My journey at Entrepreneur First Berlin

EF Berlin kick-off weekend at the Factory in Mitte

In October 2022, I joined Entrepreneur First’s 10th Berlin cohort alongside around 50 other people. Since then, some people have asked me what my experience has been like. So I decided to spend some time reflecting on it and write it down.

I will start with the programme structure before diving into my own experience. A lot of details can be found in the FAQs, but this is the kind of walk-through I would’ve liked to see.

The Programme

Entrepreneur First (EF) is basically an incubator. They call themselves a talent investor, because they invest in ambitious people with founder potential before they have a concrete idea or team.

They select around 50 people from hundreds of applications based on their existing data points on successful founders. There is a rough balance between people with technical skills and commercial backgrounds. The programme is full-time, which ensures that all potential co-founders have a similar level of commitment.

The programme itself is structured as follows:

1. Kick-off weekend — a weekend of activities and socials where you first get to know most of the cohort. It usually takes place a couple weeks before the official start of the programme.
2. Form — a three-month period to test co-founder relationships and ideas. The deadline for finding a co-founder is in week 8. You get assigned a Form representative who checks in with you regularly. When in a team, you also get assigned a venture developer and a venture partner. The venture developer is a local advisor for more general questions around company-building. The venture partner is from EF’s global network of advisors and allocated based on their industry expertise.
3. Investment Committee (IC) — a day after Form when you pitch to the investment panel. Before doing so, teams have to submit a pitch video, a product demo video and a pitch deck. You will also get the chance to participate in “super check-ins” or mock ICs a couple weeks before then. Decisions are usually communicated the week after IC.
4. Launch — a three-month period after IC where you continue building your company if you received investment.

EF encourages you to reflect on your skills and experience based on their Edge framework, so you can engage in Edge-based ideation. It basically means that you come up with ideas based on a combination of your unique skills and common beliefs about the future. This is to ensure defensibility — a team advantage that makes your venture difficult to replicate.

During Form, there are some talks, fireside chats, open office hours, socials and bi-weekly pitches, but you’re free to organise your own time. Solo founders mostly spend their time ideating with people, while teams focus on outreach and customer discovery calls to validate or invalidate ideas. This period is all about finding the right co-founder and learning to understand the problem and market properly.

On average, every person goes through 2–3 co-founder relationships before they settle on one. But there are also exceptions that pair up early on and stay together throughout. Around a week before the deadline for finding a co-founder, they also give you access to the global solo founder pool. If you haven’t found one by the end of week 8, you get onboarded onto EF’s global community.

This means that you officially become part of EF’s Slack workspace and get access to the global channels. Before that, you can only see the channels relevant to your cohort. You still receive the stipend for the last month of Form and continue to have access to the co-working space.

Differences between Antler and Entrepreneur First

Many people who apply to EF also apply to Antler and vice versa. But the websites alone don’t really tell you what distinguishes one from the other. Based on conversations with Antler people, these seem to be the main differences between the programmes:

• Start of programme: Antler starts with a two-week period solely dedicated to getting to know your cohort outside of a business context while EF encourages you to start ideating straight away.
• Team size and roles: EF encourages CEO-CTO pair-ups and teams of two. There have been instances where people pitched alone or in a team of three, but these are very rare. Antler does not put any restrictions on team size, and there aren’t any pre-defined roles. Teams of three seem to be very common.
• Cohort composition: The ratio of commercial and technical founders seems to be roughly equal at EF. Based on the conversations I’ve had, there tend to be more business people at Antler.
• IC preparation: At EF, mock ICs simply serve as preparation and the opportunity to receive feedback on your performance. At Antler, you have a pre-IC pitch that you need to pass in order to qualify for the real one.
• Wording: In an EF context, we simply talk about team-ups and break-ups. Antler people describe these as “tracking out” (of the pool after pairing up) and “tracking in” (after breaking up).
• Stipend amount: EF provides you with a stipend of €2,000 per month during Form. For Antler it’s two instalments of €1,500.

Neither of the programmes puts any restrictions on what you can work on. However, since they’re basically VCs, the idea has to be venture scale.

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Since the programmes are quite similar, they tend to attract similar profiles, and there is usually someone in either cohort who has a friend in the other. So EF-Antler socials are quite common.

My Experience

Looking back, time really passed in the blink of an eye. I am not sure if it’s my memory or the intensity of the experience, but by the end of the year I had trouble remembering what I did in 2022 beyond work and EF.

When I joined EF, I also decided to dive deeper into the startup world more generally, so I socialised a lot. During Form, I probably met and talked to over 200 people inside and outside the programme. I teamed up and broke up twice, and tested a couple more co-founder relationships informally. What I mean by “testing” is basically working with someone once we’ve agreed on an idea to explore. Before that, people usually have several ideation sessions and talk about co-founder questions.

One of the most intense moments for me was probably the speed-dating-like co-founder carousel during kick-off weekend. They basically lined up CEO and CTO profiles opposite each other and had us talk to each other for three minutes each, with short breaks in between. It was a lot, but in hindsight, it was basically a condensed version of the period that followed. Lots of ideation and few breaks in between. I am not sure if that was the best way to go about it, but I sure did learn from it.

