An interview with Alice Bentinck: CoFounder and CEO at Entrepreneurs First

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0:32Alice Bentinck:Thank you very much. Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Europe show. I'm Seb Johnson. I'm here with Alice, the co-founder and CEO of Entrepreneurs First, which needs no introduction. How are you doing, Alice? I'm very good thank you thank you so much for uh hosting me today it is my absolute pleasure look I want to go straight into it you know anybody watching my channel anybody who interacts with my content will 100 % know who you are and know the journey of entrepreneurs first you've been a pivotal player in kind of growing especially I think the UK ecosystem but also you know you've had a huge global footprint at some point and you've been operating in lots of countries I want to go straight into what has been the most amazing point of the journey and I think you've been doing this for almost 15 years.

1:15I think the early days where I think were a bit like you were sort of doing it not quite full time. It was a bit scrappier, but it seems like it's between 10 or 15 years that you've been doing this like full, full time, you know, going at it. So what has been the best point in the journey? Maybe it was a portfolio company doing amazingly, but maybe it was the moment where you realized, okay, we've really got something here, but I would just love to know the highlight of the journey so far.

1:38Alice Bentinck:So you're right. So it's been 10 years since we started investing. We did our first investments in 2015. And the three years before that, we were actually structured as a not-for-profit. And as you say, it was sort of a slightly more random start. Best moment. I think one of those sort of magical pinch yourself moments is when we were raising our Series A, because EF is this unusual, you know, we invest, but we're actually structured as a company. We went and pitched Reid Hoffman at the LinkedIn office in the Bay Area in the US. and I remember a sort of magical moment was looking at the clock at the point where he said cool how much money do you want um I'm in and it was 17 minutes past five and it was one of those magical moments where it's like wow in 17 minutes we've you know it's one of those sort of pinch yourself moments where um honestly I think he'd done a huge amount of due diligence on us beforehand and had a huge number of references on us but that felt like one of those sort of magical magical founder moments um i suppose more honestly like you know the the day-to-day thing that i really love is that because our product is so um hands-on and we work with these founders for such a long time one of my favorite moments is whenever i meet an alumni the most common thing that they will say to me is ef changed my life and i just want to say you know thank you and i feel very lucky as a founder to be working on a product that has such an enormous impact on our customers and the people who go through through our products and through the process so um so yeah that the the reid hoffman moment was definitely the pinetry one um but i think my favorite moments are you know meeting alarm and seeing what an impact ef has had on their lives and did you have a an amount in mind that you wanted to ask reid for or were you a bit thrown off um we did we knew how much we wanted to raise i think we were raising 12 million dollars at that point for our series a this is back in 2017 and then reid has been the most amazing friend to ef and has been on our board for last almost eight years um we were very lucky to have worked so closely with them yeah and on the operational day-to-day stuff and you know i've interviewed a bunch of ef founders both people who have been through it recently but then also people like barney at cleo and he was talking about it on the balterton podcast recently and yeah like the the reviews are absolutely glowing um which yeah it must be a yeah an amazing feeling knowing that the founders have come through do really love it and are so positive about the experience um and what about on the other side what's been you know the hardest moment or the lowest point where maybe you felt like this is all falling to pieces this isn't going to work what am i doing oh how long do we have um i think there's um you know i say this to our founders there's this there are there are two kinds of dread when you're a founder and i think the stage that i'm at now is you know ef works and now the risk is like i miss how big it can be or, you know, we miss its potential.

