S2E14 - Alice Bentinck, Co-Founder @ Entrepreneur First

Alice Bentinck MBE is one of the co-founders of Entrepreneur First, one of the world's leading talent investors that helps people develop their startup ideas. Away from EF Alice is also one of the founders of Code First: Girls, an organisation which offers free web programming courses for women in university. In 2015 Alice was named one of the Fifty Most Inspiring Women in European Tech by Inspiring Fifty.

James and Hector sat down with the former McKinsey Management Consultant to discuss what drove her to launch her own business, what Entrepreneur First looks for in potential founders and why it is important to adapt to different business cultures when expanding globally. 

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to riding unicorns. The podcast about growth startups on James Pringle. And my co-host is Hector Mason from episode one ventures. This week, we have Alice Bentinck from Entrepreneur First on. Alice co-founded ETF with Matt Clifford. And it's one of the UK's most successful accelerator programs. They partner a highly skilled and talented tech people together to solve big issues and problems and has gone on to create some amazing businesses. So without further ado let's bring in others Hi, Alice, and welcome to riding unicorns. Great to have you on the show. Thank you so much for having me. If we could start off with hearing a bit about your background and where you started and how you got to where you are. 

[00:01:00] Yeah, sure. I mean, it's, it's a reasonably short things. Most of my career has been entrepreneur first.

[00:01:04] So I did a, uh, Mumsnet degree at Nottingham many moons ago. And then when I left, I joined McKinsey as a management consultant and met my co-founder Matt, Clifford, that, and after two years at McKinsey, we left, and started entrepreneur first, which. Uh, it's our 10th birthday, I think in a week or two weeks time.

[00:01:24] So, yeah, the majority of my career, the majority of my growing up has all been done. Um, algebra first, super interesting, very, very concise, it's interesting that you just, after a short stint in consulting, And as far as I can see from your LinkedIn, you didn't have entrepreneurial experience.

[00:01:43] How come you ended up thinking let's build a, that's build the app that start matching, entrepreneurs and perhaps tell us a bit about what it is. Yeah. Sure. So, maybe I'll start with what BF is and then, move on to second part. So entrepreneur first is a talent investor. And so if you [00:02:00] think about accelerators, where they invest in teams with ideas, and when they invest in companies, we invest one stage audience.

[00:02:08] So we find incredible individuals who have found a potential. And it's typically before they've even founded a company, maybe they've might have found some small things in the past. typically it's before they have a co-founder, and before they have an idea, I'm really the only thing that was selecting on is do they have the behaviors and abilities that we've seen having worked with 3000 people across the world?

[00:02:29] Do they have that potential to be a globally important founder? So we've been running in London for 10 years. And about four years ago, we started expanding across both Europe, Asia, and north America, as we now work with 700 founders a year. And we invest, in a couple of ways, we give people money to join the program.

[00:02:46] So you get a stipend to actually go through the very early stages of the program. And then once you've built a team and developed an idea, we then. That we then maintain that investing relationship is as the company grows. But we really see [00:03:00] ourselves as a, as a talent investor. We have this methodology that means we can turn a hundred strangers into co-founding pairs within.

[00:03:10] Which is really the bit that everyone thought was, slightly crazy when we first started, although actually episode one had been amazing, back to the essence, the very beginning, which we're very grateful for. , but I suppose, how did, how did I end up running entrepreneur first? Most of my, I suppose, did what lots of ambitious people do and.

[00:03:26] We often get asked, why doesn't UK have a Google? And it's like, well, Larry and Sergei probably would have done what the most ambitious people do in the UK, which is they would have gone. Right. Okay. So I can go into finance consulting law. They would have been, there'd be high-performance. That's the, the ambition status quo.

[00:03:46] And I think, Matt and I became consultants because it seemed like what ambitious people did. It was the peer and parent approved career path. That, that made sense. It didn't mean we necessarily wanted to be lifetime management consultants. That wasn't the aspiration, but as we've [00:04:00] expanded across the world, it's interesting to see how.

