Why I believe in EF — Intrinsic Reward

What is EF and what led me here?

EF is a talent investing company that discovers very high-potential people, helps them find a co-founder and an idea, and then funds them. (EF makes its returns on the growth of the companies that come out of it — current portfolio value $16B+.)

There are two reasons why I think it is an amazing value proposition:

It helps impressive people figure out what they actually want to do. Most people never get a real push on that question. We all try to reach that understanding through education and professional environments: sometimes it works out; sometimes it does not. A Talent Investor’s big goal is to help extraordinary people figure out the best possible next steps for them. Importantly, not everyone who interacts with EF is told that founding should be their next big thing — but even when we think founding is not the right step, the conversation is still useful, because people end up knowing something about themselves they did not know before.
It is a bridge into a world that is otherwise very hard to get into. I absolutely love the people who participate in this constant race of building and investing. They are the most agentic people I have ever met, and they make crazily bold ideas our new reality. Not to lie, though: this industry is very network- and access-heavy. From the outside it might look unattainable, and I think this throttles the inflow of talent. For the UK and Europe specifically, that is a real problem.

I was one of those outsiders. It was never clear to me how one was even supposed to start. Then I heard Alice Bentinck and Matt Clifford pitch EF, and I was instantly hooked. EF’s whole model is to find people who could build something extraordinary BEFORE it is obvious to everyone else (I now see internally how MUCH work goes into that selection), put them in one room, and compress the noisiest part of founding (teaming up and breaking up, iterating over ideas, talking to customers, pivoting, finding a wedge) into a few months.

How EF works and what the program gives you

(1) A co-founder. You go through a room of heavily curated people who are all ready to build right now, and you work-trial until you find the person who multiplies your trajectory. This is like finding a partner: you would not want to get married after a few dates, and the same goes for co-founders.

(2) An idea you have pressure-tested hard enough to commit the next years of your life to. Ideas are built inside the program, not given out, but EF has structure, frameworks and hundreds of reps of helping people do exactly this.

(3) A forcing function. Deadlines, weekly accountability, and people whose job is to hold a mirror up to your progress and tell you what they see. You can obviously build alone in your bedroom, but empirically that is very hard for very early teams.

(4) Access. The ecosystem of advisors, alumni, customers and investors that an outsider would spend years trying to reach.

(5) Capital and fundraising. EF’s own investment, then dedicated help positioning you to raise your next round from top investors, including in SF.

Is EF for you?

HIGH_POTENTIAL := (
    you learn hard things fast
    AND you have done at least one thing people around you
        could not do
    AND you know this about yourself
)

CLARITY := (
    idea you are 100% sure you want to work on
    AND co-founder you are 100% sure you want to work with
    AND understanding of how you will fund it (access to VC networks)
)

if HIGH_POTENTIAL and want_to_found and CLARITY:
    go found now
    # you probably do not need EF programs, you are already set.
    # you can go talk straight to VCs.
    # we still want to talk with you though, to compare notes
    # on what you are building and who you should be talking to.

elif HIGH_POTENTIAL and want_to_found and not CLARITY:
    talk to EF!
    # this is exactly the job EF exists to do:
    # exceptional person in, closed pre-seed out

elif HIGH_POTENTIAL and want_to_found is None:
    read paragraph below
    # this is the branch I personally care about

What to do if you are high-potential but not really set on founding?

I know that in my network there are TONS of very very smart people who are quite distant from building something of their own.

And there are many valid reasons not to found. You might already be doing work that matters more than anything you would start. You might know you do not want that kind of risk, or that kind of life, at least not now. Absolutely not everyone should be a founder, and I am not trying to talk anyone into it.

But some of the reasons people hold are not really theirs. Prestige. What the CV looks like. Everyone around you doing X, so you do X. These are harder to spot than the real reasons, because they show up dressed as your own preferences.

So the only thing I am actually asking is this: take an honest look at how you make decisions about your priorities and career. If the logic holds, great — nothing else to do. But if you find loose ends, or a reason that turns out to be somebody else’s, or a search for external validation, come and talk to EF!

First published on LinkedIn on 9 September 2026.