4:29Alice Bentinck:The thing in the early days that was really, really hard and that I see a lot of founders struggle with is Matt, my co-founder, Matt Clifford. And I, we didn't know if we were wasting our time for about the first four years. And, you know, we left McKinsey, we were hyper ambitious, all our friends were going on to go and do these really cool, interesting things. And we were running this like slightly random not-for-profit we didn't have a business model we didn't know how it was ever going to make money we weren't you know deploying capital at that point and this sort of existential dread that you're working insanely hard but you've got no idea if it's on the right thing and the thing that kept us going because again like what we were doing back then was so crazy it was very much challenging the status quo investing in individuals before they have an idea like literally just you know now it seems obvious like pre-seed investing is a thing but back then it was very much against the status quo which was you know uh investing in companies that had something um and for our third demo day um which was in 2015 our third demo day beforehand matt and i were like look if this doesn't work out we've got to count it like if this demo day doesn't go well if the companies don't don't do well we're counting it and actually from that demo day we got our first unicorn we got our first 20 million dollar exit and so you know the rest is history but yeah we were pretty we were pretty close to canning it we actually spent um in the early months of ef we really you know the idea of ef seemed cool but we were also building a dating app on the side because we thought it might be an alternative to see someone yeah um that's yeah that's super interesting it's like one of the things i love about talking to the founders especially in tech is that it is such a long game you do just have to you know the most interesting founders with the best stories who have built the most interesting things spent so much time with no reward and no traction like you know everything going against them and then there was that moment uh so that definitely sounds like that moment to you um and how do you see yourself do you see yourself more as a a founder in the typical sense of like a tech founder or do you see yourself more as an investor i really am at the intersection of the two so you know ef runs like a company um we have 100 employees that work across four um four locations and we've always run as if we are a company delivering a product um but obviously with a business model that is an investing business model um i think to be a good investor you need to be really interested in the process of of identifying and understanding outliers, whether that be outlier companies or in our case, outlier talent.

7:16Alice Bentinck:So it really is a hybrid of the two, which I think is kind of what makes it fun as well. You know, we have the challenges and excitement of building this incredible team where we have, you know, one of the things I'm most proud of is the team that we've managed to build around this and how long our senior leadership team has been with us. You know, we were adding this up the other day and our partner team, We have 60 plus years of experience at EF between us. So, yeah, we have the company structure, which makes it really unique. But one of the reasons we do that, why we think it's good for our customer, is that it means that we can be very nimble in how we adapt our product, how we adapt our strategy, rather than being tied into any particular LPA that means that we're committed to work in a certain way for the duration of that.

8:04Alice Bentinck:So yeah, we've switched between investing off our balance sheet and investing out of funds. We're currently investing off our balance sheet. Patrick and John Collison did alongside a bunch of other unicorn investors, unicorn founders, did a$150 million round ETF in 2021 on the balance sheet. And we're investing out of that at the moment. So yeah, we are a weird mix between the two. But I think for what we're doing, which is, you know, we're building a product, we have a set of customers that we want to wow. We feel that this structure is optimal. And before you became the CEO, you were the CPO, right?

8:45The Chief Product Officer at Entrepreneurs First. Do you have a personal preference? Do you prefer building the product, building the team? Or do you prefer, I don't know, the investing, the finding the founders, the classic sort of like talent sourcing?

9:01Alice Bentinck:I mean, I love both. I feel very lucky that I really love what I do and feel very lucky that I get to spend all of my time either building the EF team or helping our founders build their companies. So I enjoyed both, you know, the switch from being the CPO or in some ways like the other founders. So doing lots and lots of different things, you know, running the company, managing lots of people and building the product out you know moving to this year where i am spending more time with our investors and spending more time thinking about the financial strategy of the company but you know matt and i have always worked very closely i think we'd be very lucky to have such a fantastic co-founder relationship for the last 13 years um and we still do work very closely together and are very good friends um i was actually at matt's amazing 40th birthday this weekend um so i think you know we've worked very closely together we still do uh but i've definitely enjoyed this new challenge of really getting to grips with and how our investors which is a mixture of high net worths and institutional lps think about what we do um and uh yeah you know as a founder the joy of being a founder is that you are on a constant learning curve and that you are constantly on the edge of what you know how to do um and that's one of the reasons why it's such an incredible job and why it's you know it's hard and and can be tiring at times but i think if you're the sort of person that really wants to uh push yourself to the edge of what you can do and what the edge of what you can be this is why there's there's no other role can uh that can compare.

10:42Yeah, no, I bet. I mean, it seems to be doing an amazing job and it's been such a, yeah, an amazing organization for, I think, you know, the ecosystem. Talking briefly about yours and Matt's co-founder relationship, why do you think that's been, you know, what do you think it is that has made it so strong and has enabled you to kind of keep working together for such a long period of time? You know, there's often, you know, you often see even in the most successful companies, even when the founders kind of move away or do different things, often the relationship could deteriorate for a number of reasons or um to break down like what do you think has enabled you to to stay so functional and well working if you think about ef's product and what we can do

