When looking for the next generation of successful founders and entrepreneurs, Alice Bentinck and her team at Entrepreneurs First look for certain qualities – and these cannot be found on a CV.
“We like megalomaniacs,” says Bentinck, CEO and co-founder of Entrepreneurs First. “We like people who strive for power and look for a way to gain power and express their ambition through that power.”
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Founded in 2011, Entrepreneurs First is a San Francisco-based talent investor that backs early-stage founders – often between the ages of 18 and 30 – and has a portfolio valued at more than $16 billion (approximately €13.6 billion).
The company tries to identify founders early on
The company works with hundreds of people in Europe, India and North America every year, helping them build startups from the ground up. Some have raised up to $15 million (around €12.7 million) in seed capital within just a few months.
The key to this success is identifying founders early on – often before they have an idea for their startup.
“When we select people, we don’t ask for ideas at all. We just want to understand them – their behavior and their way of thinking,” says Bentinck.
Some of the founders Entrepreneurs First supports start out with little more than technical experience and a range of interests that they have delved deeply into.
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Kelvin Cui and Mustafah Khan, co-founders of the startup Peripheral Labs, are two of them.
Cui and Khan met while building self-driving cars at the University of Toronto and entered the Entrepreneurs First program without having a specific startup idea. “EF helped us 100 percent in developing it,” says Cui.
Founded in 2024, Peripheral Labs develops AI models that reconstruct live sporting events in photorealistic 3D. Their goal is to allow viewers to experience games from every angle.
The most important characteristics become apparent early on
For Bentinck, the characteristics that characterize successful founders usually become apparent before a career path has fully crystallized.
“We find that once someone has spent two or three years in a particular industry, their mindset changes. That can make them more conservative,” she says.
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That’s why Entrepreneurs First focuses on people early in their careers, when their thinking is still flexible and their passions are easier to identify.
“It doesn’t really matter what they’re passionate about,” she adds. What matters is depth – people “who can really go deep and want to find out everything about a topic” and use that focus to challenge the status quo. This type of behavior is often more important to success than experience, she says.
Cui and Khan started their project out of passion
Cui, 25, and Khan, 23, for example, didn’t just study robotics – they built self-driving cars together over several years, outside of the regular curriculum. “You don’t necessarily get paid for it. You do it more out of pure interest and passion,” says Khan.
Likewise, the duo at Entrepreneurs First didn’t start with a sophisticated business plan. Instead, they spent their first few months testing ideas and talking directly to potential customers, including “every single team, broadcaster and league there is,” Cui says.
“The most important thing we’ve learned at EF is the scale and ambition we have to show to build a company like this,” says Cui, adding: “We want to have our cameras in every single stadium, in every single arena.”
There must be absolute conviction
Bentinck said the strongest candidates are those who don’t see failure as an option. “They can only imagine a situation where they succeed,” she says. When “you put them under pressure and question them, they don’t understand why they shouldn’t be able to do it.”
Because when doubts arise, she says, attention shifts away from the opportunities and toward the risks: “As soon as you try to avoid failure, you’re essentially setting yourself up for failure.”
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This belief doesn’t always look like the typical extroverted confidence so often associated with successful founders.
“Many of our founders are introverts who understand what it takes to be successful and are so focused on success that they adopt behaviors typically associated with extroverts, particularly around social skills,” says Bentinck.
Test behavior, not resumes
Entrepreneurs First looks for these qualities through real-world observation rather than through sophisticated application materials. The company works with about 500 people each year and uses interviews and selection hackathons to evaluate candidates under pressure.
The hackathon serves as a work test: Can someone form a team, develop ideas and implement them quickly? Even collaboration is not evaluated in traditional ways.
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“Working well with others is not necessarily a positive indicator,” says Bentinck, pointing out that some “very stubborn people” have gone on to be successful.
In a speed-focused model where founders can go from zero ideas to millions in funding in a matter of months, Entrepreneurs First embodies the core belief that experience can be built, but obsession, ambition and conviction are harder to convey.
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Read the original article on Business Insider US.
