The secrets to start up success: by 2 co-founders

In the startup world they call it the “secret sauce”; those unknown elements that help make a collaboration between 2 or more founders greater than the sum of its parts.
In Entrepreneur First’s case, they seem to have found the magic medicine. When Alice Bentinck and Matt Clifford met at McKinsey in 2011, their first thought was that, in Alice’s words, “we wouldn’t have made the greatest corporate consultants”. After 2 years, and many intensive discussions, the two decided that the model for creating outstanding startup companies was broken – and that they were the ones who could fix it.
4 years later and EF’s 5^th cohort demo day took place this week in a conference centre at the heart of London’s “Square Mile” financial district. When Alice and Matt launched their first cohort, 9 teams pitched on demo day; this time there were 25 companies, making it, according to Bentinck, Europe’s biggest startup demo day. As many as 300 investors from the UK, India, the US and elsewhere were also in attendance. “We firmly believe we have changed the status quo”, says Alice.

Entrepreneur First co-founders Alice Bentinck and Matt Clifford; now in its fifth cohort, the company wants to be known as the biggest creator of startup companies in the world.

EF is unique in that it invests in individuals, not companies. In fact, EF say that in 2015 a higher percentage of technical graduates from the UK’s top universities; Oxford, Cambridge, Kings, UCL and Imperial; applied to be on the EF programme, 11%, than applied for Financial Services jobs, 10% – an astonishing signal of how “entrepreneurship as a career” is becoming increasingly attractive to graduates, and what a job EF are doing of scouting the best talent.
Amongst the 25 teams pitching – mostly in pairs of co-founders – almost everyone had a post graduate qualification of some kind, usually a highly technical one. From James Williams, who has two Masters, one in Machine Learning from UCL, and Xavier Wilders, who graduated top of his year with a Masters in Computer Science, the founders of Beyond, a B2B budgeting platform currently being used by a multinational pharmaceutical company and trialled by 3 other businesses, to Alejandro Vicente Grabovetsky, with a PhD from Cambridge and Oliver van den Biggelaar, who built Machine Learning systems at the University of Brussels for his PhD, the team behind Avalon AI, who are helping to predict the onset of dementia using algorithmic studying of brain scans.

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For many of the founders pitching this was not just their first experience of running a company, but in some cases their first real “jobs” of any kind. Provided the more than 2,000 applicants display the correct levels of technical competencies, astutely judged by Programme Director Savitri Tan, they are welcomed onto the programme and, over the course of the first few weeks, they naturally find the partners they click with, or are carefully matched with other aspiring founders to form teams.
Often the newly formed companies go through several iterations, assisted by the EF team, which comprises a network of mentors, Head of Talent Zoe Jervier and Head of Programme Jade Read, supported by the Talent and Programme team, until they have the right dynamic and goals. After that, the hard work begins.