About us

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 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.

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.

Reid Hoffman is an entrepreneur, product strategist, investor, and the Co-Founder of LinkedIn.

After studying at Stanford and Oxford Universities, Reid worked for numerous high profile companies including Apple, Fujitsu and PayPal, where he served as Executive Vice President. In 2003, he founded LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network, and continues to lead the company as Executive Chairman.

Reid is an established investor in both seed stage and growth companies. He is a partner at Greylock, who work with entrepreneurs to build market-transforming companies. Their portfolio includes Facebook, AirBnB, Dropbox and Entrepreneur First.

Reid currently serves on Entrepreneur First’s board. He has provided invaluable strategic guidance to our business, and has offered advice and thought-leadership to our founders at multiple EF events.

Rob Bishop is an investor in Entrepreneur First, and an alumni of our programme.

Rob graduated from Imperial College London and worked for a year as a software engineer before joining our third London cohort. Alongside co-founder Zehan Wang, who he met through our programme, he founded Magic Pony Technology, which used machine learning to build improved systems for visual image processing.

The company was purchased by Twitter for $150m in 2016, and is now part of Twitter Cortex.

Venkat Raju is a serial entrepreneur and corporate executive with deep business, technology and GM experience.

Beginning his career in technology, Venkat has worked in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, London, Tokyo and the Indian start-up ecosystem, building businesses and providing strategy and leadership to numerous companies.

Venkat currently works as an Angel Investor, Mentor and Advisor to start ups.

As a Venture Partner at Entrepreneur First, Venkat works closely with our founders and companies on our Bangalore cohorts, bringing his experience and expertise as an entrepreneur to guide and push our founders towards greatness.

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 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 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 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.