I recently joined Entrepreneur First (joinef.com). The program recruits about 50 people from all over the world to join berlin cohort 2020. Once admitted, your mission is to team up with somebody to find an idea, develop it into a business model, and in best case, find a customer. If everything goes well, after 3 months you will graduate from the program with your own company. EF invests 90K Euro in exchange for 10% of your company.

EF classifies people into talkers and doers, roughly 50-50. Talkers and doers are supposed to become CEOs and CTOs, respectively. Normally, you would start with a Kick off weekend, when you meet everybody at once. You introduce yourself to everybody. It is a good warm up and a chance for you to spot your potential partner. Unfortunately, due to Covid-19, everything changed. All the meetings were conducted in Zoom. Despite the best efforts of EF team, I believe the experience could have been much better.

I have teamed up so far with three people. In the first team, I looked at SaaS lending. In the second team, I looked at how to use robots to sort out old clothes. And with the third team, I am looking at explainable AI.

A lot of things are unclear the moment. But we will see :).