Associate

Job description

WHAT IS THE BRIDGE?

The Bridge is the fastest way for Europeans to build massive companies in San Francisco from scratch.

At Entrepreneurs First, we’ve spent over a decade refining how to identify the most talented potential founders around the globe, help them build teams, ideate and raise funds from the world’s best VCs. The portfolio we’ve built this way is now worth over $15bn.

San Francisco is the most competitive startup ecosystem in the world - if you can win there, you can win globally. It has forged the most valuable companies to ever exist; for those that want to build something generational, there’s no better place to found.

That has led us to The Bridge: combining the best European talent with a decade of company-building knowledge, and bringing it to the SF ecosystem. Cohorts of 40-50 founders, living, working and building companies together from scratch, in a house in San Francisco.

8 weeks to go from nothing, to a funded startup.

This will be the place the next $100bn company gets created.

THE ROLE

Find Daniel Ek before he created Spotify. Mark Zuckerberg before Facebook. Whitney Wolfe Herd before Bumble. Patrick Collison before Stripe, when he’s 16 years old winning 1st place at the Irish Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition.

Your job is to identify these outlier individuals before the pivotal moments in their lives, then make sure they reach their potential. Once you’ve found them, help them build a moonshot.

You will learn how ideas become reality, have day-to-day exposure to world-class founders, and directly influence how we deploy millions of dollars every year into founders and teams in Europe and the US.

We’re creating a whole new category - you can be a pioneer.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

1. Develop and execute theses on where you can find exceptionally talented individuals early in their career. Where’s the next Homebrew Computer Club?
2. Become a trusted advisor to those individuals - help them unlock their ambition and reach their potential, from advising on career decisions to supporting them in building companies and raising funds.
3. Sharpen your judgment: learn what exceptional founders and world-changing companies look like.
4. Build relationships with experts in a broad range of fields.
5. Be a key influencer in deciding which founders and companies EF invests in.

WHAT THIS LOOKS LIKE

• Sourcing talent in Europe: you will spend approximately eight months of the year working intensely on finding great people that we want to invest in. You will source them through doing deep work in both online and in person communities, all across Europe.
• Shaping talent and companies in San Francisco: you will spend approximately two to three months of the year in San Francisco, supporting the people we’ve invested in, to build their founding teams and figure out the ideas they want to work on. You’ll also help the founders as they raise their first round of investment with the best investors in the world.

Fundamentally, your job is to find exceptional people and support them to build exceptional companies. If you do this job well, you will become part of the origin story of the iconic companies of the future - to make this concrete, some examples from our portfolio include:

• Tractable - a computer vision unicorn, co-founded by Razvan and Alex, the latter joining EF immediately after completing his Computer Science Masters degree at Imperial.
• Magic Pony Technology - an AI company acquired by Twitter for $150m after just 18 months. Co-founders Rob and Zehan both studied at Imperial, but had never met - Rob was found by a Talent Investor as the first employee at Raspberry Pi.
• Ochre Bio - an AI drug discovery company co-founded by Jack and Quin. Quin was contacted by a Talent Investor while he was building a treehouse in the jungles of Costa Rica, taking a break after starting his own biotech.
• Cleo - an AI financial advisor now on a rocketship trajectory with $100m+ ARR. Barney, the founder, was an early employee at a high-growth Fintech in London - our Talent Investing team spent months with him prior to joining EF.
• Many others - e.g. Gensyn (distributed compute), Neoplants (genetically modified house plants)...

WHO WE ARE

Entrepreneur First (“EF”) has existed for over a decade. We’re a small team within EF spinning out The Bridge, our newest product.

We’re backed by some of the most successful founders and investors in Silicon Valley and beyond. They include Founders Fund, John & Patrick Collison (founders of Stripe), Demis Hassabis (founder of DeepMind & Head of GoogleAI), Mustafa Suleyman (founder of DeepMind & head of MicrosoftAI), Reid Hoffman (founder of Linkedin), Charlie Songhurst (Board member at Meta), Lachy Groom (Founder of Physical Intelligence). They’ve built the biggest companies in the world, and are helping us back the next wave of companies that will shape the next decades of technology.

At The Bridge, we believe that a small number of exceptional people will have an extraordinary impact by creating the companies which shape the future in ways we cannot yet imagine. We exist to identify, and amplify the impact of, these individuals. We do this via our unique approach to company creation, which sees us identify and work with outliers before they even know they’re outliers, right through to the day they prove it. We call this Talent Investing. We’re looking for the next generation of Talent Investors to join us, and enable the world’s most exceptional people to fulfil their potential.

The companies built at EF are now worth over $15bn. They include Cleo (an AI consumer fintech unicorn), Aztec Network (the leading privacy layer for ethereum, backed by a16z), Gensyn (a distributed compute platform unicorn),  PolyAI (AI voice agents backed by Khosla), Neptune Robotics (underwater robotics for ship cleaning, backed by Sequoia) and Magdrive (next generation satellite propulsion, backed by Founders Fund).

WHO YOU ARE

Early in your career, hungry to learn by doing, and ambitious. You likely recognise yourself in most of the below:

• Intellectually curious: you dig for first principles, self-teach, and range across domains
• Driven: you find creative ways through walls; you own your outcomes
• Network builder: you build meaningful relationships with exceptional people, peers and seniors alike
• Discerning judge of talent: high standards; optimistic yet realistic about people’s potential
• Tech-impact oriented: fascinated by how technology, especially via startups, changes the world

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