Taking Entrepreneur First to Germany

Thoughts on being the first EF Launch Associate in Berlin

A little history: My first week at EF

I have been working at Talent Investor Entrepreneur First for almost a year now. I’ve had many aspiring entrepreneurs, VC enthusiasts, investors and friends ask me about my time at EF, and particularly about exporting EF to Germany. After working with two cohorts in the capital of techno and blockchain, now seems like a good time to stop and reflect.

This is not meant to be a post about the EF model: if you’re looking to familiarise yourself with EF, there are many better posts out there, written by our founders, team, investors and alumni.

My first week at EF felt a little like stepping on a rocket bound for space, and doing it during the last 10 seconds of the countdown to launch.

Peter Thiel’s “Zero to One” is frequently on the reading list of people starting EF

During that week, we were meeting with teams formed in the first part of the programme to select the ones we’d make our pre-seed investment in and work with during the next 6 months. Crucially, this was the first time the selection process was running across two locations. I spent Monday and Tuesday meeting teams in London, Wednesday meeting teams in Berlin, and Thursday and Friday listening to our Investment Committee making decisions back in London. Then, I was asked whether I wanted to work with the teams we selected in Berlin, and off I went.

10 months later, I’m working with the second batch of Berlin-based teams to prepare for our 11th European Demo Day this Wednesday (watch here). A lot has changed in 10 months, and I’ve not only learnt how EF works but have had the chance to play a role in one of EF’s current key missions: adapting the model to new geographies.

London vs Berlin

EF is a wonderchild of the London ecosystem, one with very specific characteristics: a centralised talent pool (yet one where people are not finding co-founding opportunities as naturally as in Silicon Valley), a deep capital pool that is comfortable with the stage EF teams tend to be at, a legal system that’s very friendly to first-time founders who are short on cash.

In Berlin, we are faced with a very different reality: a talent pool disseminated throughout the country, a capital pool perhaps unfamiliar with EF’s months-old co-founding relationships and products, a legal system that involves notary appointments and paper forms, where incorporating a company can be unaffordable for first-time founders fresh out of academia.

Unlike the UK and France, Germany does not have a single centre of gravity for talent.

You may ask: is blitzscaling even possible or advisable a) for a company like EF, where so much is based on people rather than technology and b) when locations are so different they require changes to the core product?

One of the companies that worked with EF on branding offers what I think is insight on why the answer to this question is yes: EF recruits people to a cause — that “It matters what the most ambitious people do with their lives” — and is predicating a “new way to do things”. Essentially, that means EF is incredibly mission-driven and can go into new locations with the comfort of:

• Having a team of incurable optimists who get stuff done (we call this honeybadgering). They are ready to pack their things, relocate to a new place and pursue an impossible target. In my past jobs, my team always bonded over drinks after work. At EF, my team bonds over talking about work.
• Attracting founders and investors who are outliers and are able to help EF forge the first success stories in a new place: Neel, Jordan and the Redalpine team are an example of this.

My iterative cycle

Yet, the differences between London and Berlin remain undeniable. While talking about how EF is tackling this would require a lot more words and a bit of secret sauce, my personal iteration between Germany’s first and second EF cohorts has had me:

• Thinking (mostly about talent). I don’t look after our Talent strategy in Germany, but this is probably one of the most popular lunch topics with the team. Nothing impacts the quality of our outcomes as much as the talent we are able to get into the programme. In Germany, just like in London, we need to attract great people that already want to be founders, while enabling a mindset shift in ambitious people that have not even thought about entrepreneurship. In this context, the popping up of EF-like organisations is — I think — ultimately helping EF. Our real competitors remain Google, Goldman and academia for now.
• Listening (mostly to our founders). I am more than ever convinced that we will never be as good at adding German features to EF as our founders are. I’ve already learnt all kinds of things from the founders that I’ve worked with in Berlin: from holding shares through corporate entities to social liability insurance and church tax, it is a weird and complicated world out here and I want to thank them for having the patience to embark on this journey of discovery with me.
• Doing (mostly without thinking). Those who know me also know I’m an incredibly process-driven and structured worker, a legacy of my consultant life. But I’ve been trying to get comfortable with a go out and break things attitude, and that has helped me learn at an incredible place. VC is falling in love with operators and out of love with consultants — and I can now see why.
• Talking (mostly to investors). I’m extremely grateful to the numerous early-stage investors who have agreed to talk to me about their investment thesis and who have been curious to get to know the EF model. I don’t think anyone has collected how long co-founders have known each other or worked together prior to raising a Seed round as a metric before, but I think this tends to be a few years on average, at least in Europe. Explaining why what we do with founders at EF creates stronger teams than the average multi-year interaction in the wild is one of the many things I love to talk about with investors.

Telling investors about EF’s model and outcomes at our first Berlin showcase event.

Ultimately, EF’s expansion will only be proven by the teams themselves and their exceptional ability to thrive in spite of a difficult legal system or an unfamiliar investor landscape. And our teams are already at work: I’ve seen people make hundreds of phone calls in a day, sneak into their old uni lab at night and many of the other little things that only the most ambitious people in the world do, in London or anywhere else.

📝 Read this story later in Journal.

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