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

  1. “Sexy, yeah. I think when you look at the big risk of the atis that we build insecure or shaky co-founder relationships. And so our selection process has to be super robust to ensure that only the most motivated, only the most active of the pool that we are screening. We're screening about 35,000 applications over the life cycle of a fund. One of the most important things is just making sure that those that get in are fully, fully committed to founding company at the point where they join 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

  2. “You've got to burn the boats. We do believe in activating talent, but that doesn't mean everyone should be activated, nor being ambitious and super smart isn't enough. That doesn't default, make you a great founder. We don't believe that everyone in the world should be a founder. But what we're trying to do is make sure that we do screen out those that are dabbling, that are trying to do it because it has become cooler or”

    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

  3. “I mean, the simplest question that produces the most effective answers on commitment is what are you considering if you don't get EF? If you don't get to join EF? And actually, it's the people that list out a long list of very culturally approved career path next steps that typically don't do very well on the program.”

    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

  4. “So we're in Europe, we're London, Paris, Berlin, Asia, we're in Singapore, Bangalore, and then in North America we're in Toronto.”

    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

  5. “I suppose one of the most important parts of EF is that to join EAF, you have to fully commit. You have to quit your job. Our promise to individuals that join us is that you're joining a group of individuals who are fully focused on finding a co-founder, fully focused on founding a company. I think one of the challenges that we see in locations where you don't have high network density of other potential co-founders is that you find somebody, you have the conversation, you want to become a co-founder together, you start experimenting and then they get a job or they get a promotion and suddenly they've gone and everything that you've been trying to create together suddenly goes up in flames. So I think yes, it's probably just pool of fully committed potential co-founders in the world every six months we have 300 people who join us who have all quit their jobs, who are all ready to go right now. And if you're curious about startups, if you're just at the beginning of thinking of getting started, this”

    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

  6. “The average number of years of experience post graduation is probably about five. We'll take fresh people straight out of university, we'll take people with six to eight years experience as well. But what we find is that EF does work best. Our current product, which is called Form, works best for those that are first-time founders and that are at the beginning of their career. We have probably now about 20-25% of people that join us that have a PhD, so have an advanced technical background, PhD or postdoc. About 60% of the people that we work with have some sort of technical background and the rest have a very light technical no technical background. And they are typically at the point where maybe they haven't. And because startups have become much more normalized across many of our locations, maybe they've tried something once, maybe when they're at university, they tried to start something up, they tried to find a co-founder, they've sort of dipped their toe, but they haven't really fully committed before joining EFS.”

    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

  7. “By quitting your job, the opportunity cost is if you do have a billion dollar company inside you, think about the opportunity cost of not building that and staying in the job where you're waiting for the promotion, waiting for the pay rise, waiting for whatever culturally approved carrot you've been offered. It's as much an art as it is a science and talent preferences change really quickly. So something that might have worked a couple of years ago goes out of fashion, communities change, and we need to adapt as well.”

    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

  8. “Potential CEOs. Now we like CEOs who have lightly technical backgrounds, so maybe they did a computer science degree, but they never actually used it. Maybe they did a bunch of building when they were a teenager but then didn't keep it going. But if you think about a large part of EF's beauty is making these co-founding teams work. So you need to have co-founders who understand each other's language. And so having that degree of technical understanding from CEO we find is super, super important. But finding the CEOs, they often have far more diverse backgrounds, more unusual backgrounds. So for CEOs, what we find is rather than trying to find aggregated pools of CEOs, what we're doing is using our talent scouting network, which is both our team and individuals that we then incentivize to find these people and infiltrate different networks to try and help us hunt down these people and get them in front of us. And then our job is to help convince them that actually the opportunity cost in life is not doing the startup. The opportunity cost is not the salary that you're missing.”

    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

  9. “So we go to cities where there's already a very, very strong temple. We like cities where there is a very strong university ecosystem, largely because we find the universities are some of the best talent aggregators in the world. People will move the most ambitious, will say, hey, I'm not going to settle for my second-rate local university. I am going to move to somewhere that will raise my ambition level. We have very deep relationships with universities that mean that we can understand who is coming through their system and who is fighting that system. as they are going through the academic career path are they the ones that are actually saying hey it's not enough just to produce papers i actually want to get out there and produce and build and get my technology out into the world in some ways the technologists are easiest to find those potential ctos there's often much stronger trails that they leave behind them whether it's their commits on github whether it's their activity in different tech communities often the hardest people to find are actually”

    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

  10. “Servers London, you go into banking, these are very culturally improved career paths for the most ambitious. It's what your peers want you to do, it's what your careers advisors, what your professors, what your parents want you to do. And so, yeah, if we tackle these two challenges. So we have a program, it runs in six locations across the world, six countries across the world, across Europe, Asia, and we're also in Canada as well. The point of this program is to take an individual for The point where there's Curious, they're just thinking That we do 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

  11. “Entrepreneur first is a talent investor. And broadly, what that means is that we invest pre-team, pre-idea. So the first money we deploy is into an individual rather than into a company. Pre-seed investing has become increasingly sexy and attractive over the last couple of years as valuations have gone through the roof. But really the reason that we do this is because we believe that the world is missing out on some of its best founders. The supply of founders is currently constrained and largely constrained because of two things. One, a lack of network density in many ecosystems outside of Silicon Valley. And then two, and I think this one often surprises people if they are based in or around Silicon Valley. The ambition trap of many local cultures, of many of the world's best cities, is that you see many of the most talented individuals caught in careers that may not be the best way to optimize their outcomes. For example, Singapore, you go to the”

    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