[00:04:02] Your career aspirations are so culturally dependent, we've been in Singapore for four years. And in Singapore, the number one thing you can do is join the government. But most aspirational job is to join the government. So all their best people joined the government, um, or the most ambitious people joined the government.

[00:04:18] I suppose really the, the first part of the app was saying, the world is missing out on some of its best founders. There are all these amazing, talented, ambitious individuals who could be great founders. They don't know it's possible. And then B there isn't an ecosystem or infrastructure that can support them to become founders.

[00:04:36] So we spent the very early days of EIF going out to campuses. So I'm going to Cambridge and. Being so surprised how many people wants to be a founder. Like if you said to somebody, Hey, do you want to be a founder? Do you want to create your own company? The answer would be yes. And then immediately the next thing would be, but, and the, but would be one of two things either.

[00:04:57] I don't have anyone to work with. I don't have a co-founder I don't have a [00:05:00] team or I don't know what I'm going to work on. I don't know what a good idea looks like. Oh, I've got lots of ideas, but how do I pick which one? Because I really, we designed entrepreneur first to solve those problems. You know, how can we help extract the best and brightest from these traditional well-known career paths?

[00:05:17] How can we make sure that entrepreneurship is seen as the most desirable, um, and, uh, kind of high-reward career path out there. And then how can we make sure that they've got the environment and infrastructure to find a co-founder develop an idea and get access to funding. I think the companies that you've invested in now have created, is it over 2 billion pounds of dollars of enterprise value? So it's four and a half billion dollars and it's going up all the time. So we, we had a unicorn, announced two weeks ago, which was tractable, which, is an amazing story of two.

[00:05:51] Basically fresh graduates. Alex's CEO, how to think when he has work experience rather than CTO Australia, as most as at Cambridge. And they've built one of the [00:06:00] biggest computer vision companies in the world, working on insurance tech, uh I'm really that, you know, answer husband had never met each other before they joined.

[00:06:06] Yeah. Alex was very clear that he wanted to be a founder. Ross van was kind of on the fence. But they met each other on the very first event we did for yeah. On basically immediately decided to work. And combined the backgrounds at rust on having worked with one of the best computer vision professors in the so you can get Ramani.

[00:06:25] And Alex, haven't spent a bit of time at work at internet, and tried to find things in the past, but also having done a computer science conversion course at Imperial. Um, and then just being on the most incredible journey and, uh, building a very, very exciting company that is transforming how insurance works.

[00:06:41] I'm Geico, the biggest insurance company. Is now, now one of their customers. So it's, it's super exciting to see. She met Alex very briefly years ago when he just started. And we were at an AI conference and all the VCs were like bees around a honeypot with him. It was amazing [00:07:00] to see, I was thinking, oh, what I found.

[00:07:01] It looks like. It's really cool. And what, apart from founder matching, what other support to founders get. Did you guys offer branding and design support? Because all of the companies come out of ETF looking like amazing businesses with really slick websites and everything. So what else do you offer beyond founder matching?

[00:07:21] And that's very kind. We don't offer, branding and design support and they need to make it up as they go along the left side. So that the key, the key parts is the founder matching is, is basically 90% of the value we provide. James, you, you were founded. How did you find your co-founder in the past?

[00:07:37] LinkedIn, which wasn't particularly successful. But more recently my fiance launched the company and we found a co-founder for her just through network and personal recommendation, which is, I think probably the most common route at the moment beyond the kind of formal matching. So. I thought you were going to, I thought you were going to say you found your fiance on LinkedIn.[00:08:00]

[00:08:00] That was Bumble, but this is, this I think is a great analogy that, I found my husband on, OkCupid 10 years ago? I remember taking her home to meet my parents and asking him to lie about how we met, because it felt really weird to say I'd met someone on the internet and now it's become the default where it's now the most common way somebody meets their spouse.

[00:08:22] And I think what we're seeing is co-founding is going go. Through the same process of at the moment, finding a co-founder is incredibly time consuming. And it's incredibly messy because okay, you meet one person that could be a potential co-founder it's taken me months to find them. And then even if they're not right, you kind of don't want to let them go because you've got no other options.

