FAQs

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 ambition.

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 contact us using the contact form.

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.

We recommend that you apply to the cohort located nearest to you, or where you have an existing connection, as relocation can be difficult, but ultimately it should be determined by what makes the most sense for your business.

Yes – Entrepreneur First is based in London, Bangalore, Paris and Berlin (whichever is closest to you). 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.

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 on the support offered by each location here.

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.

Yes – each cohort has a deadline to apply. If you’ve just missed out on the application window contact us using the contact form.

Many people considering joining Entrepreneur First attend our invitation-only events. If we make you an offer to join we’ll invite you to a cohort meetup and give you a login to your cohort dashboard loaded with everyone’s searchable profiles. We take cohort composition seriously – every offer is made based on degrees of likelihood that you’ll meet a suitable cofounder.

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.

No – we don’t tell you what to work on or give you ideas. We’ll facilitate team-building and ideation and have several frameworks and tools to help you reach the strongest founder-idea fit. We’re most interested in building companies which are technically defensible and can become globally significant.

On our Launch programme you will have a VP check in once a week. Prior to that, on our Form programme you’ll have a check in weekly with someone from the Form team or an Entrepreneur in Residence (EiR). These check ins are a critical part of your development throughout Entrepreneur First.

The company you create does. Entrepreneur First does not own any IP that belongs to your company, and does not take a proportion of your profits. If you have further questions about IP or a current project you’re working on please contact us using the contact form.

Some of our locations are able to provide co-working spaces with wifi, tea and coffee facilities and event spaces.

No – we invest based on talent not sector, so we’re technology and sector agnostic. We’re most excited by applications of new and emerging technologies applied to hard or underserved problems.

You will gain invaluable founder experience which will equip you with many transferable skills for whatever you choose to do next. Many of our alumni join existing Entrepreneur First portfolio companies and we help with introductions. Some return to academia, others to industry. We will work with you to help you figure out what the best next steps might look like and support you along the way. Regardless of what you choose to do you will always be part of the Entrepreneur First community – and perhaps even re-apply to join a later cohort, as many have done. There is also no need to give the stipend back – that is yours to keep.

No – though many companies choose to stay in these locations. For any company the most important thing is to be close to its customers and sometimes this means relocating to where these customers are. We have companies based in the US, South Africa, Netherlands and China as well as many other locations.

Entrepreneur First funds you as an individual from Day 1, and if you form a company, we are your first investor.  To start we will pay you £2,000 per month in London / S$4,500 per month in Bangalore / €2,000 per month in Berlin or Paris during Form. If you leave Entrepreneur First at the end of Form or Launch the stipend is yours to keep.

Our investment terms differ by location. For more information by site please click here.

Yes – most cohort members use the pre-seed funding from Entrepreneur First to cover their costs of living.

EF has been planning ahead of Brexit to ensure we are in a strong position. We have implemented controls to ensure Brexit will have little to no impact on our programs or on our investment activity in all our sites of operation. We remain committed to all our European and non European sites and to ensuring that top talent will continue to have access to our programmes.

Entrepreneur First is committed to protecting your data and puts information security at the forefront of its processes. We have SCCs in place to ensure your data is protected and we have a high standard of data protection across all sites. Occasionally we may need to share your personal data with our sites outside the European Economic Area. We may also allow our third party service providers, some of whom are located outside Europe, access to your personal data. For more information, please see our privacy policy: https://www.joinef.com/privacy-policy/.