Entrepreneur First | Successful Co-Founder Dynamics

Hi everyone. Welcome to Gray Matter. I'm Reid Hoffman, a general partner at Greylock and co founder of LinkedIn. Today we'll be discussing the critical relationships between entrepreneurs that form the basis of any company co founders and the investors who partner with them. Joining us today are Alice Bentnik and Matt Clifford, two people who play a unique role in helping to form those relationships around the world. Alice and Matt are the co founders of Entrepreneur first, an organization that fuels company building by recruiting and investing in individuals at the very earliest stages before they have a team or often even an idea. I've been a board member to Entrepreneur first since greylock invested in 2017, and we've seen the organization grow significantly in the past few years. The core mission of the organization is to continually expand their global network of entrepreneurs and investors so that one's geographical location does it make or break whether they have the opportunity to participate in the startup ecosystem. Let's hear more about Entrepreneur first straight from the source in London. Alice, Matt, welcome to graymatter.

Thank you. It's great to be here.

Thanks for having us.

Anytime. And as you guys know, I'm a huge fan, not just because of the amazing work you do, but also because of the mission and the fact that you guys are both, you know, know, great investors and great community builders and great talent finders of entrepreneurs, but also great participants in society and kind of what the mission is of entrepreneurship, essentially helping society. So why don't you give us a brief history of how the two of you met, began working together and then how did you align on the mission to create a global talent, you know, investor amplifier network?

Sure. Well, Alice and I met, I guess over 11 years ago now in our first jobs. So we both graduated from university in the middle of the financial crisis and we were fortunate to both get jobs at McKinsey, the management consultancy. And we met there and we had a great experience there. But in many ways I think it felt to us a little bit like fighting the last battle. And what I mean by that is it felt like we were in London. And you know, the joke was in London when I graduated university. Cool. You can be a banker, a management consultant, or you could be a failure. Which one do you want? And we were sort of sucked into that. And although we had a really great experience, it felt like for some reason ambitious people in London were missing out on this whole world of technology that I think Alice and I both felt was actually going to define the 21st century. And so I think where we started was this idea that probably there were many people like us who felt like that and that actually there were many people all over the world who maybe could be great founders, but were just not in an ecosystem that normalized and encouraged that. And I think we really bonded over.

That idea, this idea that the world is missing out on some of its best founders purely because of where they're located, purely because we're in Singapore, for example. In Singapore, if you're an ambitious, highly talented individual, you want to join the government. So we have this feeling that there were individuals primarily at the start in the uk, but all over the world who just because they weren't in Silicon Valley, just because they weren't exposed to what it means to be a founder and exposed to technology on a daily basis, they weren't making that career choice. And I suppose to your point about impact on society, what happens when your most ambitious individuals, your most talented individuals go into banks, banking, rather than going into founding a startup? There are consequences of that. And I suppose thinking about our founding relationship as well, Matt and I had a very traditional co founder meeting. We met at work, we'd worked together. But there is a challenge connected to that in that Matt and I are quite similar. We have reasonably similar backgrounds and that did constrain the kind of startup that we could create. And sometimes we look back and we say, well, of all the startups we could create Entrepreneur First, EF was kind of the only one that we could with our skill set. And that did drive this idea of actually there's something about talented individuals being in silos. You know, the talented technologists aren't necessarily able to meet the people that can catalyze them or meet other technologists from different disciplines even. So, what would it take to bring individuals together who aren't naturally meeting? What ideas could come out of that?

Well, I think you guys are obviously great co founders of Entrepreneur first, although now having had years of working with you, I actually have confidence you could have done other startups as well. And one of the things that obviously, you know, as I've kind of publicized in various other formats, is I really love working with founders who are, you know, what I call infinite learners, who essentially are like, okay, how are we doing this? How can we do this better? How do we learn to take this to the next level? How do we move faster and how do we create something that's magical? And one of the things that I've participated along the journey with you guys is some of these learnings. So let's kind of move to there which is, how is Entrepreneur first different from the other programs that aim to build networks, accelerators, et cetera? And then what are the things you've learned that are why founders who are prospectively thinking about this, engineers who are prospectively thinking about this should think, wow, Entrepreneur first is the one that I should be considering.