[00:08:40] What online dating did was very similar in that it created a supply and pool of liquid people that you could. Um, potentially much with go out with Mary, whatever it is. And so largely the B2B app is that we, you know, we get about 15,000 applications a year. We screened that down into the final 700 that join our programs across the world.[00:09:00]

[00:09:00] And so every person that you're interacting with has been screened for that found a potential is committed staff, that company right now. Um, and so we see. An 80% pairing rate across all our sites. So it does to be that don't respond to co-found it. So that really is the majority of the body that we provide.

[00:09:15] Um, alongside that we do a huge amount of support around idea development. It's pretty hard to know what a good idea looks like. Um, and what you read on tech crunch, um, or whatever is your preferred source of news. Um, often the stories that founders have to spin about where the ideas come from, make it very hard for.

[00:09:34] Nascent founders to understand how to come up with an idea. Everyone has this amazing backstory about like how it happened, which may or may not be true. Um, as a lot of the work we do is helping people go from maybe a collection of thoughts or insights. And actually, how do you turn this insights into a differentiator?

[00:09:50] High growth, venture backable idea. and I think because we have such an experienced team, we can very help quickly help people sort through the ideas that we've seen a million times,[00:10:00] the ideas that just aren't fundable for various reasons. but also helping people understand the trade-offs like we see a lot of people that want to work on hardware, ideas.

[00:10:08] They're an amazing selection of hardware ideas out there, but you need to understand the cost and trader for building a hardware idea versus a software idea. Ultimately, you're going to experience significant dilation, huge operational difficulties, uh, and, um, ultimately you need to be. I think that the ball for hardware founders is much higher.

[00:10:26] And so just helping people understand some of these things that the us as investors are kind of very basic, but actually it's very hard to get access to that in the outside world. And then we do all the other things that like, I have an amazing community. We have, a selection of, monthly trendy offices, but not super trendy offices.

[00:10:43] In London, we're in an old biscuit factory. We have demo days. We have an amazing investor network. One of the bits that are. His love is that at demo day, we organize, post demo day, basically four weeks of meeting investors. So the investors, well pre COVID used to come to the office, they would meet eight [00:11:00] startups a day.

[00:11:00] And so our best startups with unity, 30 books, investors over a four week period. So very quickly we'll be able to, get around, done. Now, how, easy is it to copy the model and replicated in new geographies? Do you see lots of differences and different kinds of talent or cultural nuances that have to be taken into account when you launch a new new.

[00:11:24] I thought you're going to ask them whether their competitors have copied it, we'd be very surprised how easy it is for us to copy and paste into new geographies. What's been interesting is watching other people try to replicate the model and really struggling with a co-founder that.

[00:11:36] But for us, we wondered as we moved our first international cyber Singapore, which culturally obviously is different to the UK. It's amazing to see that we haven't had to do a huge amount of localization on who we select, what we deliver, how we do co-founder, matching. And if you look at the stats, they're very similar across cohorts.

[00:11:55] So conversion to finding a co-founder is very similar conversion to being funded is very [00:12:00] similar. It's kind of crazy. I'm always surprised by how the liberalization is required. The one thing that we have seen that, as a difference is, different cultural approaches to having difficult conversations.

[00:12:11] So there were very strong cultural norms around, conflict aversion, and it varies hugely across all of our sites. You know, we're in Toronto, London, Paris, Berlin, Singapore, Bangalore and some of the things we've had to work quite hard on is creating a ETF cultural norm about how to have difficult conversations with your co-founder.

[00:12:28] In London, we found that if people weren't. Visibly getting on. It was a kind of a clear flag. Actually. He a bunch of applications where people seem to be getting on, but under the surface that's like bad things are happening. They actually don't want to work together. And so creating frameworks and, spaces for people to have really difficult, challenging conversations, particularly challenging conversations with their cultural norm has been part of how we've made the AF work across so many different places.

[00:12:57] Yeah, that's a, that's a really nice segue. And so what, what are the [00:13:00] challenges to, most frequently crop up with putting two people who've barely only just met each other, into suddenly co-founding a business with one another.

[00:13:10] So one of the interesting things is that, um, people have eight weeks to form a team when he asked, but the majority of people find their co-founder in the first week. So it's amazing how quickly it works.

