Joining Entrepreneur First was no easy decision: I had a well-paid full-time job in the R&D department of a deep-tech startup with exciting projects down the road and excellent colleagues to spend my time with. But something felt off. Having a day-to-day job and getting paid for my "time instead of my mind" (as Naval says it) started to feel unsatisfying. I had more to give than being employed and negotiating for tasks and salary.  

I was curious to start my own business and stumbled upon Entrepreneur First. Their deal: 50 like-minded people are cast by the EF team and put together in a room for three months to form groups, explore problems and ideas. After those three months, the teams will pitch in front of an investment committee, and if EF likes the team and vision, they will invest for fixed conditions (in Berlin, it's 80k€ for 10% of the company) or not. If they do invest, they assist further in fundraising a proper VC-backed business. Ah, and during the first three months, EF pays a stipend to each cohort member of 2k€ per month. They pay you to find your co-founder and teach you the VC-backed startup world. Honestly, it's a pretty sweet deal.

In the 2 1/2 interviews I had with them, I felt it was mostly about arguing that I am highly motivated and have ideas in my space. They "rank applicants in 5000 data points", as they would say later on, but it didn't feel as intimidating as that sounds.

The edge framework of EF splits people into four categories, which are:

• 🔬 Tech Edge: People that have deep technical expertise in one field.
• 📈 Market edge: People that know a particular market very well.
• 👩🏼‍💻 Catalyst doer: People that can activate someone else's edge and drive them forward. But they can also do cool stuff, for instance, a full-stack engineer.
• 📣 Catalyst talker: Same as above, but proficient talkers, for instance, salespeople.

Additionally, they divide people into CTO- and CEO types and strongly encourage teams to form of two complementary types. For example, with my Ph.D. in ultrafast optics, they put me into the CTO category with a strong tech edge in - well - ultrafast optics. But to stay in the EF framework, I would also have a market edge in lasers/optics and a bit of a catalyst talker with the conference presentations & tutoring that I did.

I had no idea what I wanted to build. I've collected some ideas over the years but wasn't too convinced of either. That is fine at EF, who invest in people, not in ideas. So you get thrown into a room with 49 other people, of which most don't have a clue what to build. But startup ideas rarely come from these Heureka moments. Instead they develop over time and mature when startups pivot around to find product-market fit.

EF starts with a kick-off weekend two weeks before the programs' official start. A motivated cohort member already created a Slack group before that, so for us, EF actually kind of started about three weeks before the kick-off weekend in endless online conversations of getting to know 49 people.

It became clear that the cohort was full of interesting people. Everybody seemed to have done something extraordinary and big already. This had me exploring two spaces (AI meeting assistant and vertical farming 🌱) quite seriously before the programs' official start.

Ideation and celebrated breakups

EF is an interesting psychology experiment, almost like a reality show without cameras. You ideate with various people, constantly checking on the relationship because whoever you are teaming up with, you will be close-to married with for 5-10 years. So you have to promote yourself while simultaneously being honest about what you can and cannot do (and what you want and don't want) AND checking if you like the other person enough to form a team with them.

The ideation process at EF is an iterative loop. You start with a fundamental belief that you and your co-founder have, and from there you form a hypothesis that you try to verify in calls with other people - people who might later be potential customers. Once they invalidate your hypothesis, you try to formulate the next one, and so on. Optimally, at some point you will find a couple of people who scream:

Of course you run into various spikes in this process and thus, there are heaps of breakups. EF celebrates breakups, emphasises that each breakup is progress for both and thus, the Slack channel is full of semi-ironic congratulatory messages when a team broke up and reflected on it well.

From food demand prediction to laser-based healthcare diagnostics

I worked in two official teams in total. For the first, I teamed up with an ex-consultant and food-delivery expert on some supply-chain optimization tool in the food industry. We had a nice machine-learning forecasting solution in mind but since there are so many solutions out there already, it was crucial to identify a wedge - a little gap in the existing solutions. To find that, we spoke to 45 people, ranging from supply-chain management in large corporations, to owners of hip bakery shops and even other companies building forecasting solutions. We learned a lot in two weeks. One learning was that this space was too saturated for us and in consequence we lost the excitement for the topic and broke up.

For the second team, I teamed up with a healthcare expert to bring a laser-based spectroscopy method from the depths of the scientific research labs to medical reality. This was close to my Ph.D. work and I have been wondering about the use of this technology for a while. So now I had the unique chance to explore this topic deeply, together with a person who knows the business side in this space much better than me. Since both of us were lacking knowledge in medicine and biology, we spoke to lots of doctors and biologists and - again - learned so much about this space, the existing technologies as well as the working processes of doctors. From large-scale cold outreach on LinkedIn, we got invited to two medical laboratories and got an enthusiastic offer from a doctor to be on our medical advisory panel.

Despite all this progress, we saw that we had a technology in search of a problem. A giant laser hammer looking for a nail. While it is possible to find nails this way – how likely is the hammer gonna be the right one to solve that problem? Both of us knew too little about biology and medicine to really solve key issues with this technology. We did see some potential solutions we could build but didn't get too excited about them and the market size was not really big enough for a VC-backed case.

After the sprint

It took us four weeks to get to that point, and those four weeks were nothing short of a rollercoaster. I enjoyed it a lot but after the second breakup, I felt like I have been sprinting for 10 weeks straight and was running out of breath. I had nine days left to find a co-founder and it was hard to get into the mood again, to come up with another revolutionary startup idea, to stay with another totally new person within the EF framework, trying to think along our edges and start calling dozens of people per week about their problems.

In the end, I passed the deadline of forming a team without being in one, meaning that EF ended there for me. I am infinitely grateful to have been given the opportunity to participate and learned more than I ever have in such a short amount of time. Additionally, I feel that the network that originated in this process will be a huge asset in the future.

As I am slowly unwinding from this intense experience, I am starting to realize, what this has been about for me the whole time: Freedom and building something that is my own. I felt constricted in my previous roles and building a startup seemed like a good way out. But a VC-backed startup entails more leading than building and at this very moment, I feel a strong urge to build. My goal for 2023 is therefore to follow my instincts, build smaller-scale projects and write about them. I am starting in the space of generative AI. Hope to see you there!

I will be writing blog posts in irregular intervals and would be very happy if you sign up (purple button bottom right) to receive future posts.