2018: EF Blitzscaling
2018 has been a giant year for EF. Since January, we’ve opened 4 new offices. We are now not just in London and Singapore, but also in Berlin, Hong Kong, Paris, and Bangalore. We went from 350 starters in 2017, to 600 individuals who left their jobs to join EF in 2018. In 2019, we expect that number to be 800, and that’s assuming we don’t open any new locations, or scale the existing ones. We’ve grown from about 60 full-time team members in two locations, to just under 100 full-time employees across 6 offices.
EF today is a drastically different company than it was a year ago. Matt, our CEO, writes a yearly review on what’s been happening at EF every year, but I thought I’d do a specific one for the EF world tour that was 2018 for me, and the three main things I learned this year.
Looking back on 2018
In January, we announced our first new office, in Berlin. I remember telling Zefi, who’s our General Manager in Berlin, about two weeks before Christmas that we’d love for him to move his life to different country, next week. Zefi hired his team, and recruited the first Berlin cohort, in 11 weeks. The teams that we presented on Demo Day in October, met each other first the first time in April. Today, our second Berlin cohort is well underway.
In April we also announced our second office, this time in Hong Kong. Between hiring Lavina, our GM, who has a resume that still slightly intimidates me, and kickoff week in July, we this time had about 3 months to find a cohort. The first Hong Kong companies will present themselves to investors during our Asia Demo Day in Singapore in January, working on everything ranging from underwater robotics to semi conductors, and I can’t wait to show you what they’ve done.
In July, we announced our third office, this time in Paris. The first Paris cohort started in October, together with London 11, and Berlin 2. Next Demo Day in London, we’ll have companies that were built in the UK, Germany, and France. The Paris team, led by Coralie, beat all our predictions. We had to close applications after only 2 months of recruiting, a month early, because we simply didn’t have more spaces. Having seen some of the teams, I feel very confident saying that the Paris companies are going to be exceptional.
Then, finally, we announced EF Bangalore in November. India represents a whole new level of scale to EF. It’s the least capped market we’ve ever operated in. I am extremely proud to officially announce Esha as our GM. We’ve just made our 60th offer in Bangalore, for the cohort that will start at the end of January. Having spent a significant portion of my time in Bangalore over the past couple of months, my main takeaway is how vibrant and ready the city feels. Early days, but I have high expectations.
We radically changed who can do EF over the course of 2018. I’ve been surprised many times, but here are my main take aways:
1. Venture capital can be blitzscaled
The traditional take on VC is that it’s really hard to scale rapidly. Raising funds, getting access to deals, establishing a presence — it takes years. At the start of the year, we realised that we had to find a way to scale more rapidly than was commonly deemed possible: we’d found product market fit, we for the first time saw competitors try and copy our model, and hence it was time for Blitzscaling.
It takes just under 9 months to go from EF team on the ground to presenting companies on stage. In 9 months, we can hire a team, recruit a cohort, and build teams, creating the companies that you see at Demo Day. We presented the first Berlin based teams at our European Demo Day in October, and you’ll see the first Hong Kong teams at our Asia Demo Day in January 2019. These teams represent a radical change in how fast EF can scale: at the start of this year, we didn’t have anyone in any of these cities, and now they’re fully fledged EF locations. The key to this model has been separating EF Form and EF Launch — we find individuals in Berlin and Paris, and locally help them build teams, but we help them fundraise across Europe, coordinated from London. The same is true for Asia. This model allows us to find individuals in new locations, without having to double our existing company building and fundraising structure.
2. The world is missing out on some of its best founders
We’ve expanded EF across the world, because we believe that this makes us accessible to the world’s best technical talent. There are literally thousands of amazing technical individuals in Europe, who would never move to London to find a cofounder. Being in Berlin, and being in Paris, allows us to find them, help them start companies, and bring them to London, when they’re ready to raise money. Same is true in Asia — Hong Kong has some of the best universities and research institutes in the world, and yet only saw 11 seed rounds in 2018.
Historically, founders have moved their companies around Series A, but hardly ever before. If you’re a founder, moving your company to a different country once you have a team and an idea, seems pretty sensible. If you’re an individual, and you don’t yet have an idea, let alone a cofounder, moving country seems pretty crazy.
Last year, in 2017, we ran EF in London and in Singapore. Even though overall applications grew 100% that year, a third of our applications were from people with either the British or Singaporean nationalities. London and Singapore are both extremely international cities, and yet, 31% of all our applications came from just 2 nationalities. In 2018, only 12% of our applications came from British and Singaporean founders. By opening up EF in new locations, we get access to a whole new segment of the worlds best technical founders. 6% is German, 4% is Chinese, 8% is French, and an impressive 21% is Indian.
3. Culture > process, and outcomes > playbooks
I’d say expansion at EF has been extremely successful, but let’s be realistic: it’s not been easy. Doubling your organisation in a year, adding 4 geographies of operational complexity — that’s really hard. Building teams and companies is hands on work — EF is as good as the people on the EF team, and as the culture that we create.
On culture: EF is a strange place. We create an environment in which we encourage you to believe that you can change the world by farming on the moon, or building plants that will solve air pollution. On top of that, we let you actively test cofounders, making it perfectly normal to ‘break up’ with someone when you’ve spent 2 weeks working 15 hours a day side by side. It really matters that this stays true, no matter if you’re in Berlin (where it’s a lot less culturally accepted to say that you want to build a billion dollar company) or if you’re in Hong Kong (where telling someone that you would rather work with someone else is, well, tricky). At the same time, we wanted to make sure that the programmes got localised. We hired local General Managers, but every office has at least one long time EFer on the team who moved from an existing office to help set up the new location. We actively train the team on ‘culture carrying’, we organise a Global Retreat once a year, and try to celebrate the bits of EF culture that we want to see everywhere. EF processes can be different per location, and every GM decides what they want to test per cycle, but the feeling of walking into an EF office is the same wherever you are in the world.
On outcomes and playbooks: I started the year thinking that we needed to write down exactly what to do at what point in time when opening a new office. We had beautiful Google Drive folders which indicated how to set up process xyz, and even explanations on why that process was better. Guess what — no one ever looked at my folders. The (amazing) people on the EF team who set up new offices didn’t want a folder, they wanted a north star. If anything, getting ‘taught’ how to run a process diminishes the feeling of being in control. Four setups in, the thing that I’ve learned is that I need to be crystal clear on expectations, giving people KPIs and deadlines, but that it’s perfectly fine if we slightly reinvent the wheel on process at times. Way more important is that the team on the ground feels in control.
2019
It’s a pretty crazy idea that 50% of the EF companies that you’ll see next year, will have been built in cities that we didn’t have any presence in at the start of this year. EF expansion isn’t done yet — watch this space.
- If you want to find your cofounder in London, Singapore, Berlin, Hong Kong, Paris, or Bangalore, apply to join EF here.
- Want to join the team? We’re hiring for a number of roles across our old and new locations, see here.
