Alice Bentinck

Who they are

Alice Bentinck is CEO of Entrepreneur First — co-founded Code First: Girls in 2012, which has taught over 250,000 women to code and is the largest provider of free coding courses for women in the UK.

Person

Alice joined Entrepreneurs First in 2011 when it was a seed-stage startup with backing from McKinsey, KPMG, Microsoft, and Sky — a tiny team with a contrarian thesis about backing individuals before they have ideas or co-founders. She read Management Studies at Nottingham University Business School (First-Class Honours), then cut her teeth as a management consultant at McKinsey before an internship in the Office of the Prime Minister via the Africa Governance Initiative. Those two stops — strategy consulting and public-sector reform — likely shaped her conviction that talent is the upstream variable, not ideas or markets. She co-founded Entrepreneurs First with Matt Clifford and has run it for over a decade, moving from co-founder to CPO and now CEO. Alongside EF she founded Code First: Girls in 2012, a non-profit that has delivered free coding courses to over 250,000 women at university level across the UK. She co-authored 'How to be a Founder' (2022) with Clifford and writes and speaks regularly on talent investing, deep tech, founder traits, and AI and UK tech growth — appearing on the Secret Leaders podcast, Startup Science, Scaling Europe, and at Station F. The through-line: she keeps moving talent earlier in the pipeline, whether that's pre-idea founders at EF or pre-career women at Code First: Girls.

Company

Entrepreneurs First recently closed a $200 million fundraise from a high-signal group including John and Patrick Collison, Eric Schmidt, Claire Hughes Johnson, Charlie Songhurst, Danny Rimer, Matt Cohler, and institutional backer Greylock — one of the largest raises of its kind for a company builder. The operational strategy has also shifted: since 2024, EF has been relocating all pre-seed-funded companies to the Bay Area ahead of their seed rounds, a move that has halved average time to raise and doubled valuations. The portfolio now spans over 600 companies with a combined valuation of over $11 billion as of 2025. EF's model — backing individuals before they have a team or an idea — positions it as what the firm calls informally the 'CAA for startups.'

Market

EF operates in the talent-first company building space, explicitly differentiating itself from cohort-based accelerators like Y Combinator and Wayra by working with individuals rather than existing teams or companies. The broader venture backdrop is a tailwind: Q1 2026 saw global venture investment reach $300 billion, an all-time high driven by unprecedented AI compute spending, which intensifies competition for the pre-idea technical talent EF targets. EF's pivot toward the Bay Area as a graduation pathway signals a direct bet that the strongest founders need to be in the US ecosystem to compete for the best seed capital.

Network

Alice's most prominent working relationship is with Matt Clifford, EF's co-founder and former CEO, with whom she co-authored 'How to be a Founder' and co-built both EF and Code First: Girls. Reid Hoffman sits on EF's board as an investor, and the $200 million round brought in an extended network including the Collison brothers, Eric Schmidt, and Demis Hassabis (who backed the earlier Series C).

Matt Clifford· Co-founder and former CEO, Entrepreneur First
Reid Hoffman· Investor and board member, Entrepreneur First; co-founder of LinkedIn, partner at Greylock
Patrick Collison· Investor, Entrepreneur First; CEO of Stripe

How they likely show up

Long tenure at Entrepreneurs First (co-founder since 2011, now CEO) → thinks in decade-scale institution building, not short-cycle optimisation.
Founded Code First: Girls alongside a full-time founder role at EF → high agency, runs parallel tracks rather than waiting for permission or resourcing.
Content themes span talent investing, founder traits, and AI/UK tech growth — not just company updates → engages with systemic questions, not just EF-specific narratives.
Moved from McKinsey consulting to public-sector internship to company builder → values structural leverage points, not just commercial outcomes.
Co-authored a book ('How to be a Founder') and appears across multiple podcast formats → comfortable synthesising and communicating frameworks, not just operating behind the scenes.
Active speaker at venues like Station F on 'What Makes a Good Founder?' → likely has strong, tested opinions on founder selection and is used to defending them publicly.

Conversation tips

→ Reference a specific claim from 'How to be a Founder' or a podcast episode — she'll know immediately whether you've actually engaged with her thinking or are just name-dropping the title.
→ Ask about the Bay Area relocation strategy for portfolio companies — it's a recent, deliberate operational bet that's produced measurable results and she'll have views worth hearing.
→ Don't position EF as just an accelerator — she's explicit that the model is fundamentally different from YC or Wayra, and conflating them will signal you haven't done the work.
→ Code First: Girls is a genuine passion project, not a PR exercise — asking about scale (250,000 women) or what success looks like there will land better than treating it as a side note.
→ She's been thinking about founder quality for 15 years — come with a specific, testable view about what makes a good founder rather than asking an open-ended question about it.

Toolbox

Openers

Open on the $200 million raise and the Bay Area pivot — EF has started relocating all pre-seed companies to San Francisco and has data showing the average time to raise has halved; that's a meaningful operational bet worth unpacking.
Lead with Code First: Girls reaching 250,000 women taught — she co-founded it in 2012 alongside building EF, and it's grown into the largest free coding course provider for women in the UK, which says something about how she thinks about structural barriers in the talent pipeline.
Reference the Station F panel on 'What Makes a Good Founder?' — she's been refining that answer for over a decade and co-authored a book on it; asking what's changed in her answer since 2011 is a genuinely interesting question she probably hasn't been asked in that form.

Discovery questions

EF's model backs individuals before they have ideas or co-founders — after 15 years and 600+ companies, what's the signal you've become most confident in, and what's the one you've had to abandon?
Moving portfolio companies to the Bay Area ahead of seed rounds clearly improved outcomes — what did that decision cost EF culturally or operationally, and was it harder to make than the data suggests?
Code First: Girls has reached 250,000 women — at what point does a non-profit at that scale start to look more like infrastructure than a project, and how do you think about its next phase?

Avoid

Don't treat EF as interchangeable with YC or a standard cohort accelerator — she has spent 15 years defining the distinction between backing teams-with-ideas versus individuals before either exists, and collapsing that difference signals you haven't engaged with the model.

Make it yours