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Alice Bentinck

Co-Founder and CEO, Entrepreneur First · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderinvestorexecutiveauthor@alicebentinck ↗LinkedIn ↗joinef.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

Alice Bentinck is the co-founder and CEO of Entrepreneur First, a talent investor backing founders pre-team and pre-idea. She also co-founded Code First Girls and co-authored the book How to Be a Founder.

14statements → 4claims → 2claims resolved → 4/5average certainty → 2.14/5average debate potential → 4.3/5argument clarity · the sources → 4said about them ↓

2 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

4 assertions · 8 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Alice argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Entrepreneur First starts pitch prep just one week before Demo Day
“We only start a week before our demo day at Entrepreneur First actually helping them get the pitches together.”
Alice Bentinck Sep 25, 2015 ▶ 15:27 FF 014: Making Great Founders, Idea Creation and The First 100 Days Of A Startup with Alice Bentinck, Co-Founder @ Entrepreneur First

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.3 / 5 directness 4.6 · coherence 4.8 · precision 3.9 · compression 3.6

answered every one of 16 assessed questions directly

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

265 words/min while actually speaking · 67.8 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,008 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Alice Bentinck said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Mindset predicts founder success better than technical skill or intelligence
“Actually the biggest indicator of all much more important than intelligence or even technical ability is mindset and how they approach building a startup.”
Alice Bentinck Sep 25, 2015 ▶ 7:01 FF 014: Making Great Founders, Idea Creation and The First 100 Days Of A Startup with Alice Bentinck, Co-Founder @ Entrepreneur First
Insight
Startup equity splits should be forward-looking, not backward-looking
“One of the important things to remember about equity is that it should be forward-looking, not backward-looking. So just because you started the company two months earlier or six months earlier or that it was your idea in five, 10 years' time will mean very li…”
Alice Bentinck Sep 25, 2015 ▶ 10:13 FF 014: Making Great Founders, Idea Creation and The First 100 Days Of A Startup with Alice Bentinck, Co-Founder @ Entrepreneur First
Insight
Early founders should ignore company setup and focus purely on product
“Stop building a startup and just build a product. So instead of worrying about all of the paraphernalia that comes with building a startup, just focus on the product that you want to build and the customers that might want that product. So what that means is, …”
Alice Bentinck Sep 25, 2015 ▶ 11:47 FF 014: Making Great Founders, Idea Creation and The First 100 Days Of A Startup with Alice Bentinck, Co-Founder @ Entrepreneur First
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Pre-idea investing was considered stupid when Entrepreneur First launched
“I think a lot of people thought that what we were doing was pretty, pretty stupid when we first started out. Investing in, in people pre-team and pre-idea was not the way it was done.”
Alice Bentinck Sep 25, 2015 ▶ 16:28 FF 014: Making Great Founders, Idea Creation and The First 100 Days Of A Startup with Alice Bentinck, Co-Founder @ Entrepreneur First
Disclosure
Entrepreneur First selects individual founders rather than pre-formed teams
“At EF, what we focus on primarily is co-founders. So we don't select teams, pre-formed teams. We select individuals.”
Alice Bentinck Sep 25, 2015 ▶ 3:21 FF 014: Making Great Founders, Idea Creation and The First 100 Days Of A Startup with Alice Bentinck, Co-Founder @ Entrepreneur First
Insight
Founders waste months trying to craft perfect startup ideas
“They assume that unless they have the perfect idea, there's no point in even getting started. And they spend months, if not years, trying to craft the perfect idea, which just doesn't exist.”
Alice Bentinck Sep 25, 2015 ▶ 3:50 FF 014: Making Great Founders, Idea Creation and The First 100 Days Of A Startup with Alice Bentinck, Co-Founder @ Entrepreneur First
Insight
Non-technical founders err by ignoring their existing domain expertise
“I suppose one of our frustrations with non-technical founders is that often we find people who have years of expertise in a particular industry, but they're not interested in using that to build a startup, and I think that can be an error.”
Alice Bentinck Sep 25, 2015 ▶ 5:33 FF 014: Making Great Founders, Idea Creation and The First 100 Days Of A Startup with Alice Bentinck, Co-Founder @ Entrepreneur First
Disclosure
Almost all Entrepreneur First co-founder equity splits are 50/50
“So pretty much all of ours are fifty-fifty.”
Alice Bentinck Sep 25, 2015 ▶ 10:11 FF 014: Making Great Founders, Idea Creation and The First 100 Days Of A Startup with Alice Bentinck, Co-Founder @ Entrepreneur First
Insight
Gathering product feedback from well-wishing friends and family is dangerous
“Getting a ton of random views from your friends, from your family, from well-wishers who don't actually who won't eventually be users of the product, but they just want to be kind and give you feedback. Friendship friends being kind and families being kind and…”
Alice Bentinck Sep 25, 2015 ▶ 13:19 FF 014: Making Great Founders, Idea Creation and The First 100 Days Of A Startup with Alice Bentinck, Co-Founder @ Entrepreneur First
Insight
Founders should avoid raising capital from friends and family
“As a founder, you want to be taking money from people who understand how startup investing works who understands the risk and how long it takes to get a return. And often friends and family isn't the best place to find that.”
Alice Bentinck Sep 25, 2015 ▶ 14:27 FF 014: Making Great Founders, Idea Creation and The First 100 Days Of A Startup with Alice Bentinck, Co-Founder @ Entrepreneur First
Assertion Supported
Entrepreneur First starts pitch prep just one week before Demo Day
“We only start a week before our demo day at Entrepreneur First actually helping them get the pitches together.”
Alice Bentinck Sep 25, 2015 ▶ 15:27 FF 014: Making Great Founders, Idea Creation and The First 100 Days Of A Startup with Alice Bentinck, Co-Founder @ Entrepreneur First
Insight
A founder's role fundamentally changes every six months
“When you found a startup, your job changes pretty dramatically every six months.”
Alice Bentinck Sep 25, 2015 ▶ 16:19 FF 014: Making Great Founders, Idea Creation and The First 100 Days Of A Startup with Alice Bentinck, Co-Founder @ Entrepreneur First
Assertion Supported
90% of Entrepreneur First participants have deeply technical backgrounds
“So we're about 90% that come from deeply technical backgrounds, so either computer science or engineering backgrounds or we take a couple of self-taught developers as well.”
Alice Bentinck Sep 25, 2015 ▶ 5:51 FF 014: Making Great Founders, Idea Creation and The First 100 Days Of A Startup with Alice Bentinck, Co-Founder @ Entrepreneur First
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Almost all Entrepreneur First founders pivot their idea at least twice
“We find that pretty much everyone who joins EF changes their idea two or three times at least before they settle on what they actually want to work on.”
Alice Bentinck Sep 25, 2015 ▶ 6:24 FF 014: Making Great Founders, Idea Creation and The First 100 Days Of A Startup with Alice Bentinck, Co-Founder @ Entrepreneur First

The other half of the tape: Alice Bentinck's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 4 times in 2 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Matt Clifford 2Harry Stebbings 2

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
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011201620172018201920202021202220232024episodes it came up in
0010.521201620172018201920202021202220232024episodesmentions per episode
2024 2 mentions in 1 episode
2016 2 mentions in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
FF 014: Making Great Founders, Idea Creation and The First 100 Days Of A Startup with Alic Sep 25, 2015 13m
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