Matt Clifford & Alice Bentinck, co-founders of Entrepreneur First, on what makes a good founder

What makes a good founder? How do you build a strong co-founding team?

In this episode, we catch up with Matt Clifford and Alice Bentinck from Entrepreneur First (EF), who have been backing talented individuals pre-team and pre-idea. They've pioneered a new model of company creation, which involves bringing together extremely talented people from academia and industry to build the next generation of globally ambitious technology startups from scratch. EF has been producing incredible DeepTech companies around the world, including at STATION F in Paris. Their program at STATION F is currently recruiting for talents to join them in April 2021.

Topics:

00:22 — Introduction with Roxanne Varza

01:38 — How the idea of Entrepreneur First first came up

03:22 — What Entrepreneur First looks for in potential founders

07:15 — How EF assesses candidates

10:50 — How EF helps two individuals go from strangers to co-founders

16:18 — What people should pay attention to when they go into a co-founder relationship

18:46 — On founder culture: are there cultural differences worldwide?

21:39 — On diversity within EF and the types of entrepreneurs in the program

26:17 — How EF identifies high-performing individuals

29:12 — Matt on what successful teams look like

32:58 — Alice on which kind of teams work well together and which don’t

35:07 — Alice on what is most exciting about being a founder

36:07 — Conclusion

STATION F: The Podcast is hosted by Roxanne Varza, and produced by Cindy Yang. Art is by Gaëtan Lefebvre.

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