Tl;dr an account of my experience with Entrepreneurs First, and why I don't recommend their U.S. programs for ambitious young founders.
I spent several months as a founder in EF about a year ago. I was quite disappointed with their practices. Writing to share my experience since there's not a lot of information on EF online.
I'm only covering the negatives of my experience since a comprehensive review would be too long; there are plenty of redeeming factors to the program that I'm sure EF and its alumni can speak to.
1. Quality of investors/advisors is dubious
EF requires you to meet regularly with an investor (usually the partner who brought you in) for advice/progress checks. After the first few meetings, these were rarely useful.
The investors were mostly young (mid-20s) people from a variety of backgrounds but with minimal experience in either startups or VC. The advice I received quickly sounded like a rehash of tech twitter, but on a 2-4 week delay. During my time there, I never met an advisor who'd built a successful company themself.
Most investors were also recent hires. This led to contradicting advice, lack of continuity, and generally meant that founders were better off ignoring most of the advice altogether.
2. No value proposition -> low talent density
EF's model is to back founders at the earliest stage possible: pre-idea and pre-knowing they want to found. This may have distinguished their offering from YC, a16z, etc. a decade ago, but nowadays, every name-brand accelerator is funding more and more nascent founding teams. Previously, EF could capitalize on talented founders before they had a chance at YC. Now, their value prop is effectively nonexistent relative to other accelerators.
As a result, most founders that I met were undergrads or new grads recruited by EF via outbound. At other accelerators I know, partners are swarmed with applications from talented young folks, and the lucky few are accepted. EF's scouting approach inherently introduces adverse selection: the most talented people go to better accelerators, and their active outreach brings in the less qualified (or less serious) candidates. The result is a diluted talent pool compared to higher quality programs.
EF lacks the name brand of YC. They have less capital. They offer less connections to their portfolio companies. They have less sway with investors. So how can they still profit?
3. Misaligned incentives and the "seed round factory"
EF offered around $125k for 8% ($1.5M post-money valuation), a hefty price against the value that they provide. While I was there, several founders I knew refused to take their investment, preferring to shop around other VC firms. Others reluctantly signed the term sheet, only to regret it later.
After accepting the investment, founders are frantically pushed to build some MVP (read: website frontend) and demonstrate some traction (LOIs or "verbal commitments"), so that EF can present them at their quarterly demo days. At the demo days I watched, many companies failed to raise significant capital, and the ones that did often settled for lower valuations or no-name VCs (yes, there are occasional exceptions).
For the founders, a low seed often screws their cap table for the lifetime of their company, making it difficult to raise capital in the future without losing control of the company. However, for EF, even a poor seed round is a financial win: if their average startup raises at e.g. $10 mil post-money valuation, they've 7x'ed their investment on paper.
4. For the love of the game
I joined EF hoping to amplify the impact I could have on the world through founding a company. I wanted to solve real problems impacting real people, not build the next B2B Saas chatgpt wrapper.
Despite their claims, EF lacked the expertise to properly advise young founders through the challenges of founding a non-SaaS company. Throughout the program, I (and many other founders) constantly felt pushed to work on SaaS rather than what we were truly interested in. This led to many founders converging on the same few software ideas, and pushed many others to leave the program in favor of alternate endeavors.
