Alice Bentinck

And so we're not actually having the hard conversation about what is the idea that we're both deeply excited by.

And also if you're running ideas in parallel, you aren't actually deep diving on any one specific idea.

So you're slowing down the information gathering process.

So what we always push founders to do is pick one idea, one starting point that you both agree on and then speed run that as fast as possible to the point where you don't think there's anything else there.

And then either change to a new idea or iterate that idea or change your co-founder.

But I think that's one of the mistakes we definitely see is where people are like, cool, we're trying four ideas simultaneously.

And it feels like you're mitigating risk, but actually you're really significantly increasing the risk in your co-founder relationship.

So our job is to help you come up with an idea and help you as a co-founding pair to come up with your idea, the idea that you are most interested in.

In the early days of EF, now 10 years ago, we did try giving people ideas.

And what we found is that they just didn't feel the level of agency or ownership over those ideas.

And so when times got tough, they would flake out.

It wasn't the thing that they really loved.

And so what we push is this idea of what is your edge?

What is the thing that you have previously invested time, energy, headspace into learning about working on?

That should be your starting point and use that as a starting point to understand, you know, what is the space that you can dominate?

I think the idea of paternity thing, you know, who gets to own an idea?

One of the reasons why I think it's so important that our companies get exposure to the U.S.

and now we take all of our companies to the U.S.,

One of the reasons why is that the competition, the level of competition there and understanding that basically there are a bunch of companies that have an idea that is pretty much 95% identical to yours makes you better.

It forces you to understand how you're going to differentiate and it forces you to be as productive as possible because that can be one of the ways you win.