I think the core idea at the heart of EF is that we start with the unit as the individual, not the company, not the startup. And that might sound really counterintuitive. Organizations like Y Combinator have been phenomenally successful taking very early stage companies and getting them ready for the next stage. We start a whole stage further back. We, we say not is there a company here, but actually is this individual someone who could be a great founder if paired with the right person, if given the right mentoring, if put into the right networks? And that actually is a very different discipline from trying to decide if a seed company is investable. You're answering a lot more hypothetical questions. You're really saying, might there be some thing in this founder's background that makes for a great idea? Is there the seed of something there? Do they have the characteristics, the personality types that we associate with great founders? And so I think that's pretty unusual. 99% of investment programs globally are looking at the company. And I think one thing that makes EF really special is we've now spent nine years and literally tens of thousands must be coming up. For hundreds of thousands of individuals who've applied, we've developed, I think, a really, really strong competence around seeing potential. It's very easy to look at a CV or a LinkedIn profile and say, oh, this woman has 10 years at Google, she must be really smart. Typically what we're doing is actually looking at people very early in their career and saying, does this person have the seed of what it takes? I suppose my answer to what sort of person should look at EF and why is it different is if you feel that actually you've got that extraordinary potential, but maybe you don't yet have the badges to prove it. Actually, EF is the place that will believe in you from the beginning and put you in the network that allows you to fully maximize and realize that potential.

This network point is so important. Yes, we are a talent investor. Yes, we invest in individuals, but that doesn't mean that we don't believe in co founders. Actually, the core part of EF is helping these individuals find their co founder. So when they join the program, they're part of a network, a network of individuals who are Very carefully screened by us for the traits, the abilities and behaviors that we see make individuals most successful. And most importantly, they're part of a group of individuals where everyone is ready to co found right now, they've quit their job, they are all in. And that creates a really kind of interesting atmosphere where there's this urgency and this kind of impatience to begin getting into teams. I think one of the questions that we get asked a lot is, okay, well, how do you do co founder matching? How do you connect the people together? The most important thing is firstly, the ingredients, so getting the right people and the right composition of individuals. But secondly, it's not about matching, it's about creating social norms that allow individuals to try out different co founders. If you imagine in the wild organic co founder relationships, you maybe try someone and you think it's going okay, but it maybe takes a couple of months to work out that it's not working, by which time you've maybe got a prototype and suddenly you've got to unpick this really nasty, difficult thing. At EF, you've got either between 49 or 99 other individuals in your cohort that you can experiment with. And so within 48 hours you can try somebody out, work out whether it's going to be a good fit or not. And if it isn't, there's still 98 other individuals to co found with. So what we see is during the eight week period that people have to find a co founder, people go through about two and a half co founders, they test out about two and a half co founders. And 80% of the people that join do find a co founder through this process. So it's these kind of magic ingredients of you select the right people in the right composition and then you give them these social norms where it's okay to turn around to someone and say, actually this isn't working, let's break up.

I think one of the most rewarding parts of this job is that we're operating in ecosystems where actually the density of talent networks around starting companies is not great. And so actually often people come to EF they start on their first day, they see the other people in the cohort and they say, these are my people. There's that feeling of belonging that maybe has been lacking before. And so sometimes we talk about it as we're creating a little bubble of Silicon Valley in cities around the world that maybe don't have that in the wild, as Alice says.

So there's a bunch of different interesting questions that come up from this. So first is what kind of principles have you learned? Because one of the things that I believe, and I think many smart investors believe, or experienced and smart, is that co founders actually, in fact give you a much higher shot on goal percentage. And also, generally speaking, even though we have iconic folks like Jeff Bezos who's like, okay, it's a solo founder, most often, even at the high arcs, Larry and Sergey, Bill and Paul, et cetera, you have co founders is really important. What principles have you guys found around? This is what co founders should look for in each other. This is how we facilitate and help finding the right co founders that then provide the very first important foundation to this difficult but amazing journey that is entrepreneurship.

