. SEEDTABLE

October 25h | #48

Last week I had the chance to talk to Matthew Clifford. Matt is the CEO and founder of Entrepreneur First, a talent investor that funds hundreds of founders every year, pre-idea and pre-team.

They run cohorts twice a year, in six different countries around the globe and during the programme, they help people find a co-founder, develop an idea, and start a company from scratch.

As of 2019 the company has had 1000+ people go through its programme, creating 200+ companies worth a combined $1.5 billion.

It was a fascinating conversation on investing, technology and (some) politics. It was so good, that after I wrote a 2,000 piece on it, I realized the transcript was an order of magnitude better.

If you want to learn more about Matt, I absolutely recommend his newsletter, Thoughts in Between.

Oh, and a quick heads up – I'm taking next week off. So no newsletter. See you on November 8th!

With all that said, here it goes (edited for clarity).

This week in Europe: The counterintuitive ideas that make Entrepreneur First work

Thanks for jumping on the phone with me. As I said, I’m fascinated by Entrepreneur First. One of the few things that is a highlight for me is the idea of co-founder matching. What do you think is the counter-intuitive idea that makes the entire thing work?

Matthew Clifford: I think there are a few things. Some of it is very intuitive, and then there’s a couple of counterintuitive things. I guess that’s, in my experience, the key to most startups. It’s 90% obvious and 10% twist and that makes the whole thing work. The obvious start is, and this is sort of what we talked about on Twitter, you have to start with the right people, I don’t believe you could do it with a random sample of the population. They do have to be very smart, very driven, very ambitious. And you do need a really carefully curated set of skills, background, areas of focus. And you need a structure, you need a time-limit and you need some incentives that push people in the right direction. I think that’s all really obvious.

I think there are two things that are less obvious but that turn out to be really important. The first is: your job as the program is not to bring