[00:13:21] Um,

[00:13:22] Alice Bentinck: and one of the big challenges is helping people understand that they aren't looking for a friend they're looking for a business partner.

[00:13:28] I think co-founder, you know, you, you watched the social network, actually. They weren't great friends on such that it was kind of like

[00:13:34] Alice Bentinck: you think of co-founders like best.

[00:13:35] buddies Ultimately you're looking for somebody who you're going to give half of your business to, this is one of the most expensive transactions you'll ever make in your life.

[00:13:43] Um,

[00:13:44] Alice Bentinck: and so that person doesn't just need to be a great buddy. They need to be able to deliver on the stuff that you guys need to make this business successful.

[00:13:52] So they need to be complimentary to you in terms of skills. Um, they need to be aligned with you in terms of mission and beliefs and values. [00:14:00] I think one of the most common mistakes we see people make is that they avoid having the tough conversations with their Co-founder um, they go to the topics that are easy, where they align.

[00:14:11] Um, so it could be a shared interests or whatever it may be, but often you'll see founders avoid talking about ideas. Um, and one of the common mistakes we see is where you get two people who are like, I've found the perfect co-founder, you know, blood brothers, blood, sisters. Great. Let's go for it. And you're like, cool.

[00:14:27] What are you going to work on that? We haven't come up with an idea. And then a couple of days later, you're like, what are you gonna work on? Like, oh, well actually, you know, um, Hector's would interested in this and James is really interested in this, but you know, we'll find something in the middle. We'll find something in the middle.

[00:14:39] To me that's just a really strong indicator of people should be friends. But it shouldn't build a company together. If you can't align on my debt, if you're compromising on a, on a sort of, smashed together idea, that's a compromise of the two things that you guys believe in Karen it's, it's not.

[00:14:54] Thing. Um, as a part of my team's job, working with these founders is to be able to flag where we see [00:15:00] inconsistencies and, um, potential trouble down the line, um, and then help those teams to break up like a large part of our co-founder matching process is actually just getting people to test each other.

[00:15:10] And then when it doesn't work, getting them to break up, um, because there's such low switching costs, you know, a pool of other people to go with the breakups of rates. They're very unemotional. Um, and people on average try about two and a half teams during the eight week period. Um, but with a heavy chunk of them finding the right team very quickly.

[00:15:28] Um, so yeah, it's, it's a bizarre, it's a bizarre, but highly managed process that, uh, gets great outcomes.

[00:15:35] And Alice, I mean, you're a founder yourself. So you said that you coming up to the 10 year anniversary, but when you. Started ETF. What was kind of the first big win and what was the sort of hustley bet? Like what were you doing? Were you, how were you getting access to talent? Because it's a bit of a flywheel as well.

[00:15:54] Once you have some success, you get more applications, which means quality of candidates gets better and so on and so forth. But [00:16:00] at the beginning it must've been harder. So how did you get started? What was the first big win and where were you kind of searching for this amazing talent?

[00:16:10] We say it is the yes, 10th birthday as in, I left McKinsey 10 years ago. Um, the school that really if took about three years to get going. So if it was not for profit for the first three years, um, as in like not by accident, we were registered, we were just not making money. We were registered non-profit.

[00:16:28] Um, and we. Really just have no idea what we were doing. And, um, everyone was saying, you know, this, this process is impossible. You contact strangers and turn them into co-founders. And, um, they were kind of right in the early days, we really, really struggled. What was interesting though, was that we never struggled with.

[00:16:45] So the process was such a slog, but talent was really easy. So we spent three months recruiting our first cohort. We went to every university in the UK. So the first couple of months just living on Virgin trains, going up north that used to make me feel so unbelievably sick. I used to [00:17:00] absolutely hate it.

[00:17:00] Going to Edinburgh Manchester or wherever it may be. And we got 400 applications in three months and the last chunk of them. Um, unusual, but there were 34 absolute superstars in that. And, um, I think a third of our first cohort came from Oxford, Cambridge or Imperial, for our second cohort, a third of computer scientists at Cambridge applied to join the app.

