Entrepreneur First Continues Global Expansion, Announces New Location in Hong Kong

On the back of its Greylock-led $12.4m funding round in 2017, EF announced that it planned to bring its pioneering "talent-first" approach to more international locations. Following a successful launch in Berlin in January of 2018, EF now is expanding its work in Asia with a location in Hong Kong. EF Hong Kong will support local entrepreneurs and those from surrounding cities. The first programme will start in July. EF has hired former Airbnb and Google exec Lavina Tien to lead its operation in the new office.

EF's unique approach is to fund ambitious individuals "pre-company"; it backs individuals before they have a team or fully worked out idea, purely on the basis of their skills and characteristics. Its company building programmes in London and Singapore last six months - three months to support the individuals to form teams and three months to support these teams to develop their business plan and be ready to pitch for, and receive investment. Similar to the recently opened Berlin programme, the Hong Kong programme will focus on the first three months of this process. Teams that form under EF Hong Kong will be eligible to participate in its Singapore demo day and to receive investment from EF's existing fund.

Matt Clifford, EF co-founder and CEO, said, "When we launched in Singapore two years ago, it was an experiment - did EF's appeal and programme scale globally? We now know the answer is yes and Singapore is now half our business. We're extremely excited about the opportunity to support the most ambitious individuals throughout Asia to build world-class technology companies and Hong Kong stands out as a global magnet for talent, its rapidly growing venture ecosystem, and its leading universities, such as Hong Kong University for Science and Technology (HKUST, ranked 14), the University of Hong Kong (ranked 19), and the Chinese University of Hong Kong (ranked 22).

Alice Bentinck, EF co-founder, said, "We believe that there are a handful of exceptional technologists globally who have the skills and ambition to build the next generation of breakout technology companies. We know that we will find some of them in Hong Kong, just as we have in London, Singapore and Berlin."

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