Entrepreneur First was founded in 2011 by Matt Clifford and Alice Bentley (later Alice Bentley Bentley-Smith) in London, built on a single premise: that the best founders do not always arrive pre-formed with a co-founder and an idea. The firm runs cohort-based talent programmes that recruit individuals first, then help them form teams and develop companies from scratch, before investing at the pre-seed stage. It was, at launch, a genuine structural departure from the standard venture model of backing teams that already exist.
The programme expanded beyond London to cities including Bangalore, Singapore, Paris, and Berlin, making EF one of the few early-stage investors operating a consistent methodology across multiple geographies simultaneously. The model produces a high volume of company attempts within each cohort, with most teams dissolving before the programme ends; the intent is to compress years of co-founder searching and idea iteration into a matter of weeks.
For operators and founders watching the early-stage market, EF is worth understanding for what it reveals about talent-first investing. The firm's thesis holds that raw individual capability, particularly in technical fields, is the scarce input, and that company formation can be engineered around it. Whether that thesis scales consistently across geographies and market cycles remains an open question, but the model has influenced how a number of accelerators and investors think about the pre-idea stage. The volume of companies EF has put into the ecosystem, across cohorts spanning more than a decade, makes it a meaningful data point in any serious analysis of how early-stage venture actually works.