[00:17:23] So actually the talent flywheel was surprisingly easy. There's just so much latent demand for this. The challenge then was okay, well, what are we going to do with them? And we didn't have any money, which was also a bit of a challenge. So we were trying to get funded by corporate sponsorship and the challenge we tried to incorporate as a charity originally.

[00:17:40] But apparently turning cause it'd been to university into millionaires is not particular charitable. So the charities cushions I've noticed that. So then we were trying to get kind of CSR budget to, to fund the next generation of entrepreneurs and broadly we'll get companies to pay us 25 K. But just, we didn't give them anything in return.

[00:17:58] So that was kind of it. [00:18:00] And having that kind of geo customer really didn't work. So trying to like, please, the corporate sponsors give them a product, make their investment worthwhile. And peas, our cohort just, just didn't work. So the first three years of VF were a bit of a mess. And after the second cold war, most of them were basically like, look.

[00:18:18] I'm not entirely sure if this is the right way to spend our lives. Like we're super ambitious. There's tons of amazing things we can do. Let's do one more kind of role. That's just see how it goes. And the third cohort is when we really hit our stride. That's when attractable was formed, our first unicorn and, one of the good leading indicators we had was how many of our early companies went to YC, uh, Y Combinator. So 20% of our first two cohorts went to Y Combinator. Um, and actually that was one of our hacks early on was we basically sold the assets like, Hey, do you want to go to YC? Cool. Go to, yeah.

[00:18:50] I was not incredibly proud of, we run an amazing event called if meets YC, where there was no one from YC there. Um, apart from, uh, some of our founders who had been to white Combinator and, um, [00:19:00] that was probably our best attended event. Supercapacitor if everyone wanted to come, there was definitely a pretty hacky, I mean the first three years were like a huge amount of time.

[00:19:09] Everyone's telling us we were wasting our time. I'm really the only indicator being that people wanted to do this. Our customer really wanted to do this. And if we could just make it work, if we could just work out how to get people into teams and get them funded, there was something there. Um, so yeah, it was, um, in some ways the first three years ago were way more stressful than the subsequent years because, and we see this with our founders now, the dread of, oh my God, am I wasting my time?

[00:19:35] Am I an actual idea? Is this. Emily being delusional. And I think it's so hard to find us because sometimes I think God is all delusional and they always seem that time, but it's such a fine line. And now that the flywheel really is spinning and. Very many people know about yet. Very many people won't go apply to.

[00:19:57] Yeah. Um, do [00:20:00] you, how do you manage those applications? Are you, are you using technology now to prioritize and score applications or applicants? And are you using technology to scrape, LinkedIn and scrape university websites for, for sourcing candidates? How does tech come into what. What about big, decisions as a company was to work out whether we are a tech first company or whether we were at tech enabled company.

[00:20:26] And I think there was some amazing programs like that. I don't know if you guys know pioneer, which is very much kind of like a tech first, um, program sort of similar to F in some ways it's like helping very early stage founders. But I think the beauty VF is people you've got to get the right people in the room and they've got to be in the room to, to meet and match with each other.

[00:20:45] So when it comes to applications, we do all of the screening manually. Um, and you might be like why? And it's because if you look at our selection criteria, there's some stuff that we could screen for. So like, um, we'd like smart people. Uh, the [00:21:00] people who have, who go to top tier universities typically perform best on.

[00:21:03] Yeah. And we've experimented with lots of different types of university, but that does look like a very strong, um, indicator of success. So maybe we could also have to be screened for people who have, or haven't been to those universities, but that's just one very small criteria. And we look at ability and behavior.

[00:21:20] That's not ability bucket. So ability is, um, smart and skilled and then we'll behave. In some ways, the behavior criteria way more important, um, in terms of looking at final outcomes. And so the application basically has a bunch of questions where you have to outline ways, things that you've done in the past.

[00:21:37] And we're looking for certain, certain things in that. Okay. I'm sure. Maybe in the future we could do this in a more tech enabled way, but there is such nuance in evaluating those applications and understanding the individual and seeing how the various component parts go together. And we've tried to work out like, okay, well, if someone is spiking this criteria, how many other criteria they have to crush on, et cetera, et [00:22:00] cetera, but it is so candidate specific.