11:25Alice Bentinck:that no one else really has been able to replicate the scale that we we do it um ef is about building co-funding teams from scratch uh and i suppose it would be it'd be ironic if we hadn't been able to maintain our relationship um but i suppose we as a company have come up with a bunch of um norms and uh processes to help people have functioning co-founder relationships i would say there is you know we matt and i use that for our own co-founder relationship as well um but that's what i was going to ask yeah because i was like you know has yours and matt's relationship kind of defined how you build co-founder relationships at ef or has ef sort of helped you manage your own co-founder relationship with matt I think a bit of both I think a bit of both I mean the bit that you know we always push our founders on when they're trying to select their co-founder is does this person make you feel more productive um are you more productive when you're in this relationship and it's amazing how often somebody will say I really like them but that's not true and I still want to stay with them like no no that's a terrible idea and Matt and I are a really really insanely productive team and he makes me feel more productive and i think we are lucky you know we we have a huge amount of respect for each other we have some skills that overlap and i think that's helpful you don't necessarily want a co-founder that has a completely different um way of working skill set um opinion about the world that you need to have a very strong overlap but we also have enough differences in our preferences and um skill sets that there's kind of enough for each of us to do the work that that most excites us uh and you know throughout the the time you know the journey of ef we have had reasonably distinct roles um and matt has been the most incredible fundraiser for all of the various vehicles that we've we've had and i spent a lot of time building the product and running the operations of the company um and that's given us the space to be able to do our thing um but we also spend so much time together as in we talk to each other relentlessly And I think this is one of the things that you can't skip as co-founders.

13:32Alice Bentinck:Relationships are trophy really, really fast. And the only way you fix it is by spending more time together. We also had amazing coaches. And I'm always a big fan of spending more money on a coach than you think you can afford. You know, you kind of get what you pay for. And we've had some very expensive and very, very good coaches. and we both speak to them individually and then we speak to them together and it's just one of those like hygiene things that means that you stay on the same page and stay uh often often with our coaching sessions we would turn up and be like i don't think we've got anything to talk about all's fine and then within about 10 minutes you're like oh yes this is this is what we should be talking about and that's that's what a great and very experienced coach can do for you and is that is that you know is that part of the role that you and the team play for your co-founders you You know, I mean, you know, the cohort co-founders, do you end up playing that role of sort of like mentors and coaches to the teams?

14:27Alice Bentinck:Yeah, I mean, the way that we think about it is when you're an early stage founder, particularly at that stage where you're trying to work out who to co-found with, you need a mirror. You need somebody who can reflect back what they are seeing. Now, if you've never really gone through the co-founding process before, you don't necessarily know what good looks like. And so that mirror needs to help you understand where you are in the stack rank of possibilities and outcomes. um so yes is a key part of what we do at ef is like yes it's about giving you a pool of carefully screened carefully curated co-founders but as importantly it's having somebody guiding you through that journey saying look seb i know you really like alice but what i'm seeing is that you're less productive than you were with you know um and let's talk about why that is um and let's work out if this is actually the right uh the right co-founder relationship for you so yeah it's it's definitely you know it's it's definitely a large part of what we do and that move you know from Matt stepping down and you going into the CEO position, how did you find that on a personal level?

15:25You know, you mentioned that you had quite distinct roles and quite distinct areas of responsibilities. I assume that was quite a big jump to then sort of, sort of looks like you're almost doing both. How did you find that kind of transition? I mean, it was more of a change than I expected,