I can jump in on this one. One of the most important things that we do when people join EF is we help them firstly understand who they are. As a co founder, you need somebody who is complementary to you. And I think that's kind of well known. But actually, one of the things that we've learned is individuals are often pretty bad at understanding who would be a good complementary co founder to them. Broadly. When we build a cohort, we're looking at two kinds of different individuals. About 60% of the people that join us have what we call a technical edge. They have some sort of competitive advantage in a certain technology. You know, they know something or they can build something that very few other people can build. The kind of people we need to match those with or help connect is not CEOs, and I think this is often a kind of misunderstanding. We call these individuals catalysts. And the reason we call them catalysts is often they have a technical background as well. It's not that they're, you know, hire an MBA off the shelf, but they're these individuals who have these often quite unusual, quite impatient, almost fidgety backgrounds where maybe they did a CS degree at university, but then they went on to be maybe did a year in consultancy, then a year as a product manager in a startup, then maybe try to found something and they've got this sort of impatience and frustration. And what we found has worked really well is when you bring these two types of individuals together, the catalysts are running around trying to work out, you know, who is the individual in the cohort that they can catalyze and help take to market. I suppose in some ways that maybe simplifies what is in many ways a process of combining two individuals, their ideas, their skills, their expertise, and seeing what comes from that.

I think one thing that's really surprising to Us. And maybe surprising to people who haven't been sort of intimately involved with the EF process is that it's much less actually about how we do upfront matching and much more about how we give these individuals the tools to test their co founding relationship. So we always say to people, this is not a marriage on day one. Don't worry so much about making the right choice first time. Make sure that you're constantly testing and evaluating the choice. And so when Alice talks about being able to get a good read in 48 hours, that's not because we make people take a personality test that spits out yay or nay. It's because one of our core beliefs at EF is that a good co founder makes you more productive. And equally, if you're a good co founder for someone, you'll make them more productive. And so a really good test is spend 48 hours working together, set yourself an ambitious goal and see what comes out of it. And actually what we find is when we give people that goal, extraordinary, what the best teams can get done in 48 hours, certainly in a week. And so what we're constantly saying to people is test yourself. Don't assume you're in the right team. Say, is this person making me my best self? If the answer to that is constantly yes, that's a pretty good sign that you're on something special.

Yep, absolutely. And then the other thing that your earlier answers I think really should highlight for all the folks interested in entrepreneurs, obviously the founders and prospective founders, you know, investors, the ecosystems that they're in is this approach to networks. And I think there's two parts of the network. One is the network of founders themselves, right. Not just within one class, but between classes. Right. And how that creates additional strength and opportunity for these entrepreneurial efforts. And then the next one is the ecosystem around the founders.

Being part of EF is getting access, as you say, to not just the immediate network, not just the cohort where you'll find your co founder, but the now, what is it? Two and a half thousand alumni who have been through EF over the last decade that aren't just based in the same city as you, they're based all around the world. There are two really interesting things that we see. One is that actually more and more now individuals find out about EF and get referred to EF by our alumni network. Our alumni are now doing more and more of the legwork where they say they meet these interesting outlier individuals that just have so much potential and get them to Join ef. One of the reasons they do this though is the second reason why our network is so useful is that one of the most common exit routes out of ef, if you don't build a startup with us, is you join one of our alumni companies. So actually individuals know when they join EF that they're gunning to go and build a company, they're gunning to be a founder. But actually if that doesn't work out, the next best option is they become a very early employee in one of our alumni companies. And you know, we see our companies growing very fast because they have the opportunity to hire two or three machine learning PhDs out of the EF network very, very quickly from the most recent cohort that's gone through. It both lowers the time taken to hire and the cost of hiring.

And I do think this network effect increasingly spills over onto the investment side as well. So there's now at least 700 different investors around the world who've invested in EF companies. And some of them are because they know EF, they're located with us in one of our sites. But actually some of them are more circuitous route. And what's really exciting is once someone has invested in an EF company, the chance of them investing in a second EF company just goes up so much because the alumni go to bat for each other literally. In the last week I was talking to a company out of our Paris cohort that was getting the warmest of warm intros into some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley seed funds who had led that alum seed round to get them to do this new seed round. And that's so powerful. I think that ability of founders to refer founders is really valuable. I suppose even more excitingly for us now that there's been several substantial exits from ef. There are now founders who have the capital to invest themselves. And what we see is founders recycling capital back into the EF ecosystem. We have several alarm LPs in our fund, we have alums who angel invest in EF companies. I think once that flywheel starts to turn, you get this very, very powerful effect that founders can make things happen for other founders.

