Assertion Supported AI assessment confidence: 85% certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

90% of Entrepreneur First participants have deeply technical backgrounds

Alice Bentinck · FF 014: Making Great Founders, Idea Creation and The First 100 Days Of A Startup with Alice Bentinck, Co-Founder @ Entrepreneur First · Sep 25, 2015 · at 5:51

Alice Bentinck, co-founder of Entrepreneur First, details the breakdown of technical versus non-technical talent accepted into the program.

0:00 / 0:09exact quote · 9.2s

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“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.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

The claim, plainly

Approximately 90% of Entrepreneur First participants come from deeply technical backgrounds in computer science or engineering.

a quote alone can be ambiguous, so this restates it with the references and context of the conversation around it resolved. AI-written; the tape below the player is the source.

Assessment

The claim is supported by official Entrepreneur First program documentation and repeated contemporaneous statements by co-founder Alice Bentinck. During the 2011-2015 period, EF targeted and reported an 80% to 90% technical intake primarily recruited from elite computer science and engineering departments (such as Cambridge, Imperial College London, UCL, and Edinburgh). In both the September 2015 podcast and a February 2016 publication, Bentinck cited that 90% of participants possessed computer science or engineering backgrounds. Although an exhaustive person-by-person roster audit is not publicly published, all available organizational metrics and official records validate the approximately 90% figure.

Alice Bentinck confirmed in a February 2016 Medium article that 90% of EF's 200 annual participants have a computer science or engineering background.
Official Entrepreneur First program materials consistently specified an admissions target and composition of 80% to 90% technical participants for cohorts up to September 2015.
EF's primary recruitment focus between 2011 and 2015 was concentrated in top CS and engineering departments, becoming the second largest recruiter of Cambridge Computer Scientists by 2013.

Checked against

[1] wikipedia.org [2] thetwentyminutevc.com [3] podcastrepublic.net [4] deciphr.ai [5] medium.com [6] thedrum.com [7] wikipedia.org [8] joinef.com

assessed as of 2026-07-23

This assessment is an AI reading of a public statement, made against the cited references with the confidence shown. It can be wrong. The quote, the tape and the references are all on this page; if something is off, use report an error below. full disclaimer →

Mentioned

Alice Bentinck Entrepreneur First

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Assertion Not checkable as stated

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Disclosure

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Insight

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90% of Entrepreneur First participants have deeply technical backgrounds

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