About us
Entrepreneur First was founded in 2011 by Alice Bentinck and Matt Clifford with the aim of enabling the world’s most ambitious people to build the most important companies, and that is still true today.
Originating in London, we now also have offices in Singapore, Bangalore, Paris, Berlin and Toronto, and over 2000 extraordinary people have gone through our programme globally.
It matters what the most ambitious people do with their lives, and we are proud to have helped create over 200 companies, worth $1.5bn combined.
BE THE TEAM FOUNDERS WANT TO WORK WITH
We are always looking to hire exceptional talent to join the team. If you’re interested in joining us on our mission, please see the available job openings.
A global team
We have almost 100 staff in six different countries worldwide, including a large number of trusted Venture Partners.
Our team finds, supports, and develops the world’s most ambitious individuals and helps them build the next generation of world-leading companies.
You can see our leadership team below.
Matt Clifford
CEO, Co-founder
Matt Clifford is co-founder and CEO of Entrepreneur First, which he started with Alice Bentinck in 2011.
Matt sits on the board of Code First Girls, which he co-founded in 2013 to teach young women how
to code.
Matt started his career at McKinsey & Co. and holds degrees from Cambridge and MIT, where he
was a Kennedy Scholar. He was awarded an MBE for services to business in the 2016 Queen’s
Birthday Honours.
Alice Bentinck
CPO, Co-founder
Alice Bentinck is co-founder and General Partner at Entrepreneur First, which she started with Matt Clifford in 2011.
She also set up Code First: Girls, a not-for-profit that has taught 5,000 women to code for free while
at university.
Alice started her career at McKinsey & Co. She was awarded an MBE for services to business in the
2016 Queen’s Birthday Honours.
Joe White
General Partner & CFO
Joe is CFO and General Partner at Entrepreneur First.
Prior to EF, Joe was co-founder and COO of Moonfruit.com, sold to Yell Group in 2012 and is currently a non-exec director for The Behavioural Insights Team. He also served as a non-exec director at Demotix, a citizen journalism newswire, sold to Corbis in 2012.
Joe started his career at McKinsey & Co. and earned an MA in economics from Cambridge. He was awarded an MBE for services to technology businesses in the 2017 New Year’s Honours.
Tom Shinner
COO
Sam Barnett
President
Sam is the President of Entrepreneur First, a $200M fund which invests in individuals to find a co-founder and build a deep technology business.
Sam has experience building early stage startups and unicorns in Europe and the US. He founded Struq in London (which used machine learning to personalise ads), scaled it across 7 territories and exited to Quantcast.
After the acquisition he spent four years as an executive in SF running the 5th largest data processor in the world. Sam is also on the board of Refunite, Levelapp and Tyve.
Coralie Chaufour
General Manager, Paris
Esha Tiwary
General Manager, India
Jonny Clifford
General Manager, London
Bernadette Cho
General Manager, Singapore
Philipp Herkelmann
General Manager, Berlin
Rachel Zimmer
General Manager, Toronto
Entrepreneur First is backed by some of the world's best entrepreneurs, including the founders of LinkedIn, DeepMind and Paypal, as well as top VCs from Silicon Valley and Europe. We are also proud to be backed by our alumni, Rob Bishop and Bryan Baum, who both created companies on EF that they have since sold.
Reid Hoffman
Founder, LinkedIn
Demis Hassabis
Founder, DeepMind
Bryan Baum
Founder, Represent
Rob Bishop
Founder, Magic Pony Technology
Greylock Partners
Founders Fund
Lakestar
Mosaic Ventures
Venkat Raju
Venture Partner, Bangalore
Ashutosh Vikram
Form Manager, Bangalore
Ashutosh is a serial entrepreneur – most recently, he co-founded and scaled Ninjacart, India’s largest tech-driven supply chain platform. At Entrepreneur First, he leads Form, where he works closely with co-founders and helps them scale ideas to businesses.
Ashutosh Chouksey
Talent Manager, Bangalore
Ashutosh leads the Talent and Partnership team at EF Bangalore. Early in his career, he worked in the Retail & FMCG sectors and scaled up the Modern Trade business for companies like Henkel and Nivea. Before joining EF, he cofounded Saara.io, a TechStar-backed computer vision startup in the supply chain automation domain.
Prajwal Bhat
Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Bangalore
Prajwal is a Computational Biologist (PhD) with interests in ML/AI and Biology. He co-founded Cerenode, a Bioinformatics company serving Pharma and Biotech. He has also been in a senior leadership role in medical devices industry overseeing product development, go-to-market and regulatory affairs for in-vitro diagnostics products.
Ashwin Chandra
Form, Bangalore
Ashwin is a 2x founder who started, scaled and exited Brekkie – one of India’s first cloud kitchen and delivery ventures. At EF he helps teams ideate and build venture backable companies.
Tanuja Rajah
Launch Manager, Singapore
Jess Cheung
Form Manager, Singapore
Tiffany Lau
Talent Manager, Singapore
Ad Ketelaars
Venture Partner, Singapore
Teik Guan Tan
Venture Partner, Singapore
Teck Moh Phey
Venture Partner, Singapore
Alex Norman
Venture Partner, Toronto
Milad Alucozai
Venture Partner, Toronto
Francois Le Nguyen
Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Toronto
Elmira Shans
Talent Manager, Toronto
Bogdan Knezevic
Form Manager, Toronto