You know, classically, as an investor, all of your children are beautiful, right? But talk about a couple of the companies that were kind of the most startling or perhaps different or interesting to think about of what's come out of ef.

So I think one really good example of this coming together of somebody with this kind of deep technical domain alongside this catalyst type Individual. We've got a company in Berlin called Nostos Genomics and I remember doing the interview for the CEO David and in my interview notes at the end it says I can't work out if what he's saying is true because if it is, it's just so unbelievable that he's achieved this much before turning 25. And so he had been at university in Switzerland, was doing a non technical degree, but it ended up building not just the largest computer science hackathon in Europe, but it also founded the first hyperloop in Europe as well and got funding for it. It just achieved an enormous amount and was desperate to start trying to find a co founder and came to EF to really find his co founder. He very quickly, within the first kind of five days of ef, found Rossio. And Rossio had been a medical doctor, but then retrained and gone into academia and ended up doing her postdoc at the Max Planck Institute where she'd done a PhD in genetic disease. I think this is a really nice combination because they ended up working on nostalgics, which speeds up the diagnosis of genetic diseases. Where David's drive to achieve his outlier behavior, his willingness to challenge convention, drove forward Rossio's technical background and created something that neither one really could have created by themselves.

I think one of the early companies that gave us real confidence that maybe we were onto something was a company from the first cohort in London that we ran in the current model where we backed individuals before they had companies and paid a stipend. So we had these two guys join us they'd never met before. A guy called Alex Daliak who had done a machine learning degree at Imperial, had a little bit of work experience at Rocket Internet, but you know, we're still pretty early in his career. And then a very, very promising researcher in computer vision out of Cambridge who was referred to as by a professor there, guy called Razban Ranka. They met at EF and this was quite early on in the evolution of deep learning. This is sort of 2014 and they had this vision that deep learning was just going to change everything. And they set out looking for a really important, important problem to apply their research to. And they eventually came up with insurance. So you know, millions of people have sadly traffic accidents every year and there's something wrong with their cars and yet it takes so long to get a repair done because there's so many humans involved in that process. What they ended up building was a company called Tractable, which uses computer Vision basically to do disaster recovery for insurance companies. So they evaluate the damage to a car in real time better than a human. It sounded a little bit crazy back in 2015 when they graduated from EF. Today that company does tens of millions of dollars of revenue all over the world. Today they work with most of the world's leading insurers. It's extremely fast growing company. She just had a great profile in the New York Times if listeners are interested. That's a company that was built from nothing by two people who never met out of their shared as Alice used the phrase earlier edge. And I think it gave us so much faith early on that there was something here. To use a more recent example, a company that is totally wowing us at the moment out of Singapore is a company called C Mode. C Mode is company started by two amazing PhD graduates out of the National University of Singapore who, although they came out of nus, they're actually both from Iran, Sadaf and Milad. And they applied their research to building what seems to be one of the world's leading pieces of software for predicting and preventing strokes. So it uses mix of computer vision and computational fluid dynamics to predict strokes. This is a company that's less than three years old and I think it's the fastest company to go through medical regulation that I've ever seen at ef. Just astonishing progress and already being paid for and used in hospitals around the world. Incredible company.

Well, I frequently find that the companies themselves are the things that show what are the really interesting things that are happening with an investor or with a incubator or with a network. But now let's kind of zoom out and say, where is EF today?

So when we first met you, Reid, in your office at LinkedIn back in 2017, EF was still pretty small. We'd been running in London for a little while, but it'd taken us quite a long time to experiment with the model to get to the right version. So really we'd only been running with the current model in London for really a couple of years. And we just opened up in Singapore and our vision that we pitched you was give us a little bit of money and we'll be able to take this global. We really believe in this idea that the problem we've identified is not just a UK one or a Singapore one, it's around the world. And so what we've done since greylock invested in 2017 is Expand EF. We're now in six locations around the world. London, Paris, Berlin, Singapore, Bangalore and Most recently Toronto. So I think at the time that we met, you know, there were about 300 individuals a year going through EF. That's now 800 we were graduating, you know, probably fewer than 30 companies a year at that time. It's now well over 100. There are now, as Alice mentioned earlier, two and a half thousand individuals have gone through EF and I think we're up to about 200 plus companies that have, that have gone on to raise follow on financing and close to a billion dollars of follow on financing for EF companies around the world. So it's grown pretty quickly, but we feel particularly for a non software product, but we feel we're just getting started. I mean, it strikes us that the big macro trends that make entrepreneurship attractive today just keep growing stronger and stronger. And we see a big part of our mission is being accessible to talent globally. I think one of the interesting things that we've learned during the pandemic is how powerful actually remote is. We had to suddenly run all these programs remote. And although we still massively believe in the power of face to face interaction, we've definitely learned a lot about how we can be even more accessible by using software to reach even more people.

