How to submit a winning application to Entrepreneur First

The selection criteria at Entrepreneur First are transparent, it’s not a mystery box on how we select the talent to join our cohort. It’s a careful balancing act between taking a risk and having enough evidence. You can always refer to this page for an extended breakdown.

It is, at its core, an assessment of your experience, skillset, and ambition.

What you’ll be building during the program is YOURS and you are first and foremost a Founder. There is literally a mountain of work that you and your co-founder need to climb and on this journey you will each take full ownership of the things to be done. As a technical profile you’ll do sales calls and as a commercial profile you’ll take product decisions. What’s important to understand here is what profile do you have coming into the program, not what operational tasks you’re interested in doing.

Focus on what you have achieved and where you see opportunities. What is your edge?

Lets go back to what makes a good application?

We assess two major areas, Behaviour and Ability. Behaviour is further broken down into Challenging Convention, Drive to Achieve and Followership (not the dictionary definition).

Ability is broken down into Commerciality and Technical Understanding for commercial profiles (CEOs) or Valuable Tech Knowledge and Applicability for technical profiles (CTOs).

Lets have a quick look at all of them:

• Challenging Convention - Have you taken risks in your academic, personal or professional life? Have you pushed for what you thought was right? Have you taken a different route to achieve more, faster?
• Drive to Achieve - When presented with the opportunity to have an impact, did you take it? If you were not presented with you one, did you create it? How have you shaped or determined your own outcomes?
• Followership - You need something and someone else has it. How did you persuade them to give you what you needed. Did you get someone to work on your project pro bono? Did you convince a stubborn CTO that your solution was better and you got an entire team to back you up?

For the above, feel free to bring examples from both your personal and professional life. Activities that you’ve done outside of what was required of you are always a strong positive signal.

• Commerciality - Can you identify, generate and capture value? Do you see the opportunities and grasp them? What level of commercial impact did your work have?
• Technical Understanding - What is the difference between an app and a tech company? What is the cloud? Where is the cloud? Can you bring examples of you working on the technical side of things?
• Valuable Tech Knowledge - How unique is your skillset? What can you do better or faster than others? What do you know or what can you do that nobody else can?
• Applicability - Research on Dyson Spheres is cool but can you build one? Can you apply your skillset to bring to life a product that brings value to its customers on scale?

All dimensions give you the opportunity to use Data. We like data, you like data, data likes data. Quantifying your achievements, showing their impact, understanding market size, defining value potential is what makes an application stand out. Impact should be the your guiding star in the application process.

?? What impact have you had, what impact are you looking to have?

When sifting through thousands of applications, there’s only one thing we’re looking for: what makes you stand out? Actions speak louder than words: proof that you can build, proof that you can sell, proof that even though you’re only graduating, you’ve already put a satellite in orbit (true story!). Achievements followed by impact data is what makes an application stand out more than anything else.

Last part and perhaps the most controversial one. Are you better than your peers? We compare your application not only to a set of criteria but also other applications of similar background. Are you an outlier? Are you more driven than your peers? Did you use your time to make a difference, to improve, to grow?

? Do you have what it takes to stand not at the finish, but at the starting line of building unicorns?