Six years ago I was part of EF’s London Cohort (100x aspirational entrepreneurs brought together for 2 months, with pre-seed funding, to meet their co-founder and start a business). Since then I’ve also worked at two successful EF-funded companies. This year I’m interested in starting a new business, and I joined YC’s “Startup School: Co-Founder Matching” on the recommendation of some former colleagues. 2 months in I want to compare and contrast the experiences.
Throughout when referring to either “EF” or “YC” I specifically mean: their programmes for cofounder-matching (they both do a lot more than that, have other programmes too).
Setup
Stats – EF – https://www.joinef.com/
Participants: 100
Meetings: 100% on-site, London, UK
Duration: 2 months
Total meetings: 7-15
Collaborations attempted: 5
Stats – YC – https://www.ycombinator.com/cofounder-matching
Participants: ~850 (filtered to ‘London’, see below)
Meetings: Mostly zoom, self-identified as ‘London based’
Duration: 2 months
Total meetings: 30
Collaborations attempted: 5
The programmes are different but share broadly the same aims: you join, you network with people that have been pre-approved and vetted, you try-out ideas for a new business, and if the idea is strong enough: you incorporate, get funding from the same org, who then helps you get further Seed/SeriesA funding for your business.
Programme Differences
EF puts everyone on-site, a large amount of face-to-face networking. This focus on face-to-face somewhat mirrors the traditional Y-Combinator funding programme (that YC’s Co-Founder Matching is an extension of). There is an intensely strong focus on “meet many, choose one, work exclusively and intensively for days/weeks until the relationship clicks or breaks, repeat as needed”. The overall programme is also strictly time-limited – you have 2-3 months to find a founder and get past EF’s own funding committee before the programme ends. Get moving! Since it’s a full-time commitment, they give a small monthly stipend (barely covers basic living costs – it’s massively lower than the salary that participants have given up to take part)
YC is fully online, UX is a simplified LinkedIn merged with Tinder — you see a single profile at a time and decide “contact or skip”. Focus is on crafting good initial contact messages and then getting into a meeting ASAP. They limit you to max of 20 contact requests per week to increase focus / discourage spam. Despite filtering to only my city (London) and preferring face-to-face meetings … in practice about 95% of meetings I had were over Zoom/Meets/Whereby/etc. There is no time limit to how long you’re in the programme – I met people who’d been on there for multiple years and were still looking. YC themselves advises that it can take typically 6 months from meeting someone to committing to work together, with successes that took up to 9 months or more.
Filtering
Based on previous experiences, I wasn’t interested in meeting anyone early in their career – I’ve held leadership roles in corporate, co-founded companies, led teams of 50+, built multi-million-dollar revenues from scratch. While I love hiring and growing people for their potential more than their achievements … such a person isn’t going to make a good co-founder for me; I’m much more likely to hire them as a senior employee.
EF attendees skew young (a deliberate choice by EF), typically early-20’s to early-30’s, but with YC I was able to explicitly filter-out anyone in their 20’s or early 30’s. Everything I experienced in YC needs to be viewed through that filter: if you targeted a younger crowd your experiences would probably differ.
Beyond that I did minimal filtering within the system – although the people I chose to interact with changed over time as I adapted and optimized.
Participants
EF attendees ought to be ‘all-in’ — they’re being paid, they have to attend the programme daily for a few months, they should have no other commitments. In practice a minority aren’t fully emotionally/mentally committed – I’d estimated around 20-25% – but that’s fine: many people won’t know for sure until they try it. A much smaller minority – about 5% – are half-committed from the start (prior commitments etc), small enough number that it doesn’t really affect overall outcomes.
YC attendees ought to contain a large proportion of “I have a full-time job, but I’d like to quit”, since that’s an explicitly allowed option. In practice I found (in 2024) that a minority were in that situation – perhaps 20% of those I met – but it’s a strange time economically and I suspect more than usual people in full-time jobs aren’t willing to risk quitting while the world is in such turmoil. Many more were actively doing consulting work, part-time contracts, advisory, or angel investment – perhaps 30-40%. This makes sense given you need at least some spare time to do the meetings, explore ideas with people, etc – that’s hard to do around a full-time job.
