Entrepreneur First

“I think we must have done about 404 150, something like that.”

“We had this company that was only a year old called magic pony technology. So very funny and memorable name. It was like a early computer vision company doing video compression using a technique called super resolution and a year into their journey, Twitter bo…”

“Part of the reason that we decided to stop doing local demo days in each of the sites and just do one big demo day in SF was that the reach to investors is huge, but it also exposes companies to customers that they might otherwise not reach.”

“So if you look at the, you know, you referenced earlier that the, you know, the portfolio is worth, you know, kind of just over ten billion today. Most of that is still UK businesses because we've just been going so much longer there.”

“We'd expect sort of 70%, 80% to raise a seed round. And then, you know, of those, I think historically something like 60% of seed from the companies EF have gone on to raise a series A.”

“I think you've got One of the best education systems in the world for identifying technical talent and in a world where that technical talent is graduating into an economy where people see opportunity, special things are going to happen.”

“Actually as a founder, your most valuable asset by far is your time. And so, you know, I think one of the most things, obviously we all want companies to get big and be huge, but if a company is not going to be huge, Then I think actually people should be hone…”

“In 2021, we raised one hundred and sixty million dollars onto our balance sheet to become like an evergreen permanent capital vehicle. And we raised that from a mix of You know, very well-known entrepreneurs, people like Reid Hoffman, but also John and Patrick…”

“We call it talent investing. So the idea is we're funding individuals before they even have companies and helping them build companies from scratch. So when we make the initial bet, we're really saying we back you the individual before we even know what you're…”

“Yeah, just over. Yeah, that's right.”

“When you take a world-class university ecosystem with a focus on engineering, then you've got like the first wave of companies starting to see their mafias develop. That's a great time to be investing.”

“The way you do this well, isn't by having like a really good matching algorithm or Doing really great matchmaking or doing a lot of like marriage counseling for co-founders. The way you get really good at it is by letting people test and fail very, very rapidl…”

“We might speak to a thousand people to get to the batch of 40 individuals and then, you know, what we found historically is that, you know, if you go through that first three months of co-founder exploration, typically about 70 to 80% of people find a co-found…”

“We have two unicorns so far and we have probably another dozen that I would expect to become unicorns over the next couple of years, you know, that are sort of valued in the mid hundreds of millions.”

“This one called Acurix that serves 99% of the UK primary healthcare health system.”

“We met Reid Hoffman back then who really fell in love with the idea and in our first meeting with them offered to invest in our management company to give us the capital to scale. So he led like a series A into the management company and we use that money to s…”