When we expanded, one of the big questions for us was what would talent be like in these different locations? Would we be dealing with very different types of talent, different aspirations? And we often had the feedback when we were saying, oh, we're going to go into X country. The feedback would be like, oh, but they're not very entrepreneurial. I think what's been really interesting for us is to see that we're not looking for the majority of the population to be entrepreneurial. But in all of the countries that we've gone to, there is this small minority of outlier individuals who are so frustrated with the status quo, who are so fed up with the career options and opportunities in front of them and they're sort of shaking the railings, desperate to find an alternative career path that allows them to fulfill their potential. And so it's been interesting to see that actually the messaging and the product has remained pretty consistent in all sites. And as Matt said, remote has been really interesting for us because I think in our Singapore cohort during lockdown, we had a team formed. You had one person in New York who was never able to actually get to Singapore, but still the team was formed, has got funding and we're beginning to hear more and more of these stories where actually it's not just unlocking a local set of talent but it's really unlocking regional global entrepreneurial talent as well.

I think one of the things you just said, Alice, is extremely important, which is entrepreneurship is not for everybody. Entrepreneurship is for a person who is willing to leave the beaten path to take intelligent risk, to, as I usually describe it, jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down. And that's only for a subset, you know, a very actually select and small subset of any population, including in more entrepreneurial areas. Say a little bit about which characteristics of founders that you have found are the right ones to apply to ef? Right. And obviously some baselines are obviously driven and grit and learning and intelligence. But what are some of the characteristics that may not be as immediately obvious as those?

Sure. So this is something that you can imagine that we are fanatical about. We get thousands and thousands of applications each year that we need to whittle down to a couple of hundred. So getting the right couple of hundred really, really matters. And we've learned a huge amount over the last almost decade. I suppose there are kind of four things that we look for, some which are obvious, some maybe less so. First of all, you have to be smart. And I think what we're not talking about here is not getting all the academic badges. It's not going to the best university necessarily. It's about your point, Reid, about being an infinite learner, somebody who has that pace and speed of learning that they can take on the challenge of being a founder. They can rapaciously learn. When I think about one of the examples that we've had in the past, we had a guy who had a patent pending on his brain computer interface. He was working with four different universities, but he was 18. He hadn't even been to university yet. But he had this kind of rapacious desire to learn and to achieve. So you need to be smart. It helps if you're smart and it helps if you're an infinite learner. Secondly, we do like people with a skill and largely a technical skill. And as I was saying before, you know, we like our CEO, our catalyst types to have a technical background, even if it's just a very light technical background. Because when you think about team building, it's actually much easier to build that kind of co founding pair when you have a shared language and shared understanding about how to, to work together. Those are the kind of ability pieces that we look for. And then there are kind of two key behavior pieces that we look at. The first is you need to be an outlier. You need to Be willing to challenge convention. You need to be willing to push back on the status quo, make unpopular decisions if you like, and take an alternative path. And that's particularly important in these ecosystems where being a founder is often something that your parents disapprove of, your peers disapprove of, and are surprised at what you're doing. And the final thing we look for is you need to be a leader, so you need to have this drive to achieve, this drive to win, this sort of inner competitiveness. I remember interviewing a guy when he was just taking me through his achievements in his life. And he had been on the great British athletics team as a kid preparing for the Olympics. He'd done his physics degree at Imperial, had come top of his glass. He'd also become an electronic dance musician and had his track sampled by one of the world's leading leading electronic EDM musicians. He just couldn't stop achieving, even across this kind of very broad range of examples. But you can't just do that. You also have to take people on that journey. You have to build followership. So yes, there's always the kind of nutty professor, the eccentric person building stuff in their garage, but those don't necessarily become the scale entrepreneurs. We're looking for people who can build scalable, globally important companies. So you have to take people on that journey. You have to be a leader who can develop followership as well.

