Jonny Clifford, Entrepreneur First

“People think that founder breakups are really bad… They’re really bad if they happen after you’ve raised money, after you’ve committed really down the line but we’ve created this safe space at EF where we celebrate people breaking up - so in the first eight weeks of the programme you can go through as many teams as you want”
— Jonny Clifford

This week on CUTalks, we are speaking to Jonny Clifford who is the General Manager at Entrepreneur First London, a company that invests in potential entrepreneurs pre-idea and helps them to find co-founders. Jonny has previously been a teacher as well as worked within sales at Show My Homework, an Edtech startup. We spoke about how EF identifies talent and what the programme entails. Amongst other things, Jonny also touched on how to know if founding a company is for you and gave his advice to early-stage founders.

Here is the link to the survey - https://forms.gle/9nkZYGhUFSQRhGWD7

And here is the link to the event CUTEC is hosting with EF on the 27th of April  - https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/demystifying-entrepreneurship-a-workshop-with-entrepreneur-first-tickets-148886580771

This podcast was produced by Carl Homer, Cambridge TV.

  1. Background - 1:41

  2. Role as General Manager at EF - 4:28

  3. What’s the EF programme? - 5:34

  4. EF success stories - 8:32

  5. How to identify talent - 10:35

  6. Hallmarks of outliers - 16:01

  7. Convincing people to found companies - 20:11

  8. Who should found a company - 23:42

  9. What does going through the programme look like? - 25:10

  10. What do people struggle with? - 30:20

  11. Impact of being online on finding co-founders - 31:22

  12. Advice to early-stage founders - 33:39

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