The journey to finding your co-founder starts here

We recommend that you choose the cohort that is closest to you. Participants are expected to relocate to take part in the programme, and while there’s no commitment to stay in those locations afterwards, most of our alumni do.

If you don’t currently have the right to work in any of the countries we operate in, some of our locations are able to support successful applicants to apply for a visa in order to take part. 

You can find details of the support we provide here.

Yes. People we select relocate to join us from all over the world. In some locations we can offer support to help you apply for a visa if required and to help you settle into the regions. There’s no commitment to stay in any of those locations after the programme, though most of our alumni do.

No –  Entrepreneur First is designed for aspiring founders to join as individuals, and meet their co-founder from our carefully selected community.  

The first 8 weeks of the programme is dedicated to trialling co-founders and ideas. You’ll have the opportunity to test partnerships with leading talent from a wide variety of backgrounds to find the right person with a complimentary skillset and mindset.

No – you don’t need an idea to apply to Entrepreneur First. Insights, strong convictions and beliefs about the future are encouraged, though. If you do have an idea, that’s great, but its strength and weaknesses won’t affect how we assess your application. We care most about the size of your ambition.

Yes – approximately 20% of our cohort is non-technical. If you don’t come from a technical background but have strong beliefs formed from working in industry we’d welcome an application from you. Some of our most successful companies have been built by co-founders with a combination of technical and domain expertise. Again, we care most about the size of your potential.

Absolutely – we’re strong believers that technically-skilled individuals can make some of the best founders. The Entrepreneur First team will work with you to help you understand customer development, validate your idea and figure out the go to market strategy. We’ll help you develop core founder skills every step of the way.

You are still eligible to apply if you have taken a very small amount of investment or been awarded a grant. However, depending on the arrangement, it does sometimes prevent us from being able to invest in your company and therefore prevent us from offering you a place. We deal with these situations on a case-by-case basis and you should email [email protected] for more information.

Entrepreneur First’s programme is designed first and foremost for individuals to find a co-founder they wouldn’t have otherwise met. We assess prospective founders solo, based on their potential to found a company, rather than the merits of an existing team or business.

Our cohort creates an environment for you to trial those partnerships at an accelerated pace. Therefore, EF might not be the right place for you if you’re already in a team, particularly if you’ve made a lot of progress and are committed to working together.

If you are in a co-founding team and do still wish to apply, we ask that you and your co-founder apply separately to the programme.

No – When taking part in our programme, we ask you to commit full time so that you can move as fast as possible, and focus your energy on working with your co-founder.

We provide a monthly stipend to enable everyone to focus on our programme without the need to work elsewhere.

No – at this point we do not allow deferrals. There are two reasons for this; one is that each cohort is carefully composed based on the backgrounds and skills of the strongest applicants meet during the selection cycle for a cohort – this means we can optimise for strong cofounder combinations. The second is that we believe in urgency and not delaying building the company you believe should exist.