF what we're doing is creating companies that otherwise wouldn't exist. We're bringing together individuals that wouldn't otherwise meet each other. They're then coming up with ideas that just couldn't have existed because they wouldn't have met each other.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the idea is the product of two people's backgrounds, experiences, and skills coming together. And the reason why I love why I find it so exciting is that whenever you sit by yourself and try and come up with an idea, you are constrained by the markets you know, by the skills that you have, it's very, very hard to imagine beyond that. As soon as you start interacting with someone else where you come in with the openness of mind to open up your background and skills to what they might be able to create, you're basically in this moment of combinatorial innovation where the combination of what you two can create is way more powerful than what any one individual can produce alone. And I think that's why people find EF so addictive when they first join because they come in often thinking, yeah, my ideas are really great. I'm just going to sell my idea. I hear what the EF says. I'm just going to sell my idea. I'm pretty stuck on it. I think it's the right thing. And then they come in and they very, very quickly back away from whatever idea they thought they were going to end up working on because they just didn't realize what was possible.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ideas are really important. I don't want to downplay the fundamental role the idea plays and whether the startup succeeds or not. But I suppose the bit of conventional wisdom that I would strongly, strongly challenge is that the way that a startup comes about is that somebody has an idea and they build a team around them. Yeah, you can build startups like that, that definitely works. But that's not what we've found to be optimal. What we found to be most exciting and to build the most interesting companies is where you see the idea as a product of the co-founding relationship. So what I mean by that is you bring two individuals who are open-minded but also incredibly clear about what they can bring to the table. And then you get them to ask each other the question of how could we work together? Where do our backgrounds intersect? What do I know? What can I do? What skills do I have? What behaviors do I have? You tell me what you have as well and let's see where they might intersect.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just your initial hunch, it's just the beginning point, and you can get to that in 24, 36 hours. It doesn't need to be a long, protracted process. If you are a team like the one that I'm talking about, you feel like you're being productive, you feel like you're doing the right things because you found somebody that you really gel with. But ultimately, if you're not able to make progress on that idea very, very fast, it's not going to work.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Proving hypotheses super, super fast. Those are the teams that will succeed. The teams that won't succeed in, I was in one of our locations recently as the teens were all kicking off and sat down with this pair of co-founders who had been working together for a couple of days and they were so excited about each other. Perfect on paper, perfect in real life, loved each other, thought it was going brilliantly. But then I asked them about the idea. And one of them told me about the idea. And they got super excited, really, really excited. And I was like, oh, but how does the CTO fit into this? How does it fit with their background? The CTO was like, well, I could try and manipulate my background so it sort of fitted in here. And okay, well, this doesn't sound like the best fit in terms of ideas. What other ideas do you have? The CTO told me his very exciting, brilliant idea. And the CO looked slightly crestfallen. Thinking about productivity, if you are a highly productive team, you can get the idea that you want to work on, which is”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are they the right co-founder? So if you're looking at a 30 70% split, for example, are you sure that person should be a co-founder? Maybe they should be a first employee. Do you think they are disposable? If you think they are, then, okay, well, maybe hire them as a first employee where you do have a different relationship. I mean, when we look at what makes teams fail, there's a very, very clear singular reason, although it's often not clear to the founders. And this is why the EF environment methodology is so important, because most people joining EF maybe they've experienced one co-founder in their life. We've seen thousands of people make hundreds of teams and we have a very, very clear idea very quickly about which teams are going to work and which teams aren't. And the really clear indicator is productivity. We have an internal mantra, which is productivity as traction for teens. The teams that are making decisions on a daily basis that are moving way faster than you would expect, who are developing and”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The equity question is reasonably simple. We recommend all teams split 50 50 unless there is a real significant reason as to why it should be different. Our push is always to see equity as forward looking, not backward looking. So even if you've come in with an idea that you've spent four weeks, four months, whatever working on, it's not sufficient to change the equity division. We often use the example of me and the map. Matt is my co-founder. He started working on EF a month before I did. It would have been very easy for him at that time to say, hey, you know, I've actually made some progress. Why don't we do an unequal equity split? I probably would have accepted that. It's 10 years later. Would I accept that now? No, that would be a real thought.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Relationship. They can often be quite hard to shake off. When we think about building these co-founding teams, what we're saying to the people that join us is this is your chance not just to find a co-founder, it's about finding the optimal co-founder, the right co-founder for you. And many people, when they join us, they have a preconceived idea about who their co-founder should be based on the press, based on watching the social network, based on whatever it may be. It's only beginning to test other people within the cohort that they understand who the right fit is for them. So typically people go through two or three co-founders in a eight-week period. They're typically working with them anywhere from 24 hours to four or five weeks. So it's a very, very fast iterative process.