[00:22:02] Um, so we, we do all the applications screening manually, um, and all the interviewing as well. And in, uh, in person. When it comes to the top of the funnel, um, we do have a bunch of methods to reach out to a bunch of people find top performers at university. Um, and again, this is a human process. We're not software company.

[00:22:24] Um, The best candidates who are most in demand, not from like other entrepreneurial things that is most in demand for various other career paths. They want a need the bespoke touch. So even if you find them in a highly scalable way, ultimately the outreach needs to be bespoke tailored and very human.

[00:22:43] Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I think exactly the same thing is happening in, in, in VC more, more generally, you know, it's the very best people. There's almost a sort of negative selection. If you kind of automate outreach to people, the ones you hear back from, uh, probably going to be overweight, the, the less impressive ones.

[00:22:59] And so it's just [00:23:00] human in the loop is always going to be there. Yeah, no very interesting. So what, what is the end goal of, yeah, there's so much going on in the ecosystem at the moment. And, um, I don't know if you've heard of, um, the seed stage, which is an initiative that I run, which is basically a demo day without the accelerator.

[00:23:17] And then obviously there are things I, why see there are things like, yeah. And I think, yeah, it was really nicely placed in that it does serve a different purpose to a typical accelerator, but what sort of excites you about. Very very early stage landscape. And, um, and what's going on that

[00:23:37] the ecosystem has grown and changed so much since we started 10 years ago. Um, and it's amazing to see so many people's journeys through it, as well as, and people that I knew as founders 10 years ago then became angel investors and now are running their own VCs and like the flywheel in London. It's, it's, it's going, and it's great.

[00:23:56] What excites me is seeing other ecosystems go through that same [00:24:00] development process. We've been in Singapore for quite a while, and seeing it go through the same process of, okay. You're beginning to see the seed VC ecosystem grow. You're beginning to see more people see founding as a aspirational path for the new alternative.

[00:24:15] But realistically the world is still missing out on many of its best founders, purely based on access to opportunity. And so, yeah, it, it means making sure that we are accessible, to as many of those founders as possible. And there are different ways we can do that, but, we're not done. We're not done with international expense.

[00:24:33] Yeah, I think it's, it's such an interesting topic because what you said earlier about, you know, the best candidates typically come from the top, universities is undoubtedly true. But I wonder how much of that is to do with, as you go down the, down the funnel to kind of raising series a or seed or series B round, how much of that is actually embedded in the bias of those investors.

[00:24:55] And so you kind of. I, those investors look to which universities the [00:25:00] founders have been to and they love the ones who've been to Oxbridge. And so that means that you guys end up having to, select people from Oxford, Cambridge, whichever other unis, um, in order to get yeah, great results. I wonder how, how long it will take and how, yeah.

[00:25:15] Get to a point where you truly are selecting the best candidates from anywhere in the world, regardless of education and base purely actually. Talent raw talent. Yeah. Yeah. And I suppose this is where, um, so when we screen application, the behavior part is way more than the ability part. So yes, we do get lots of people who happen to be from those universities.

[00:25:41] But what we're looking for is the way that they've behaved in the past. So to give you an example, One of the guys that I interviewed recently, what we'll look for is drive to achieve, challenging convention and followership. Those are all kind of behaviors that we're looking for. So these sort of outlier haters, and you know, this guy had been part of the [00:26:00] GB great person, Olympic athletic squad, doing hurdles.

[00:26:03] As a teenager, he then got very injured and lost and had to apply to university, got into Imperial, did physics. Graduated top of his class and visits from Imperial. While at the same time you got into electronic dance music and produced a track that was then sampled by Neo. One of the biggest EDM musicians in the world, like just his ability to, or his behavior of like, just doing so much stuff, challenging convention of going from a sporting background to an academic background, like his level of achievement.

[00:26:31] That's way more important than the university that he went to. But I think unfortunately there is so much ingrained bias in, NBC and, I think one of the positive things that we're seeing is just the increasing diversity of venture capitalists, taking lots of funds, doing a big push of women at the moment, which is amazing.