15:42Alice Bentinck:if I'm totally honest, because we have worked so closely together and talk relentlessly and discuss everything and every decision um I thought it would be less of a change but actually like it is a change in responsibility and it's a change in the kind of things that I'm spending my time on um but I've really enjoyed it and uh I like taking on new challenges I like learning new things and this is um pushed me to do things that I haven't done in the past so yeah it's been so it's now been two years and um yeah it's really it's really fun i'm you know i think we're we're both very happy with the changes that we've made to our roles um in that period of time i've also moved to the u.s and i now live in san francisco so there's been lots of lots of different changes but you know i've been doing this for a long time and um i think having opportunity to do actually a much more radical um change in role than i'd expected has been really reinvigorating amazing and look let's let's talk about the us then you're now based there you know ef has now changed i guess its model and now it's all about sourcing founders from london forever but getting them to san francisco can you talk a bit about uh the rationale for why ef made that switch yeah so there's two there's two parts to this one is oh sorry you froze but maybe that's okay sorry did you had you finished or did i just cut in no no that no that was it don't worry okay so so there's two two reasons why we have made this shift um for the last couple of years we have been trying to work out how to engage our founders with the us um we have this incredible investor base that is largely us institutions and us high it worse um it's not that we didn't try to raise from institutions in europe it's just that we had a lot more success in the us um and i've been very lucky to work with uh alex bangash at transpose platform who's a sort of big and early believer in alternative models of venture and as i actually spent three years spending three months a year in san francisco trying to work out you know how do we get american capital to invest in more european companies you know do we do this through road shows like what's the right way to to make this work um and i would highly recommend it it's like being able to dip into the ecosystem but for enough of a period of time you actually begin to tease out the differences between ecosystems um i would i would highly recommend it also doing it between february and sort of you know april is a is a really great time to be um what in the uk okay uh so part of it was we were actively thinking about how do we make the most of our connections in the us make the most of um the ecosystem here and then the big shift that we were seeing was a change of what our customers wanted um and in the last 18 months suddenly we were beginning to hear my number one priority is to try and get to the bay area as quickly as possible can you help me to get to san francisco and as a company that has a product with customers um our job is to make sure that we're delivering a product that delights our customer and you know i think it's partly that there's been a shift in the demographics um you know we're around founders and we're now working with younger and younger demographic um you know 25 used to be seen as like youngish age to be a founder now it's sort of 17 um and so really it was it was the combination of those two things you know how do we how do we make the most of this incredible network that we have in the us and then seeing our customers actually change how they uh how they think about what they want from their founding journey um and you know the the fact that open ai and anthropic are headquartered in san francisco has brought so much energy back into the city and really really brought um you know it's now the center of this ai revolution that we're this current wave of ai that we're in and you know the energy is palpable and it's it's really beginning to attract more and more particularly young european talent um to to come over here and are you seeing results already i know it's fairly early in terms of like a full venture cycle or whatever but are you seeing uh tangible differences in maybe the amount of money raised revenue generated from those companies that you've brought straight over to san francisco versus the ones in in prior kind of cohorts that that hadn't made the move yeah happy to have a share some numbers on there so um if you look at the average um valuation uh pre us being in sf um versus post so now basically will our companies kick off their fundraisers in San Francisco although I will say like some of our amazing European VC friends have done a great job at um uh coming out to demo day and still being part of that fundraise process but if you look at pre um being an SF versus post being an SF valuations have doubled um we're taking the same people we're doing the same things valuations have doubled if you look at the speed to close around we expect pretty much all of the fundraising to be done in two weeks post demo day and demo day is a hard starting point like you don't start raising before that um previously in europe that would have been more like six weeks uh although things are beginning to get faster so we knew that there would be a shift in um we expected that there would be a shift in the amount raised the speed to raise the the caps that they were getting i think the bit that has surprised us most i think is definitely under um undervalued is what happens when you work with u.s customers um so looking at the speed that our founders can get to uh get to pretty significant contracts with american customers is unlike anything i've ever seen before and so if you look at the top companies by demo day and these companies are max six months old and this is from like a you know a standing star you know pre-team pre-idea they they had nothing and then six months later but some of them are only you know sort of four or five months old and they're getting to somewhere between 100 and 500k of ar and that's largely all coming from American customers um and it's American customers behave in a different way compared to their European European counterparts and that was probably one of the things that I'd underestimated one of our um incredible investors Charlie Songhurst who's one of the world's best angels um and backed Matt and I when we basically had absolutely absolutely nothing he said to me which I think is so right and definitely isn't talked about enough he said to me, everyone thinks that the founders set the culture of a company, and they do to some extent.

22:25Alice Bentinck:But what you don't realize is that the customers set the culture of a company. Because how fast your customers move, how quickly they respond, that is the pace that your company will move at. And so by having American customers from day one, it forces you to adopt this pace and productivity, which when we look at this particular wave of AI companies that we're in at the moment, And pace and productivity has never been more important. So, yeah, it's definitely been one of the things that has surprised us is, yes, we've seen amazing fundraising outcomes. But actually, it's the speed of revenue generation that's been so incredible.

23:04That's so interesting. I hear a lot from founders about procurement generally. But, you know, Europe versus US, when the companies are based in Europe, they're selling to European companies versus, you know, maybe they're still headquartered in Europe, but they've got, you know, their go to market in the US. Procurement is the thing that they talk about and how risk-averse European companies are. But I've never heard that point about it being having such an interesting impact on the companies itself. But given these results and given, yeah, doubled evaluations, the insane speed of revenue growth, do you regret not doing it sooner?