Although I didn’t find a co-founder in the end, I had a good experience overall. I feel like I’ve made some good friends and learnt a few things. Before joining I talked to a friend who finished a previous cohort without a co-founder, only to find one elsewhere and start a company after, so I knew that was a possibility. Though I was a bit surprised to find just how common it was. About half the people in my cohort left the programme without a co-founder and a handful dropped out in between. From the Berlin cohort, 13 teams pitched, and four received investment.

What I liked

• The people — generally speaking, I felt like there were some great people in the cohort. The right mix of complementary skillset and personality fit is hard to find, but I loved learning about people’s stories, bouncing thoughts off each other and feeling the drive to get things done. The community is definitely one of EF’s biggest selling point, as it’s full of ambitious people who support each other.
• The breakup culture — EF encourages quick feedback and difficult conversations among co-founders. They also celebrate breakups. We had a team formation channel where pair-ups, pivots and breakups were announced. Every time a team broke up, the founders would explain why. I liked to call these texts “love letters” because they would always focus on the positive. Of course teams had their reasons, but the environment encouraged quick decision-making, which helped me refine what is important to me in a co-founder relationship.
• Luna & friends—Luna is one of my fellow founders’ dog. She became somewhat of a cohort mascot, as she was always there and ready to receive attention. There are also some others who occasionally brought in their furry friend. You might laugh, but research actually shows that petting dogs lowers the level of stress hormones in your body. And managing those is also part of the journey. If you’re unfortunate enough not to have a dog in your cohort, I recommend visiting Susie, an adorable Shiba Inu, at The Rabbit Café around the corner. And no, I’m not getting paid for this.

What I disliked

• The framework—I do think that Edge-based ideation makes sense, but at one point I felt like the framework was being applied too rigorously. During solo founder sessions there was a strong focus on non-obvious beliefs. Even though I am aware of the consensus bias (the tendency to think our beliefs are widespread, even when they are not), I have yet to find a way to overcome it. So all that talk about beliefs eventually felt draining to me.
• The grading — I eventually learnt that every team was being rated based on a specific set of criteria after each meeting. I understand the need to collect data points, but I think it would help to communicate those criteria transparently, and tell people directly what they, as teams or individuals, could improve on. I received feedback on my interview performance at offer stage, which I really appreciated. But I don’t feel like I received the same level of transparency afterwards.
• Lack of diversity—sadly, this is something I am quite used to, but I would have loved to see more women and people of colour in the cohort. Having mostly worked in male-dominated environments and been on the receiving end of bad cultural experiences, I care greatly about diversity and inclusion. So it is quite important to me that my counterpart reflects a similar level of commitment toward it. Although you don’t have to be part of an underrepresented group to do that, I often feel like a closer alignment of values when that is the case. Having a more diverse group also shifts the culture in subtle, but noticeable ways. Since I met more women than men who were actively looking to found outside of EF during that same period, I think there is still room for improvement here.

Having said that, I do think that EF provides a great environment for first-time founders. The programme reduces the risk of founding by providing you with a stipend, a solid community and experienced advisors. At the end of the day, there are many ways to build a venture, and the journey is oftentimes as unique as the founders themselves.

What I learnt

I think the biggest lesson I have learnt from it all is simply to listen to myself more. There is just so much noise out there that it’s easy to become distracted from your own thoughts and judgement. Although leaving the programme without a co-founder or venture can temporarily feel like a setback, I think it can also be a blessing in disguise. What sometimes feels like a sprint is actually a marathon, and sometimes the best you can do is slow down to go further.

That is something I realised after talking to a founder who has already exited a venture and is successfully running another. Listening to her story and the insights she has gained over time was very inspiring. It put some things into perspective for me. I am very glad that I met her, because I feel like it provided me with a role model in my immediate environment, which is actually quite important to me.

Apart from that, my time at EF made me realise how in demand a combination of tech and communication skills are. Although I started out as a CEO profile with the goal of finding a more technical co-founder, I ended up talking to a lot of commercial counterparts, because they valued the versatility of my skillset. This made me want to invest in my technical skills more. All the conversations about chatGPT and the future of Artificial Intelligence in particular has left me wanting to develop my expertise in this area.

I think the biggest challenge I encountered at EF was simply self-doubt. I have always struggled a bit with imposter syndrome, but being in an environment where you’re expected to regularly pitch yourself and your ideas really made it worse. I felt more confident over time though, as I got to know the people better and some of those I respect the most told me what they appreciate about me and my skillset. In that sense EF has also helped me become more aware of my strengths and weaknesses.

As for what I’m going to do next:

First, I’m going to sleep. Because it’s 4am and my competitive streak has me typing away on this article. I set up an accountability system with someone from my EF cohort, because we realised that we were both planning on writing a reflective article. To raise the stakes, whoever misses a deadline will pay €5 into a virtual jar, and the first one is today. The plan is to use the money for food. I like that, because it usually means free food for me haha.

I’m not trying to throw shade or anything, but Dylan if you’re reading this, you really need to get your own personality. You cannot copy my blog articles forever.

As for what I’m going to do after that:

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