Entrepreneur First Blog

CTO / Technical Founder | EF | London

We're a new kind of startup accelerator; often investing in top-tier developers pre-idea and pre-team and we're currently recruiting for our March start date.

We bring together the best developers into cohorts where they can find technical co-founders and get support to help them through the early stages of startup building (ideation, customer development, fund-raising).

We're experts in day -100 to day 100 and have had two cohorts so far resulting in twenty companies that are currently worth over $100m (our third cohort are pitching to Europes top VCs in just over 2 weeks). Companies in our portfolio have raised money from some of the best investors around the world including YC.

We're experience agnostic, so whether you're in the early-stages of your career or a developer with years of real world experience, our only criteria is that you're exceptional.

Founders are required to move to London, but we’re actively recruiting from across Europe and we’ve helped sort visas in the past when they’ve been needed.

We're especially interested in developers who also have domain expertise that they want to apply to building a startup. Whether that's from academic experience (turning your academic work into a real product that people love to use), personal interest in specific technologies (blockchain, statistical/probabilistic-learning, VR, etc.) or from working in a particular field (finance, security, etc).

If any of this sounds like…

There will be a big questions to answer:

Will the basic income be paid in addition to standard gov't subsidies?

If yes, how do you make up for the shortfall of money? "Taxing the rich" is nice in theory but IMHO it doesn't work right now, what are you going to do to change that?

If no, it might be worth it, if you also fire the bureaucrats currently working on gov't subsidies (freeing up the money thereby) But I don't see how your study will account for this, nor do I think this is feasible because gov't tends to increase in size and has no incentive to decrease. Other beneificial aspects would be decreasing the size of the code of law and forcing "social security lawyers" to specialize in something else, reducing costs of all other lawyers. Again, it will be hard to put it in practice and difficult to account for in your study.

I suppose you also have already read some literature on the topic. From my personal viewpoint I'd recommend "Economics in one Lesson" by Hazlitt [0], it's decidedly non-mainstream and I wonder if it's taught at all in universities today but the only economic theory based on game theory (although not explicitly) and fully consistent IMHO.

I also believe that funding a multi-agent simulation is probably cheaper for a few economic models (I'd volunteer here)

Finally, I see some business value here, namely studying whether it would make sense to fund persons instead of start-ups, as e.g. Entrepreneur First does [1] (I have no affiliation)

[0]…

CTO / Founder | EF | London

We're a new kind of startup accelerator; investing in top-tier developers pre-idea and pre-team.

We bring together the best developers into cohorts where they can find co-founders and get support to help them through the early stages of startup building (figuring out ideas, customer development, fund-raising).

We've had two cohorts so far resulting in twenty companies; they’re currently worth around $100m. They’ve raised money from some of the best investors around the world including YC.

We're currently focusing on developers who are in the early-stages of their career ranging from recent graduates and PhDs to developers with 4-5 years of real world dev experience. Founders are required to move to London but we’re actively recruiting from across Europe. We’ve also helped founders sort-out visas in the past when they’ve needed them.

We're especially interested in developers who also have domain expertise that they want to apply to building a startup. Whether thats from academic experience (we’ve had founders turn their doctorates into real world products), personal interest in specific technologies (blockchain, deep-learning, VR, etc.) or from working in a particular field (finance, security, etc).

We strongly believe that that we can only succeed by finding the best founders, so if you’re on the fence about applying or have any questions then drop us an email and we’ll help you figure it out.

http://www.joinef.com/apply

I think you're setting yourself up for a world of hurt here. Starting a company is really hard, and there is very little downside to being in a team. VCs agree on this, and will show the same attitude towards solo founders as YC does.

The real question is why you're even contemplating being a solo founder. Discounting you actually wanting to be solo (that's a whole different kettle of fish) the reason is probably because it's really hard to find a co-founder. Co-founder dating doesn't work, meetups have terrible SNR, etc.

It's an unfortunate (for the rest of the world, YC might disagree) fact that the best place to find a co-founder are places like Stanford. Elite US universities, which encourage entrepreneurship, where external factors align to create lots of liquidity around able co-founders.

So while I think something like the YC Fellowship is great, the team has missed the boat. The actual problem in very early stage startups is not money, but suitable co-founders.

(Of course I'm totally biased, since I run a startup program based on this concept in the UK [1].)

[1] http://joinef.com

Kula | London, UK | Onsite | Full-time | Full-stack/ Front-end Developer | £50,000 - £90,000 + equity | https://www.joinkula.io/jobs

Hey there! We're Kula (https://www.joinkula.io/), a London based startup that is bringing the legal experience into the 21st century, for the 1.4 million SMEs in the UK.

We were founded in April of this year by Nelson and Saaras on Entrepreneur First (https://www.joinef.com/), and are growing quickly with more revenue than any company in EF history by the end of the program and over 40 paying clients!

But we couldn't do it alone, our advisers include the ex head of product at Twitter and a serial entrepreneur who has taken multiple companies from idea to IPO.

We're currently building out our Web platform and prototyping our AI technology to allow our clients to get a contract or submit a patent as easily as you would would order an Uber.

See our jobs here:
https://www.joinkula.io/jobs

Entrepreneur First | London | Software Engineer and Junior Software Engineer | Full-time | ONSITE

Entrepreneur First supports engineers and computer scientists to build world-class tech companies from scratch - so far we've helped 300 individuals form 100 companies, worth over $500m.

Our tech team's mission is to capture, and leverage, the best dataset around startup formation in the world, and these roles will be a key part of realising that vision. This ranges from building systems which support our Talent team to find the world's best technical individuals, to tools that facilitate team building and ideation on our programme, to portfolio tracking and management tools.

To learn more about EF: https://www.joinef.com.

Junior Software Engineer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/workforef/jobs/533282#.WJ9bSraLTMU

Software Engineer: https://boards.greenhouse.io/workforef/jobs/533365#.WJ9bTLaLTMU