Alice Bentinck

For the last 10 years, I've been building and running Entrepreneurs First, trying to find founders basically before they founded a company.

We've now built $15 billion worth of companies.

We've got 500 seed-funded companies.

We now work with about 400 individual founders every year.

So the nuggets that we're looking for are not companies, they're people.

Why do early stage companies fail?

It's often co-founder breakups.

If you have a great co-founding team, it doesn't matter if the idea sucks because you will iterate to the point where you get to a good idea.

In a founder, yes.

Megalomania has always been important to the people that have influenced the world.

They believe they are different to everyone else.

And this is not sufficient to succeed, but it is necessary.

You can be super smart, super ambitious, but if you don't believe your odds of success are different to everyone else's, you're never going to make it.

I'm very good.

Thank you so much for having me today.

I was over for the Christmas break, but I'm going back to my new home in California in a couple of days.

We moved out about two years ago.

Yeah.

I love it.

It's a very special place.