Approaches
On EF I tried to meet everyone although in practice only really got to know about half the cohort – since it’s all face-to-face there’s no way to realistically filter beforehand. At the very start I did aggressively use the supplied online tools for reading people’s profiles, looking at their linkedin, trying to meet-up in advance – almost all of that failed. The vast majority of EF attendees were unwilling to engage before the programme started (largely because they were in full-time jobs up until the last minute, or finishing a PhD, etc).
YC felt like I had more agency on the conversations that started – face-to-face people can walk up to you and start a conversation, but online you both need to read each other’s profiles before the comms even happens, so it leans towards more time spent considering. Initially I tried to meet as many people as possible: YC informed me that I had circa 850 people in London that matched my criteria – I figured that with 12 months on the platform (YC’s expected period for most people to have found a co-founder) I had plenty of time to meet them all and I didn’t want to exhaust the pool too quickly by screening any further.
Adaptations in-flight
With EF we were given strongly recommended (but optional) frameworks for working together. In practice at least half, if not most, people ignored them. I’m not sure that was the right decision – some of the rules people ignored/broke were hard to see value in (and those that broke them did great), others it seemed foolish not to follow the advice being given by EF’s staff who’ve been administering these programmes for years (and I saw plenty of individuals burn time and energy only to belatedly adopt the advice they were given on day1).
EF’s advice changes year-to-year and they constantly revise their programme structure, so I’m not going to dwell on the details of what we were doing. But the recurring themes year after year are: “find personality-fit ASAP”, “if it’s not working (as a relationship) GET OUT FAST and try someone else”, “ideas don’t matter, pick something that shows traction instead”, and “you only know if you’ll work well together … by working together — so go off and WORK TOGETHER!”. They talk about all of that quite publically.
Obviously my main adaptation was: re-assess how and why I picked the person I last tried working with, see if I should/could change my criteria, before I commit to the next one.
With YC I found that it was much easier to draw a line between “this meeting wasn’t great” and “I could have predicted that in advance” — because I was seeing profiles before approaching, and you can’t just click “connect” but have to write an intro message there was always an easy reminder of “why did I think this person was worth meeting?”. Obviously it also makes a huge difference that I’d done all this before (with EF) in a more intense manner, so I was better prepared (mentally and critically) going into it.
But with each YC meeting being: online, organised trivially (calendar bookings) to fit within our mutual schedules, with no waiting around before/after … I was able to churn through high-intensity meetings quickly (typically 5/week – often 2+ per day). I rapidly noticed that certain lines of conversation were boring me (e.g. deja-vu sense of “this person has too little experience of [the technology] / [commercial/sales] / [running a biz / management]”, or e.g. individuals who weren’t really interested in starting a company were just daydreaming) — and within a few weeks without even thinking about it I naturally narrowed down the topics that I was keen to talk about from “any of these 5+ – but open to anything!” into “these 1 or 2, and here’s specifically why for each one”. I found I had 3 things I really cared about, and 2 of those highly specialised such that I could tell at-a-glance from someone’s profile whether it was worth talking to them about either of those 2. After that point I would go into each call knowing I’d be mentioning my 1 non-specialised topic and knowing which (if any) of the 2 hyper-specialised ones I’d be bringing up.
(side note: while I expected EF to be much easier/faster/less fricting to scheduling meetings when you’re all face-to-face … in practice it was much slower and harder than when you’re all working at desk-jobs and have plenty of time to read your incoming emails and click ‘yes’ to filling an empty slot in a calendar)
Outcomes
EF – I found it very difficult to know what made a good business to pursue – while they try to tell you they don’t want to be too prescriptive, since as investors they WANT you to be disruptive (one of the big financial successes in our cohort wouldn’t have happened if they’d followed all EF’s advice). With hindsight, a year or two after leaving (and after working for some former EF companies) I had a pretty good idea of the kernel of what makes for a ‘great’ EF opportunity for me given my own strengths and weaknesses. Some of that I now take into new startups (and have been successful with) but it was too late to make a difference while inside the EF programme.