23:39Alice Bentinck:I mean, if you look at when else we could have done it, I think COVID wouldn't have got in the way. um uh if you if you look at the story arc of ef we went really big into asia like we took a massive bet on asia um and in 2016 expanded to um singapore and then expanded to hong kong and to to india and we've now actually consolidated we only have india left so we took a big bet on asia um and at the time it felt like the right bet to make uh i think we now realize like the right way to run EF is to actually scale a small number of hubs and scale the number of people going through each hub rather than trying to do enormous geographic coverage which honestly operation is just very very hard to manage the really hard thing is making sure that every site has the right taste and you know if you think about normal VC you have a small number of partners who are making decisions about who to invest in and we have that at our investment committee but actually the first selection decision the first investment decision is which people are you going to take onto the program and we now have a very deep apprenticeship culture um in each of our sites we have very experienced investors teaching the next generation um and so so that's one of the reasons why we've shifted to a much more consolidated model so yeah could we could we have moved to the u.s earlier probably yes um but i think the timing right now is pretty great uh san francisco as a city is really so um on fire is the wrong word like it's it's so buzzing right now um and increasingly so sort of quarter on quarter um so i think that the timing has been pretty good uh yeah maybe maybe we should have come earlier no interesting um i always want to talk about the the reaction to the move to the u.s i think you know i actually put a poll in one of my newsletters when it was like hot topic at the moment and it was bang on 50-50.

25:39I said, do you think entrepreneurs first have made the right move, prioritizing getting founders to the Bay Area? And half said yes, half said no. What was your interpretation? And what did you feel like the reaction was from the wider or maybe the specifically European ecosystem? How did that respond to the move?

26:01Alice Bentinck:I don't think the ecosystem loves the move. And I can see why, you know, we're taking a bunch of high quality companies that previously were raising and staying in Europe and now are not. But ultimately, my customer is not the ecosystem. They're a really important part of what we do. But the most important thing for me, you know, I'm the founder of a company. My job is to make this company as successful as possible, both for me, but also for my many shareholders. and I think EF will be more successful and will produce bigger companies by being able to give our founders access to the US from early on you know applications this year are double compared to last year um you know EF has never been more attractive and that's largely because we have an offer that really really appeals to our target customer um you know I love I love our product I've spent so much of my career thinking about it and I have to do what is right for our customer and what they want rather than what's right for the ecosystem.

27:00Alice Bentinck:I think EF has done an amazing job and I'm very proud of what we've contributed to the European ecosystem. And I understand that the move is not necessarily going to be popular and we have had a bunch of pushback. But I think ultimately any founder needs to listen to their customers and what their customers want. And if anything, we are seeing rapidly increasing demand to try and get to the US. I think the piece that is worth noodling on is how can we build a bridge that goes in both directions? So rather than seeing this as a brain drain and a cutting of ties with Europe, how can we say, look, there is one of the world's best talent ecosystems in Europe?

27:42Alice Bentinck:You know, the talent in Europe is absolutely world class. Some of the world's best universities, you know, we all know how great the talent is in Europe. And we know that the ecosystem in the Bay Area is the world's best ecosystem. And on whatever metric you look at, it just is the world's best ecosystem. How can we connect these together? How can we build a bridge? And honestly, since I've been in San Francisco, I'm seeing more and more European VCs come out. Lots of them, when they come out, they come say hi, come to the EF office. and more and more of them I see you know the narrative is shifting where they're saying look actually we need to take both ecosystems seriously and connect between the two and help our companies access US investors and help our companies access US customers and rather than seeing this as pure competition and you know if you are a founder in the UK and you're ambitious you're building a global company from day one and there's lots of different ways to do that and And, you know, you said, you mentioned Barney from Clio.

28:41Alice Bentinck:He's an amazing EF founder who has largely, I think, 100 % customer base in America. But the whole company is based in the UK. And, you know, he's making$250 million a year is profitable. So there are lots of different ways to do this. But when we think about the connection between the two ecosystems, that's when we can actually really, really begin to push Europe forward. and accelerate the growth of both the founders, European founders, but also European talent and seeing Europe as a great place to build out talent hubs. So there's lots of different ways to think about the model rather than just think of it purely from a nationalistic and protectionist perspective.