Are there any misconceptions about founders or co founders that you particularly need to help, especially new founders overcome in order to be successful?

I think one thing that's unusual about Entrepreneur first is in many ways the core thesis goes against a lot of conventional wisdom from venture capital. If you just look at classic piece of advice that you can Google, you know, people say, you know, start a company with someone you've worked with before, start a company with someone you've known for years. And I understand why that advice is out there. I think if you, you know, if you're in Silicon Valley and you're in this sort of very dense network of potential co founders, I can see that you would definitely reduce your risk by going with someone that you already know. I think what the way we see the world in, you know, kind of operating in six ecosystems that are much less dense, where actually it's very likely you don't know the best co founder for you, they're not in your network. And that's very risky advice. It often means actually settling for a suboptimal partner, someone who can't make you succeed. And we actually think that's much riskier than actually going through a program like EF that can really help you find someone who's really exceptional at what they do and help you build trust and rapport and proof points about your ability to succeed together very quickly. So that's like one misconception that, you know, I think rightly because Silicon Valley has just been so phenomenally successful in building companies, most of the advice out there is very Silicon Valley centric. And for a lot of things that's absolutely right. A lot of things are invariant across the world. But I actually think that things that are about that very first step that really come down to are you living in one of these very founder and investor dense places or actually somewhere where it's scarce and unusual? I think if you're in that second category, the advice has to be a little bit different. And I think that's what we specialize in really at EF.

Just to build on Matt's first point there, EF is basically eHarmony, not Tinder. I think lots of people who have tried to solve this problem of how do you help co founders find each other. They created Tinder, which is basically like, you know, match someone, see if it works out. Very quick relationship, if you like eharmony. When you look at eharmony's figures, eharmony is an amazing marriage platform. It's not a dating platform, it's a marriage platform where 4% of US marriages now through eharmony. There's a sort of interesting general shift towards individuals now finding their partner online. You know, it used to be at the workplace, it used to be through religious organizations, through friends at bars. And now there's been a significant rise. I think now it's the most common way to meet your partner is online. I'd say that if you take that idea and you apply it to this idea of kind of inorganic co founding relationships, but you realize that it's not about Tinder, it's about eharmony, about having individuals who've been carefully screened, where there is a very careful process that enables people to test each other and where you set a bunch of social norms about how committed you are to the process of finding a co founder. You know, the individuals who come to ef, they've quit their jobs, they're all in. You know, there's a real opportunity cost to come into ef, but it means that it enables these very long term co founder relationships to be built. I remember a really proud moment for me and Matt many years ago. When we were first starting EF was we had a demo day and the investors came with all the teams. And one of the bits of feedback we kept on getting was, oh, so you take teams now? Oh, so have you changed your thesis? You take teams now? We hadn't. It was just that the teams that we were building behaved and were experienced like teams that had worked together for many, many years. And that was largely down to this process that we put the teams through. But more than that, if you look at our data now, our almost decades worth, our teams are more likely to survive than teams that are built organically, sort of in the wild, if you like. And that's because of these sort of norms that we set very early on around feedback and finding the right co founder for you and understanding yourself as an individual and who might complement you.

Yeah, I think the points that both of you made are critical to understand, which is, look, obviously if you happen to know the right co founder yourself personally, then that can be a great thing. You've got a decade or whatever of depth of relationship. But co founders are extremely important and the thing is to be deliberate about. As Alice, you were saying, eharmony, like this is the equivalent of an economic marriage.

Right.

Make sure that you're doing it. And this is the thing that EF has been, as far as I can see from my position here in Silicon Valley, looking at YC and everything else, EF has done the best of this if everywhere in the world. And it's that ability to facilitate kind of organic and kind of trusted relationships that lead to very good co founding partnerships is extremely important. So let's shift to another part of the network node. I mean, I get asked by a lot of investors about like, oh my God, there's all these great technical founders that are part of EF and you know, these amazingly deep technical companies. How do I participate? What do I do? What's some of the advice that you give to investors about what is the way to connect with and participate in EF in the way that would help them be most successful?

