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.