29:25And I think you touched on it earlier, but the way that the speed at which VCs are now moving in Europe, it seems to be because you know that bridge is is kind of clearer than ever and more more american vcs are now trying to kind of get very early into european deals it's sort of forcing our vcs to move quicker and move faster and adapt that speed which i think is kind of to your point it does work both ways and we kind of we build the good habits from learning from our american peers but i think it was really interesting the move and i think you kind of touched on it that um you know nobody would criticize a European founder for going out to San Francisco, you know, like an early stage founder trying to build their business.

30:03You know, no one ever criticizes or pushbacks against them for doing the best thing. But I think it's because it's such an amazing role that you and Matt have played in building the ecosystem. People forget that you are a business, not an ecosystem player. You know, you're not a not-for-profit. It's been a long time since you've been a not-for-profit. So I think it's really interesting. How did you find that on a personal level? you know because it really it clearly sounds like the absolute right thing to do for the business and you have played such a pivotal role in building up the European ecosystem how did it feel then to have you know some of the ecosystem then kind of push back what you felt was the right thing for your business

30:41Alice Bentinck:I mean you know it's not nice um but ultimately you know being a founder is is not about people pleasing being a founder is often the opposite of people pleasing um and ultimately it's going back to the principle of what does our customer want and um there is nothing more satisfying than delighting your customer and speaking to somebody who's thinking about founding and you tell them what ef now does and how we can help them get uh to the us and give them exposure to the ecosystem here and their eyes just light up and it's they are super excited and it's the easier sell for us honestly uh so you know when we first started ef the ecosystem thought we were wasting our time um and we did not get a positive response so this is not like you know we've been the darlings of the ecosystem for 10 years and no like you know until we had the magic pony exit um which was largely almost five years after we started ef i think we were seen as a bit of a joke um so so you know it's it's i'm i'm fine with being unpopular the most important thing is pleasing our customers and um i believe we can build ef into one of the largest and most successful companies that's ever been built from europe uh and i think it'd be crazy not to leap on that opportunity amazing no it looks like you're doing an amazing job um but yeah it's just such an interesting perspective yeah it feels that there's such a big pro-european movement at the moment and yeah it just looked from the outside like a really challenging position to be in you know trying to balance this this this reputation you have as an amazing ecosystem with actually just being the CEO of a great business that you're trying to take to the next level um I also want to touch on your experience being you know in London and in hubs all around the world you know london paris singapore india and then also you know now in san francisco like what are some of the key differences what do you think are the key things that you know hubs like london need to do to try and match either the i don't know the speed or the intensity the productivity what can we learn from san francisco

32:55the crazy thing about san francisco is that it is it is um a single industry town where um

33:06Alice Bentinck:almost the geography of it uh makes it special as in it's a tiny tiny city right and you know you probably don't really go into the tenderloin so like the spaces where people are hanging out are reasonably small and you I bump into people on a daily basis and the reason why that is helpful is that you end up exchanging information and really really quickly and so like what are the things that make it so intense here that make it so productive and it's largely that the connectivity is so high like everyone you bump into if I go to a kid's birth I've got two small kids and if you go to a kid's birthday party it's probably actually a networking event as in like you will largely be meeting a bunch of people who are in or around the industry.

33:52Alice Bentinck:And so the kind of density of the networks here is really, really interesting, unlike anything I've ever experienced. I do miss the days in London when, you know, Google Campus and, you know, Sarah Drinkwater and the team there did such an incredible job to create a sort of single hub that really, really pulled people together and in some ways san francisco is a much much larger version of that um and uh so there's something there's something about how do you create density how do you create these spontaneous interactions um but i think the bit that is much harder to replicate is the cultural pieces um you know it's it's it's things like in london i had lots of friends who weren't tech and spent a lot of time hanging out with people who weren't in tech, which is great.

34:46Alice Bentinck:Here, you really do only hang out with people in tech. And one of the interesting kind of consequences of that is if you are an ambitious and competitive person, it's very easy to stack rank yourself versus other people. And I think there is something that then means that you are constantly getting a view of, okay, well, what does the best in the world look like? And actually how far away am I from that um and so I think it it makes outlier outlier sort of outlandish success much more legible and observable um and there's something really really interesting about that that's quite hard to hard to replicate um but I think that you know my one push would be that I think ecosystem density really matters and proximity matters And so tech clusters, I suppose, I believe even more in kind of a small, you know, really trying to gather people together in a small, distinct place that enables people to aggressively network and build those relationships that drive decisions around funding or hiring or getting access to customers.

