Alice BentinckCo-founder and CEO, Entrepreneurs First

One magical moment was pitching Reid Hoffman at the LinkedIn office in the Bay Area. He said, “Cool, how much money do you want? I’m in,” and I remember it was 17 minutes past 5. It felt like a real “pinch yourself” founder moment, even though he clearly had done serious diligence beforehand.

I love meeting EF alumni. The most common thing they say is, “EF changed my life,” and they want to thank us. Because we work with founders for a long time and the product is very hands-on, you get to see real impact on people’s lives, not just numbers.

For the first four years, we didn’t know if we were wasting our time. We were working insanely hard, but we had no business model and no clear path to making money. It creates this existential dread where you feel hyper ambitious, but you don’t know if the thing you’re building will work.

Yes. Before our third demo day in 2015, Matt and I said, if this doesn’t go well, we’re going to can it. From that demo day we got our first unicorn and our first $7 million exit, and then the rest is history. But we were genuinely close to stopping.

I’m at the intersection of the two. EF runs like a company: we have a team, we build a product, and we deliver an experience. But our business model is investing. To be a good investor you need to understand outliers, and for us that means spotting outlier talent and helping them turn into outlier companies.

The team. We have built an incredible group of people, and our senior leadership team has stayed for a long time. We added it up and our partner team has 60 plus years of experience at EF between us. That creates strong standards and keeps the product quality consistent as we scale.

It was more of a change than I expected. Even though Matt and I talk relentlessly and discuss everything, the CEO role changes responsibility and what you spend time on. I now spend more time with investors and on financial strategy, and it pushed me to learn things I had not done before.

You’re on a constant learning Kurv. You’re always on the edge of what you know how to do, and that is both the hard part and the rewarding part. It can be tiring, but if you want to push yourself to the edge of what you can do and what you can be, it’s hard to beat.

A key question is: does this person make you feel more productive? It’s amazing how often people say, “I really like them,” but they are not more productive, and they still want to continue. That is a terrible idea. Matt and I make each other more productive, and that matters more than vibes.

We spend a lot of time together and we talk relentlessly. Relationships atrophy really fast, and the only way you fix it is by spending more time together. We also use coaching. I’m a big fan of spending more money on a coach than you think you can afford, because you get what you pay for.

Founders need a mirror, especially if they’ve never been through co-founding before. They don’t know what good looks like. We help reflect what we’re seeing and guide them through the tradeoffs: where the relationship is making them faster or slower, more productive or less productive, and why.

Two things happened at once. We have an investor base that is largely US institutions and US high net worths, so we were already working on how to engage with the US. Then we started hearing founders say, “My number one priority is to get to the Bay Area quickly.” Our job is to delight the customer.

Valuations have doubled compared to before we anchored fundraising in San Francisco. The speed to close a round is also much faster. We expect fundraising to be done in two weeks post demo day, with demo day as the hard start. Previously in Europe it was more like six weeks.

The speed of revenue generation. Some companies that are only four to six months old are getting to roughly 100k to 500k of ARR, and a lot of that is from American customers. US customers move and respond differently, and that changes how fast the company itself moves.

A key idea is that customers set the pace. If your customers move quickly and respond quickly, that becomes the pace your company moves at. By having American customers from day one, founders adopt a higher level of productivity and speed. In this AI wave, pace and productivity matter more than ever.

It’s not nice, but being a founder is not about people pleasing. The most important thing is what your customers want and what makes the business successful. We were unpopular early on too, and people thought we were wasting our time. I’m fine with being unpopular if we are building something great.

Density and proximity matter a lot. San Francisco is a small, highly connected place, so information and relationships move fast. You bump into people constantly, which creates spontaneous interactions and faster decisions on funding, hiring, and customers. Some cultural parts are hard to replicate, but clusters and real hubs help.