Entrepreneur First's Alice Bentinck on finding pre-idea founders and running demo day for 20 AI companies

Mark Beno for hopping on the show. Uh, I am the show is in chaos at this point. The timeline is in turmoil. Our show schedule is in turmoil. I believe we have more guests. I hope so. Alice coming in. Bring in someone to talk to. Sorry. Hello. How are you doing? Welcome to the show. Sorry for all the chaos.

Uh Mark Benoff really knows how to take control of an interview. Uh it was a fantastic conversation, but but we are here to talk about you. So, please introduce yourself and give us the news. Yeah, great. Hi, I'm Alice Bentink and I'm the CEO and co-founder of Entrepreneurs First.

Um and I'm coming to you live from the EF office where behind me I have 40 of the most incredible founders that were pitching at our demo day yesterday.

Um so we had Jack Clark who's one of the founders of philanthropic who kicked off demo day um did an amazing opening talk that included the phrase I'm deeply afraid which I think is is always useful for grabbing lights in AI to uh to share. Yeah, totally.

We had 200 attendees, an amazing selection of our previous co-investors and the kind of leading lights of the the Bay Area uh fundraising ecosystem. Uh partners from Kosla, Andre, Zeta, Susa, True Ventures, Baset. Um and we had 20 companies uh 20 companies pitching the next generation of largely AI related products.

Um and it was wild. Standing room only, amazing vibes. Um so yeah, it was a it was a great day. What are the most common trends? I mean, we've been to a couple YC demo days now. We And being actually like in the room and talking to so many companies, you start to pick out uh really clear themes.

Uh what's get us to the frontier. What's the October 2025 theme or different or even like anti-the I think the key theme for this one was really young founders early career founders who are who are obsessively solving some of the most um tricky problems in like old old industries.

So companies like Faction, which are the these two insanely ambitious young guys who are automating the um ordering process for industrial distributors. Um and it's like where do these guys get these ideas from? And that's actually part of the EF process is because we work with individuals um pre-team, pre- idea.

We help them go through that process of actually developing the idea from scratch. Um, and Canal, the CEO, he had actually spent a summer spending eight hours a day hand processing these sort of purchase orders for these big, you know, old industrial distributors.

Um, and he's like, right, I'm going to become a founder and I'm going to make sure that no other intern spends their summer doing this. Uh, and it's the most incredibly lucrative industry, an enormous industry. But I would say that's the theme.

You know, another example would be got a great company called um, Cto and what they're doing is it's like VA for FMCG.

So, it's um automating the compliance process, but for um fragrance companies, for cosmetics companies, this is something that's holding back $400 billion dollars worth of new products every year because it takes months and months to go through.

Well, and and probably a year ago at this point, I had somebody pitch me this idea of something they wanted to do, but they they I believe I don't think they actually went and did it. Uh but I was super uh bullish on the idea at the time.

What uh what kind of guidance were you giving the batch on uh kind of metrics around what would be compelling from for for the investors that were going to be in the audience around what like what what's the bar to come out of demo day uh with you know a seed round uh uh from your view?

So it depends on the company and depends on what they're trying to build. Um half of this batch had more than $100,000 worth of traction and these are really really young companies. So because we build all the the companies from scratch, we build co-founding teams from scratch.

We have this really unusual and unique process that uh creates companies. Um the companies that were pitching at demo day were incorporated often less than 3 months ago. So you're getting to really really impressive revenue traction within a short amount of time.

I think one of the things we do know that investors are looking for right now is the stickiness of that traction. Um and particularly because a lot of our companies are selling to older uh industries, the revenue is super sticky.

Um so it's less the sort of the the JC curve revenue where you you know it's here today, gone tomorrow, you got to rebuild it. Um often our companies getting you know year-long contracts, multi-yearong contracts with these big old companies.

Um so yeah, I think one of the things we're really focusing on right now is is the stickiness of the revenue that that they are creating. Last question from my side. uh how do you apply and do you have any particular uh application questions that you think uh make your application stand out?

So you can apply but honestly we like to find you. We'll call us. We'll call you. I like that. Uh one of the ways to think about EF is a little bit like um you know CIA the talent agency. We see ourselves in the same way. We want to be the CIA for founders.

we want to be in their um in their corner as their talent agent. And so we go out into communities across Europe, across um the US and across India. And we build the relationships and the connections to actually work out who are the individuals that we should be going after.

And because we're going after them at the point where they're pre-comp, they're pre-teen, they're pre- idea, um our job is to work out from their behaviors, uh which are the ones that stand out.

So I suppose some of the behaviors that we um focus on are pace, productivity, their ability to build really fast, but you don't see that in an application. You only see that from spending an extended period of time with these people. So our selection process includes a hackathon.

Um it means that we're spending 2 days, you know, 48 hours pretty much straight working alongside them, seeing what they build, seeing how they interact with others. And honestly, the interacting with others bit, they don't always play nicely with others. We're not looking for uh for team players.

Um but it's really about the behaviors. You can't really assess an individual their founder of potential by looking at a piece of paper. Yeah. Well, congratulations. Hackathon is a very cool selection process. Hit that gong for the whole batch. Um it's great to meet you and uh hope to