35:56yeah it makes sense and yeah london is terrible for that at the moment we desperately need one place like you know startup city for for you know people in king's cross or in a shoreditch yeah they're all over the place i think it's something that stockholm is doing really well because stockholm is small and it's got such dense dense like height like incredible talent density in stockholm and that and you're seeing that flywheel turn um but yeah we definitely we desperately need that in london um i want to talk about the portfolio generally you know like you took we've talked about clio i think tractable was your first unicorn uh poly ai i think is another one they seem to be doing really well these are all companies founded i think probably like 20 i think tractable was probably even earlier but clear is like 2016 poly ai 2017 2017, 2017, way, way before the AI wave, you know, way, way before kind of the chat GPT moment.

36:53These are all AI companies. I think there's something really interesting that entrepreneurs versus had such success with AI companies that are not this sort of like new AI wave, but are still doing incredibly well. And why do you think your model specifically attracted the type of founders who are building the types of technology that were really ahead of their time?

37:16Alice Bentinck:Well, and I think that's the right point is that it's actually not just AI. I think we were very early investors in AI, you know, tractable. We almost had to explain what deep learning was at that demo day in 2015 because it was still so new. um but if you look at some of our other big companies like aztec or jensen uh these are companies that were built 2018 and 2021 um and these are web3 companies uh or if you look at okra bio which um is a coastline backed biotech startup that has got a billion dollar contract with boehringer ingelheim um again it wasn't that we had a particular thesis on biotech It all goes back to our model is to find the very most ambitious, most talented individuals and then say, cool, what are you interested in right now?

38:09Alice Bentinck:You know, we see seed VCs are a lag metric for us rather than a lead metric about the future or a lead indicator of the future. and and i think you can you can basically never go wrong by asking ambitious um uh smart builders okay well what's going to be the next big thing and you know sometimes we get it wrong and we we put a lot of money into quantum computing probably too early um and augmented reality but ultimately by backing early technologies i think you end up being on the cusp of some really really interesting um businesses but also really interesting people as in finding people who have contrarian views about not just a you know a particular business um opportunity but a contrarian view about a certain technology um so yeah i think we've done we've done very well to be early in in some of the most kind of exciting um spaces and are you seeing that in your portfolio today or like you know everyone seems to be building an ai are you seeing people who are going against the grain who are building at technologies where you are sort of like not like there isn't much excitement or hype about them or is it still very much like everybody's focused on ai i think we are at an interesting inflection point at the moment because this sort of feels like when we were first starting ef in the early 2010s um you know you had vcs that were only investing in apps um and you know like mobile vcs you know vcs that were specialists in mobile was was a thing and i think we're now tipping over on that point where every company is an ai company so i think it becomes less about the technology and more about um what are the interesting uh technologies that are intersecting with ai um and so we have a bunch of interesting companies coming through that um will be doing demo day in january um so i probably can't give you any spoilers there but yeah i would i would i don't know if i would want to make a bet right now on what the next big technology technological shift is going to be but i would say we will experiment and if anyone who's listening to this who is interested in founding a company and believes that they have a view on what that next shift will be we would love to speak amazing well look i want to finish up with some quick fire questions just four or five short snappy ready right are we in a bubble yes no don't care doesn't impact my job at all no no uh the best part that you the bit that you enjoy the most about being in san francisco

40:52uh the people what is the absolute worst part about being in san francisco um the time difference with europe and what is the one thing that you really miss about europe

41:09my family yeah and then finally if you could implement one policy change across either the uk or or the whole of europe magically that you think would kind of take the tech ecosystem forward what would it be um

41:29Alice Bentinck:ultimately we are in a talent war and so just making sure that the uk and europe is doing whatever it takes to get the world's best talent um particularly through our universities i think when you look at what is one of the great assets the assets that europe has it's our universities you know they're absolutely world class and just making sure that we're getting attracting the very best in the world um and uh giving them access to not only our education but then the opportunities that come would come from that um we we mustn't lose sight of that amazing all right so double down on talent and make sure we can attract the world's best well look alice thank you so much for joining me i've absolutely loved chatting it's been really interesting hearing about you know your journey on entrepreneurs first thank you so much for having me i've really enjoyed it amazing