A venture capital firm says it invests in people “pre-idea, pre-team”

You have complete freedom over who you work with and what you work on. They fund you unconditionally for the first three months and you can walk away at any time if you want to.

Their website is actually pretty informative: http://www.joinef.com/our-programme/

It's completely the latter.

(disclaimer: also in the current cohort)

They fund individuals for a fixed, three month period, during which you are free to work on whatever and with whomever you want.

After three months, they invest £10000 (in exchange for 8% equity) in all teams that are settled on an idea and seem promising.

There are no fees of any kind.

(disclosure: I'm on the current cohort)

I think the EF model recognises that a lot of technical people create way more value than they are able to capture working in a traditional company. Some then go out and start companies of their own, but there’s a fairly large gap from labouring away at Google to going without salary for six months while you get yourself in a position to get into y-combinator et al.

EF tries to bridge that gap and capture a slice of the value in the process. It’s not for everyone, but I think more people should really consider this option.

Graphene detailed the economics, so I will just add that yes - the valuation is lower than what you could do had you spend 6-12 months on your own first, but in an endeavour that is likely to fail iteration speed is critically important. I have moved faster and learned more during 3 months with EF than I would have 6-12 months on my own. I’m still young but I won’t be forever - so I’m willing to give up a fraction of potential upside to decrease potential downside.

Personally I actually joined EF with a co-founder an idea and a product which is quite unusual. Two weeks into the program we decided to start from scratch and we are better off for doing so. EF is the kind of environment that encourages you to do this and an environment i missed during my time at university.

I guess it makes sense that Entrepreneur First are offering less money for more equity as they're taking people with "no team" and "no idea".

>An incubator/accelerator that isn't as good as YC should have a better deal than that to make up for the difference

Only from the perspective of someone being recruited by both YC and the alternative. If YC isn't an option (as it isn't for most people), then it doesn't much matter whether or not YC is offering a better deal to someone else.

From the YC application page:

"The ideal company would have two or three founders. We’ll consider those with four or five. We’re reluctant to accept one-person companies, though we have funded a few."

There exists a large group of technical people who are currently only capturing a small fraction of the value they are creating for whom getting into a position where they would fit the YC ideal company is untenable. For this group EF is a valuable option and I'm quite surprised this model isn't more widespread.

Everybody in the EF cohort are quite smart so if they were in a position to take the YC deal i'm sure most would :-)

location, location, location...

Basically you need to invest in fundamentals while the asset itself is at its cheapest, and "not yet existing" may happen to be among the cheapest states of the asset

Michael, what you've just written is a gratuitously negative comment[1] that adds nothing. Guess what, 99.999% of getting funded happened in Earth's prehistory of 4.5 billion years, at any point during which things could have gone differently and precluded humanity and culture. Out of the remaining 0.001% - 45,000 years - scarcely ten thousand consisted of the establishment of western civilization and only the scant past few decades have established an Internet and a culture where literally anyone in the western world with an idea can start making it a reality, on a physical (if not cultural) level - i.e. physically nothing is required that the average person cannot access. Physically you do not need access to anything except knowledge and culture, which are actively working to take away. You are stealing.

The way to expand this opportunity is not to focus on the first 99.99999% of history, but the next ten years. You add nothing and take significant amounts away from that. I'm sick of your negativity. Here's a fact: I'm not asian, but asians are far more likely to get funded. SO WHAT! How does that change whether I'm taking the time to build something?

Michael go build something. Anyone can call people names. People should downvote your negative comments on sight. Besides being policy here, anyone who is downvoting you is literally creating good in the world. Because you are actively preventing the expansion of a culture of building. We might not have the power to get a sixty year old who had to go work early in life and received no formal education funded, regardless of this person's merits or ideas. But we can - and should, are required to - downvote you, and contribute to a positive culture where in five years, when that person is sixty-five, and has spent the past five years building something, he can be.

[1] the definition of which is that it is not new, not useful, not insightful, and adds absolutely nothing while being negative. Similar to if you said to a commenter: "by the way YOU SUCK at every skill, when compared to Mozart at music". This is undeniably true, he started at the age of four and specialized very hard. It is a comment nobody would disagree with on a literal level. It is also an absolutely worthless comment that adds nothing: the only reason anyone would write it is so that they could say the word "YOU SUCK" and then weasel out of it. Of course you should get downvoted, so hard you delete your comments which add nothing. Go build something, Michael.