Well, the first thing I would say is that they should come in and join the party. I mean, one of the really gratifying things that we've seen at EF over the last three years in particular is the internationalization of the investor base. It really felt like a few years ago Seed was very much a local game. People only wanted to invest in companies that they could, you know, kind of get an Uber to. And we've just seen that dramatically change over the last few years and you know, we now see that, you know, a large proportion of our companies will raise some money from the US in their very first round. So we're really excited to continue to expand that. Do you think it's something that the pandemic has, has only helped accelerate. So in each of our sites we, we have a team that is dedicated to getting the, the companies funded and, and they are, if you like network nodes. Their job is to, to signpost and triage and matchmake between companies and investors. As you can imagine, just given the scale of ef, the diversity of what we've got in the portfolio at any one time is really enormous. So it does take a bit of navigation and if anyone is interested I'd encourage them to email. You can email me mattignef.com and I can put you in touch with the right person. We also now have quite a lot of self serve on the website. So all of our demo days now, partly again because of the, because of coronavirus, are online. You can see all the pitch videos online. We also have investor matchmaking tools online. So you know, we see this as a huge part of the growth of EF going forward is you know, particularly in our least developed ecosystems, the ones that have not yet been through, you know, a full cycle. It's pretty extraordinary the quality of talent available relative to the supply of capital in those places local. So I think there's really an opportunity for game changing investments at what by Silicon Valley prices standards will seem like very reasonable prices in some of those areas and we're excited to continue to accelerate that trend.

One of the things that I get as a lens that's interesting given the scale of EF across a number of different geographies is who are they? Quality investors and geographies outside of Silicon Valley. And that's always been one of the, the additional interesting learnings in terms of obviously founders and new interesting tech ideas and everything else that come out from my own participation in ef. It's obviously this suddenly weird time where people are sheltering in place. One of the things that has been central to EF and will be obviously in various modified ways because we were always learning in the future has been the in person connections. But what were some of the kind of surprising learnings from the pandemic?

The most surprising learning was around team building. We were very, very worried at the beginning of this year about what would happen to team building outcomes when individuals couldn't meet in person. We'd never tried anything like that before. And yeah, things have been pretty worrying if team building outcomes have crashed. Interestingly, they seem to be at about 90% of the levels that we would see during normal times. And the companies that are coming through, we were just doing some investment committees this morning. Companies that are coming through are as good and interestingly have as much traction as we would see in non pandemic times. I think there's something really here about entrepreneurs are highly adaptable and as you say, infinite learners. And the best entrepreneurs will just learn their way out of the pandemic and we'll work out how to edit and adapt their ideas and their companies to be able to make the most of the opportunity. One of the things we were also worried about was that applications would fall. Who is going to quit their job during this period of great uncertainty? Interestingly, in every location applications have risen. And even more interestingly in London, for example, applications have risen by 8% from women, they've risen by 37%. So we're seeing a real sort of drive in applications coming through where people say, yeah, I get a pandemic is going on, but I have the risk appetite and I'm adaptable enough of an infinite learner to be able to capture this opportunity. And there are so many great examples of globally important companies that were built during not normally pandemics, but often global recessions or times of economic hardship. But it's really interesting to see so many individuals applying to EF and recognizing the opportunity that comes from the very weird situation we are in.

I think on the investor side a similar thing is true, which is at the start of the pandemic we were asking, will anyone invest in companies this year we're going to graduate all these companies, what will happen? And I think there was slow period at the start where people were just figuring this out. I mean this was a really did feel like a once in a generational shock to the system, but I was amazed how quickly that changed. And actually what we've seen is not only have our best companies succeeded in raising money, but they've succeeded in raising from a much more international audience than they might have done before. We've seen many more Silicon Valley firms look into Europe and into Asia, because if you're doing everything over zoom, it doesn't really matter if they're a mile away or 10,000 miles away, it's all the same. I think that's a big thing that we hope we'll be able to continue to capitalize on. But maybe even more importantly, I think we've Just seen that our best companies in the portfolio have been able to embrace the change that the pandemic's caused and really ride that wave, hopefully both in a way that's economically valuable for the company and socially really valuable. Maybe my favorite example, we have this company called Accurix, which we funded in London, you know, maybe four years ago. They provide software to doctors, primary care doctors, allowing them to, you know, kind of schedule appointments and communicate with their patients during the pandemic. They built over a weekend a video consultation feature which ended up having a million uses in its first month. And it took accurate market share from around 40% at the start of the pandemic to 98.5% of UK doctors using it, where we are now in the pandemic. And it's just pretty striking to see how adaptable entrepreneurs have been in really seeing like, what does the world need in this moment and moving with that. And we find it really inspiring. And I think it probably points to why, as Alice said, applications are up. There's a lot of change in the world right now and that means there's a lot of need and a lot of opportunity to build for that need.

