Entrepreneurs First

Defining your Saturday morning 🌅 🤖 🥐 Saturday Club /ˈsatədeɪ klʌb/ noun 1 a regular session in Shoreditch, London, run by Entrepreneurs First, for people working or studying full-time who are serious about starting a company. "She used Saturday Club to turn her side project into something real." 2 a curated group of engineers, scientists, and self-taught technical builders, each committing at least 10 hours a week to building. "He met his co-founder at Saturday Club." 3 dedicated time to build, get advice from the EF team, and prepare to go all in. "Saturday Club was where I got ready to leave my job." Saturday 31st October, 9:30-11:30am. Registration in the comments below. Nick Sopuch Laura Sahyoun

We are hiring our next round of Venture Fellows at Entrepreneurs First. The Venture Fellowship is a two year role designed as an entry point for people at the earliest stages of their career to learn the ropes of venture capital, build out their startup network and get an inside view on what world class company building looks like. At the end of the two years, we back the fellows to take their next step by actively helping them secure roles as either a full time investor, a startup operator or a founder. Previous alumni have gone on to become Partners at EF, work in Tier 1 VC, become startup operators, run government agencies or founded their own companies. See the link in the description for more information on the role and to apply now.

Some of the best founders I’ve met didn’t call themselves founders. Not yet anyway. Someone had to find them first. That’s the job. And we’re hiring for it at EF. Our investors spend their days tracking down exceptional engineers, researchers and operators all over the world. The ones deep in a problem who haven’t realised they should be building a company around it. Then we help them make the jump. It’s part detective/investigative work & part backing people before anyone else does. And there’s nothing better than seeing someone you first messaged months ago pitching their potential life's work on demo day 🚀 We’re looking for people who: - Are relentlessly curious about people - Can spot talent before it’s obvious - Love the hustle of building networks from scratch - Get genuinely excited about founders If that sounds like you (or someone you know), drop me a message. Always happy to chat :)

One of our new founders landed a multimillion-dollar contract in Japan by growing a beard, printing fake “Growth Director” business cards and throwing his own embassy reception. ⠀ He’s just one of the outliers in The Bridge Fall 26 cohort, which has officially kicked off. A few other crazy things they pulled off before landing in San Francisco: > Won four international physics olympiad medals, then helped scale a foundation model at Citadel Securities 200x in size as part of a team whose model generated nine-figure annualised revenue. ⠀ > Turned down a €400K quant trading track to teach himself longevity biotech. ⠀ > Built a voting platform at 15, grew it to 30,000 users, and sold it to the Council of Europe at 16. ⠀ > Built an AI tool that turns prompts into working hardware designs and grew it from $0 to $23K MRR in six months. Had already sold an AI tutoring business with 10,000+ paying students. ⠀ > Built a thrust-vector-controlled rocket in high school, then went on to build testbeds at NASA JPL and rocket-engine hardware at Japan’s space agency. Also raised CHF 2M for charities door-to-door alongside his studies. ⠀ > Built an AI product solo to 350,000 users and $30K ARR in eight months, with $0 spent on marketing. ⠀ > Won the highest-scoring gold medal at the International Philosophy Olympiad, then built a quant-finance platform that hit $30K ARR in its first month after launching exclusively to MIT’s Master of Finance cohort. ⠀ At The Bridge, we take chances on crazy outliers who’ve shown an edge that’s impossible to ignore. ⠀ Follow The Bridge to follow their journey.

Lovart x OpenAI: Founder Vibe-Design Workshop Thursday, Oct 22 · 6–8pm · San Francisco A hands-on session for founders building products with small teams. Bring something you’re working on. Demos are encouraged. The top 3 projects win a year of Lovart Pro and a feature on our socials. Spots are limited. RSVP: https://lnkd.in/gAbgsRxZ

From underwater robots to solving one of the biggest bottlenecks in infrastructure: energy. Grace and Vayu came to SF building underwater robots. 1 week later, they killed the idea. Then they spoke to hundreds of people in 2.5 weeks and found a much bigger problem: getting enough power, fast enough. That led to LOIs and a $500K contract. Two weeks ago, they pitched Lattice Energy at EF Demo Day. Watch their full pitch on the Demo Day portal.

Working or studying full-time, but serious about starting a company? We are relaunching the Entrepreneurs First Saturday Club in London.   Saturday Club gives you dedicated time to build alongside a curated group of technical people, where you can meet potential co-founders, get advice from the EF team, and prepare to go all in.  If you are an engineer, scientist, or someone who has developed strong technical skills independently, and can commit at least 10 hours a week to building, this is the room to join.     Our next session is Saturday, 31 October. Breakfast provided. Registration link in the comments below.

Biographica is in Times Square 🌿 We’re proud to say that Biographica has been selected for the prestigious Norrsken 100 list of companies tackling deep tech problems at scale. The challenges and opportunities in creating the crops of tomorrow are larger than ever. Creating resilient food systems will take a whole variety of technologies but at Biographica we believe more granular, mechanistic understanding of plant biology is critical to delivering the novel crop products of tomorrow. Building that understanding will involve new modelling approaches, rapid validation assays and whole new toolsets for agentic AI. We’re proud to be building in all three of these areas. https://lnkd.in/dxzbAf_F

They came to SF knowing they wanted to build in energy. They just didn’t know what yet. A few weeks of testing problems later, Bianca and Alessio found the intersection of energy and compute, and Ambra Compute started moving fast. On the way to Demo Day, Mike jumped in a Waymo with Bianca to talk about finding the right problem, building in San Francisco, and why speed matters. Full conversation in the comments.