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decisions you ever make in your life. It's assuming you're successful, you give away half of your company to this co founder. There's literally nothing more expensive that you could do. You really need to treat it like a hiring process rather than like a friendship development process. I mean, one of our strong beliefs is that your best friend is not your best co-founder. So many, many, I think a lot of the conventional wisdom is around, okay, well, if you want to find a co-founder, find someone you've known for years, if not decades, you should have grown up together. The reason we don't believe that is fully optimal, yes, there are many examples of where that has worked beautifully, but the reason why we don't believe that is optimal is that how likely is it that your best friend is ready to go at the same time as you, has a complementary skill set, is interested in the same ideas as you. And I suppose one of the things we have found when we have worked with teams that have known each other for a long time is that there is often a huge amount of baggage that comes from having that pre-existence.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reason we put such tight deadlines on this is because what we've found is counter exposed to popular belief, which might say that time and space leads to better ideas or better co-founded relationships. What we've seen time and again is that the early stages of startup creation is more like the creation of a diamond. It's this intense moment of pressure that leads to something great. The reason why this works so well with team building and ideation is that you only know if it's a good team, you only know if it's a good idea if you test it. If you don't test it, it's basically just conjecture. And it's very, very easy because it is such a human process, the co-founding process and the ideation process, to be honest. Because it's such a human process, it's very easy to get stuck in the talking loop where you are talking, you're agreeing, you are having a wild time together, just kind of enjoying each other's company. Now that's how you find a friend. That's not how you find a co-founder. And if a co-founder is going to be one of the most expensive...”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, EF feels very, very intense. One of the things that I love about EF is that often when people join, they say, wow, I didn't think I'd find other people like me. And I definitely didn't think I'd find other people like me in such high volume. So having the opportunity to interact with 50, 60, 70 other people who are as ambitious as you, who are as motivated, who are as unconventional, if you like, is a real magical moment for many of our customers that join us. Yes, can feel very emotional. Largely, this is the first time that most of the people who have joined us have failed, failed significantly. And yes, failure is baked in. So you join on day one, you join with, let's say, 50 other people. And by the end of that first week, you need to be in your first co-founding team. So within five days, you need to go through this sorting process where you're basically sorting, searching, evaluating, and choosing who you might want to co-found with.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the second and third, but they can get there. For some of the things that we actually actively don't look for, and that I think are very, very hard to assess during a selection process is something like determination. Of course, founders need to be determined. But how do you compare different examples of determination, some of which are self-driven? I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, and some of which aren't, such as I escaped a war zone. These are previous examples we've had, how you meant to compare those. We actually talk about drive to achieve rather than determination. How is this person demonstrated that they have pushed aggressively to make various achievements happen? They've had that innate drive to make things happen for themselves. Determination, when we used to ask, we used to have a question on application form that was just an example of time, you've been exceptionally determined and it's just impossible to compare the different answers.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of founders or a lot of investors look for outliers. I would say the same is true for us. We've tried, because we've got this large team of individuals, many of whom are involved in selection, but have to think very hard about how do you actually codify what an outline looks like. And so during our selection process, one of the things that we're constantly asking is how and where have you outperformed or done something differently that your peers wouldn't do? So one of the first questions is who is your peer group? How would you define your peer group? Who do you compare yourself to? And then by understanding that and then getting them to articulate where they have outperformed. I think this is where the personal exceptions comes in as well, that sort of self-belief. Some individuals find it very hard to articulate how they might have outperformed compared to their peers. You hear people respond and say things like, there's no way I could have built something that my peers couldn't have built. Like, surely we're all the same. And then the good ones, like, well, there was this example and there was this example and there was this example. And then the medium ones, they give you one example and then you've got to kind of”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this idea of high personal exceptionalism can be reasonably hard to evaluate. The great thing about EF is that before we invest, so we invest after about 14 weeks, before we invest, we've collected about 200 data points on every individual that has been through the program. Selection is important for us at the point where we're doing interviews, but actually we're able to select the entire way through the program before we invest. The other things that I would say that I'd pull out would be often the most interesting individuals in the EF have these deeply obsessive personalities. Now, it often doesn't matter what they're obsessed about and they're often reasonably plastic in how they think about their obsession, as in if you ask them in the past what they've been obsessive about, there could be four or five different things that seem really disconnected. But to be a successful founder, you need to be basically fully obsessed and fully absorbed by your startup. And so having previous examples of that is a very, very strong indicator for us.”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're lucky now that having done this for 10 years, we can see how the lead signals that we used to evaluate have been translated into results. There's a couple of things that just consistently have reliably shown us who's going to be a top performer in their cohort. The first is that people who believe that they can do it and believe that their odds are different to their peers, it's not a slum dunk that they will then be the top former and their cohort, but it is necessary for them to succeed. So we call this having high personal exceptionalism. So an individual who just believes that their odds are different. It shouldn't be conflated with overconfidence. It shouldn't be conflated with arrogance. Often these individuals are some of the most coachable and some of the most”
2022-07-12 · Invest Like the Best · Alice Bentinck - Building a Start-Up Machine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.285] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source