How Entrepreneurs can Identify, Fund and Launch their Best Ideas by Alice Bentinck and Max Clifford — Lionesses of Africa

Book Review

How to Be a Founder, by Alice Bentinck and Max Clifford, is an essential guide to equip the next generation of business founders with the mindset and tools they need to take the leap to become globally successful entrepreneurs.

Featuring a foreword by Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, How to Be a Founder: How Entrepreneurs can Identify, Fund and Launch their Best Ideas by Alice Bentinck and Max Clifford is a fascinating handbook. It inspires aspiring founders and provides essential guidance and advice for people who want to build a successful company. This book answers the question “how do I get started?” It takes the reader from making the decision to plunge into entrepreneurship, through the process of choosing and developing an idea and team, all the way to raising capital and working with VCs and angel investors.

Alice Bentinck and Matt Clifford are the co-founders of Entrepreneur First (EF). Over the last decade, they have worked with thousands of ambitious individuals across the world, supporting them to become founders. Those individuals have now built companies worth billions of dollars that are taking on some of the world’s biggest challenges, including finding hard-to-spot cancers, tackling climate change and building new financial platforms. In How to Be a Founder, the authors share advice, insights and lessons from their decade of experience working with individuals to become successful founders. The book covers what you need to do today to start your journey as a founder and the steps to take to maximize your chances of building a high-growth, scalable company. You’ll also hear advice from some of the world’s best investors and entrepreneurs who have built some of most iconic technology companies of our time.

Author Quotes

We look for people who have very strong founder potential, and help them meet a co-founder and build a technology company from scratch.

Having started in London a decade ago, we have now worked with thousands of potential founders across Europe, Asia and North America. In that time, we’ve learned to recognize world class founder potential before anyone else.

About the authors

Alice Bentinck MBE is the co-founder of Entrepreneur First. She is part of the UK government’s AI Council and was selected as one of the Prime Minister’s Business Council advisors 2022. She started her career at McKinsey & Co. Matt Clifford MBE is the co-founder and CEO of Entrepreneur First. He is a non-executive director of Innovate UK, and a Trustee of the Kennedy Memorial Trust. Matt started his career at McKinsey & Co. and holds degrees from Cambridge and MIT, where he was a Kennedy Scholar. Matt and Alice also co-founded Code First: Girls, the UK’s leading organization for women in tech, which has taught more than 50,000 women to code, for free. They are both now non-executive directors.

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