Entrepreneur First

We recently introduced Stripe cofounder John Collison to a room of future founders in Paris. Our cofounder Matt Clifford caught up with John on his experience founding Stripe — from the early days to scaling the company to thousands of employees and billions in revenue.

We recently brought together 25 talented and ambitious women for Find in Paris. Over a single day, they tested cofounder partnerships, identified their unique advantages as a founder, and pitched their ideas to a jury of Talent Investors. Solutions ranged from cost-effective simulated materials for rapid testing to a mobile app that uses computer vision to offer real-time physiotherapy assistance. We wrapped up the day with a fireside chat on founding with EF alumni and CEO of EndoGene.Bio, María Teresa Pérez Zaballos. María built EndoGene.Bio at EF in 2022 to tackle undiagnosed endometriosis using a prescription diagnostic test that can be taken at home. If you’re curious about building a startup, keep an eye out for our future events.

Last month, our Summer '24 San Francisco cohort met for the first time at Kick Off Summit in Santa Cruz. They tested out cofounder relationships, began ideating, and heard from EF Alumni Joseph Melkonian, Cristian Ponce, Théo Schäfer, and Eric Sun about their founding experiences building Womp Labs and Tetsuwan Scientific. Register interest for our US Winter cohort, starting in January 2025, here: https://apply.joinef.com

Feelings from an exciting weekend with the Entrepreneur First Bangalore Team! I attended the entrepreneur first hackathon this weekend and it was one of most exhilarating experiences I’ve had in a while. It was 2 days full of ideation and building. In the process, I met a bunch of very impressive people but ended up spending most of my time with the most fun biologists and gene researchers ideating on how to make wet lab experiments faster. It’s exciting to see how young sectoral experts are bringing in their expertise to form businesses in under served areas. Through this process, I had to face my biases on the ideation process too. The EF team has a simple yet effective process to ideation and my biases against a structured approach to ideation came out in full force through the exercise. I believe in a free-flowing idea generation process, but you more often than not miss out on the deeper problems while scratching the itch on the surface. This is one simple learning which I’ll carry with me throughout. I also want to thank the EF India team for being phenomenal hosts and mentors through the weekend! Sajal, Dhruv, Raghav, Rahul, Urmil

Are you looking for your next role in marketing? Join our ambitious team as a Content and Communications Associate. You'll curate and deliver global campaigns and content, collaborating with our team of Talent Investors across the US, Europe, and India. Apply by July 12: https://lnkd.in/e6MpV6Nr

Last weekend, we partnered with Inflection.xyz to bring together ambitious technologists curious about building a defense tech startup. Check out our tl;dr from the European Defense Tech Hackathon in Munich 👇 In just 48 hours, teams built solutions to protect us from the most significant cyber, electronic, aerial, space and biological threats on Earth. Demos ranged from 3D digital battlefield map reconstruction to autonomous drone interceptors and a tool for defense against unmanned aerial systems. The winning team, Sirvan Almasi, Satyam Goel, and Johannes Pfannschmidt, worked on distributed signal and target detection with software-defined radio and TDoA. Their tool enables better battlefield intelligence by detecting electronic threats in a scalable and cost-effective way. If you’re interested in building with a group of talented technologists at one of our hackathons, look out for our upcoming events. Photo credit: Zhen Ming Ng

Our cofounder, Matt Clifford, recently caught up with cofounder and CEO of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, at the Stripe Tour London. Demis and Matt discussed def/acc and the importance of reconciling technological optimism with taking dangerous capabilities seriously. Find the application link for our upcoming def/acc program in the comments below 👇

Cofounded by EF alumni, Thibaud Martin and Joonatan Laulainen, PhD, altrove has raised a $4M Seed round led by Contrarian Ventures. Altrove is leveraging AI and lab automation to develop sustainable alternatives for critical materials. The funding will enable altrove to build a self-driving lab powered by AI and computational models. Thibaud is a repeat founder with successful experience building, growing and exiting a b2b startup, and Joonatan has a PhD in Materials Science from the University of Cambridge with unique expertise in using AI for materials prediction and lab automation.  Read more here: https://lnkd.in/eFxfqPyT

When in Paris 🇫🇷🥖: founding a startup in 24 hours. Just got back from attending the FIND bootcamp organized by Entrepreneur First in Paris. It focused on gathering high-potential female engineers with an entrepreneurial mindset. Met 29 incredibly talented young women and learned tons on impactful entrepreneurship. Together, we experienced EF's program at an accelerated pace (24 hours instead of 1 year): from ideation to pitching. What I learned: I will definitely need a CTO when starting something 😅 But that's the beauty of it - you shouldn't (and don't have to!) do it alone. There are so many talented people out there with each their own unique specialization. My edge proved to be in being a catalyst, while others will have that tech and/or market edge your startup might need. Thanks a lot for the organization 💜 Donia Gharbi, Pauline Commereuc, Louise De Blommaert, Candice Hermant and Estelle Charveriat (and Maxence Jamet for reaching out!). Thanks to all these girls for the great conversations ❤️

Our startups don’t sit still. In June, they launched partnerships to fight liver disease, secured deals, and were acquired by major companies like Waitrose & Partners. Congratulations to Ochre Bio, Automata, Dishpatch, and Cube AI. Read more here 👇