The 5 collaborations I attempted during EF were – with hindsight – very unlikely to work out. One of the two that I spent most time on (and secured commercial traction for, before we even had a product) did eventually take off as a small profitable business for other people, but many years later. It was a decent business opportunity albeit perhaps too early to market – but it wasn’t an EF aligned business opportunity. Oops!
YC – the pace of YC (6-9 months instead of 1-2 months) provides a hugely different emphasis, and allows a lot more time to really get to know the potential founders. My first attempted collaboration we were both able to bow-out early based on the increasingly obvious view that – whatever our skillsets – we weren’t compatible as co-workers. The same would have happened on EF with that person – but on EF it would have burned a few of my precious days (out of the limited total allowed) and driven me to slightly increased desperation on the next match. On YC it had minimal negative impact – a few hours of interesting meetings/calls plus a few hours of research I won’t use for anything else.
Two features of YC came together in unexpected ways with positive outcomes for me. Firstly the lack of formal frameworks / guardrails — which created a vacuum into which I simply dropped my own well-honed best practices in startup founding (and which I already know work well). Secondly the very small amount of time each individual tends to devote to YC work — not being full-time paradoxically works in our favour here, because with only a small amount dedicated it’s much harsher test of “are we achieving? are we going nowhere?”.
Collaborations on YC
If you’ve worked with me in the last decade or so you’ll recognize my heavy focus on Customer Development (Customer Discovery in the early days, Product/Market Fit and Customer Success later on) – although you might be surprised by how obsessed I’ve been with it during YC. With only a couple of hours of each person’s time per week everything else drops away, and I found myself paring away more and more cruft, leaving us with just a single shining concept: Customer Development is the single most important thing a startup does in its first 2-4 years of existence.
The best thing is: this gave me an incredibly easy-to-measure metric for success in each partnership.
When I click with someone, and they seem smart and engaged and we find a mutually exciting opportunity … I immediately move to Cust Dev. At this point, most of the people that have got this far either already know of CustDev or are themselves sold on it – it takes little or zero persuasion (it’s pretty hard to argue with as a first activity!). I quite simply measure week to week on each opportunity: “how much cust dev did [person X] do? how much did I do? what outcomes for each?”
Some don’t even get as far as me counting “outcomes” – they don’t even participate (even in cases where I’ve bent over backwards making it easy for them). That is not in any way a criticism of them: with one person (hi!) it was the opposite way around: I had the best of intentions to perform CustDev work with them, and I kept failing to find/make time for it within my own schedule. Days became weeks. My guilt grew. Until I realised: “that’s it – clearly I don’t believe in this particular opportunity as much as I thought I did; or this person and I don’t align as much as we need to; or … any of many other reasons, but IT DOESN’T MATTER: what matters is we’ve discovered we’re not the right pair to work on this problem today”. The problem might be perfect, the other person perfect – but if so what we’ve discovered is that I’m the wrong co-founder for them.
As a former EF alumnus that’s not a disappointing result, it’s an exciting one: each time a potential co-founder performs no CD (or I perform none) I celebrate that we discovered our mutual incompatibility extremely early and at very low cost. That’s the most valuable thing I could achieve in the co-founder hunt.
Considering EF? YC? Co-Founders? Investors?
I’m actively looking for a co-founder (or want to join a startup on these topics) – my primary interests right now are in “AI interfaces for non-tech people”, “AI in Finance and Data”, and “EdTech for parents and teachers” (all three I have substantial background experience in). Get in touch!
If you made it this far and are looking to join either programme (EF/YC) and want feedback/input, feel free to contact me – although most of my available time is for face-to-face/coffee meetings (London zone1) I have a smaller bunch also reserved for zoom/etc calls with anyone outside the UK – e.g. by messaging on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-martin-b3ba4414a/) or by DM on Rands Leadership Slack (as ‘Adam Martin’).
Finally: if you have a scaleup or startup and want advisory or strategic input, I have some time reserved for Advisory and Angel investing (although please note: I am currently NOT considering new Angel investments outside my network, my money is fully committed to existing syndicates/investments)