[00:26:48] But there's lots of work still to go. So yeah, it's, uh, I think making sure that we get the very best founders, [00:27:00] regardless of background is so important because founding is one of the most and wealth generative things that you can do. And, in some ways it should be one of the most, democratic ways to act.

[00:27:13] Unprecedented wealth. And I think it's very on popular right now to talk about like founding as a way of generating wealth. But I think it's important to talk about it because well, equals power, If we have founders who only come from certain backgrounds, certain genders, certain ethnicities, it does mean the power is kept with a very small group of, white privilege men.

[00:27:34] Fascinating. I completely agree on the point about interesting backgrounds, uh, being really highly valued. I saw someone the other day, and reached out a guy. He was, um, He'd done something. Then he became a policeman, really young guy in his twenties became a policeman, was a detective I think, then became a software engineer at Starling and has now founded a light, sustainable fitness business.

[00:27:56] And I just love seeing those kinds of founders. I'm [00:28:00] such a rounded individual, so many interests and, yeah, I'm sure he'll do, if people who do lots of horizontal moves rather than just doing kind of vertical, If someone applied to it. Yeah. Who had, I don't know, done 10 years in an institution that was very highly rated and was, you know, the highest performer in that institution.

[00:28:18] I don't know. I'm not particularly interested in that.

[00:28:20] Yeah. And now if we come back to you a bit more as a person, like what motivates you personally and how does that tie in with the sort of grand division for what you want entrepreneur first to wrap it? I mean, I feel very lucky that the business that I happened to found, just have this enduring mission.

[00:28:41] So our mission is to transform the lives of the world's most impactful people. And it's a really hard mission to fulfill, and it's an engineering mission and that my job is to find amazing people and help them realize that potential. And to do that in a kind of hugely scalable way across the world.

[00:28:58] And I just can't [00:29:00] imagine being excited by anything else. There's so much that EMF can do and already has done. And when you look at the impact that our businesses are having, particularly because the kind of founders that we see coming through now, they want to have some sort of positive impact.

[00:29:13] So if you look at attractable, for example, okay, it's an insurance tech company. Like what good could it do in the world? They have saved, as many cars from scrapping as Tesla produced last year, which is an incredible environmental benefit of insurance tag products. And seeing AR as part of my career, being able to enable these kinds of people.

[00:29:36] I mean, it's just super difficult. I feel very, very lucky.

[00:29:38] It's absolutely brilliant. Well, it's been, it's been awesome. Having you Alice, but before you go, we would love to ask you, if you had a business lunch, which three people, they can be whoever would you ask to business lunch?

[00:29:53] Okay. Um, so I would have, and I assume lots of people say this. I think Elon Musk is the [00:30:00] great inventor of our time. Um, so having a mask, I would have Kate Bingham, who is the woman that sourced the vaccine to the UK and who has done the most incredible piece of work for. The United Kingdom, um, and in pretty difficult circumstances.

[00:30:18] And I think she has a bit of an unsung hero who I would love to hear more from, uh, and then feeling inspired by the Olympics. I would love to have Simone Biles as well, who I think is the most inspirational athlete. Um, and I think that would probably be quite a random combination of people and maybe brilliant things her.

[00:30:34] I think for sure. Yeah. That sounds like it sounds like a great large, well, Alex, thanks so much for coming on the show. We've dug into so many things. It's been brilliant hearing about how you select founders, how you expand globally, similarities between ETF and dating all sorts of things.

[00:30:52] So it's been fascinating to hear. And yeah, thanks for coming on. I think you've had any analysis just before. Is there [00:31:00] applications open at the moment or is there any way we can direct people that wants to get involved? Yeah. Great. Do you go to your join.com? Applications are always open for one of our sites around the world and we would be delighted to see it.

[00:31:12] Yeah. Great. Thank you.

[00:31:14] James: Thank you for listening to write in unicorns, please do engage with us on LinkedIn or Twitter on Twitter. It's at riding unicorns underscore, and on LinkedIn, you can just search for writing unicorns.

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