So, Alice, one of the things that you were mentioning, and this is one of the things that I've also had the pleasure of by being on the board of ef, is noting how diversity and inclusion naturally falls out of just how entrepreneur first looks for amazing talent. Say a little bit about how, you know, kind of what the diversity of the, of the entrepreneurs of the co founding base and what you have found there and what the trajectories are there.

The key thing about looking for potential rather than looking for experience is that often experienced individuals have, you know, come through institutions and systems that are often biased against underrepresented groups. One of the key things about looking for potential is identifying what potential looks like for different underrepresented groups at the point where they apply to ef, which is, you know, we're looking for individuals who sort of, you know, have less than six years of experience somewhere in that kind of in that range. And hands up, we could still do a much better job on diversity. When we first started, Matt and I naively thought we'd solve the problem overnight. So much so that we actually started up a not for profit called Code First Girls, which has been wildly successful, but hasn't necessarily shifted the diversity stats at ef. Just a side note, on Code First Girls, we set this up six, seven years ago with the idea of teaching women to code for free. In university, we've now just hit 20,000 women taught to code for free, 50% of which come from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. So we're very, very proud of that. But if you look at EF, we're still significantly underrepresented with women, we're about 20% in terms of other kind of underrepresented groups. We try and reflect the diversity of the cities that we're in, and we're doing a pretty good job. But I think for any investor in the space, anybody who's investing in technology, this has to be front of mind. It has to be something you're always paranoid about, because it's really hard to change, and you can only make change if it's front of mind and it's something that you're actively investing in. So, for example, we invest extra time and extra resources in sourcing individuals from underrepresented groups, rather than just assuming they're going to come to us.

And then for Our last question, 2021, what lens do you see on 2021, both of you?

2021 is going to be a very big year for EF for a number of reasons. One, we're going out to raise a new fund, which is always exciting. Two, we'll be seeing the results of our first Toronto program, which will be the sort of culmination of the first wave of expansion that we did over the last three years. But three, I think it's a year where we really start to look at the next phase of growth for our mission. So, you know, our mission is to transform the lives of the world's most impactful people through entrepreneurship. And, you know, one of the big lenses we put on that is accessibility. Who can reach us and how do they reach us? And so, you know, we got big, big plans about how we ensure that we can be accessible to even more of the world's best talents. I think one of the things that we're really excited about is thinking not only about that in terms of geographic sites, where do we have feet on the ground? But as I said, how do we use software? How do we use the capital that our investors have entrusted us with as tools to make sure that we're reaching the best talent? So we have some big plans. I think there's ways that we could 10x our reach @ the top of the funnel, and hopefully that has huge impact in terms of the caliber and the reach of the companies that we produce at the bottom.

I feel very lucky that almost a decade into founding ef, I still feel so inspired by our mission to transform the lives of the most impactful people. That is really, really hard to do. And we're just getting started. We want to build a globally important institution that unlocks talent and there is much more to come.

Absolutely. And as we've been talking about founders throughout this, the fundamental characteristic of great founders is infinite learners. Both of you are. I know that from personal experience and I hope our listeners in the podcast have derived some things from those learnings which I have learned from you guys along this journey. So, Matt, Alice, thank you for this podcast across the Pond and I look forward to our next conversation.

Thanks so much, Reid.

This concludes this episode of Gray Matter. You can subscribe to our podcast on soundcloud.com Greylock, Greylock Partners, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find new episodes and blogs on our website, greylock.com you can also follow us on Twitter reylockvc. I'm Reid Hoffman and thanks for listening.