This is highly subjective, but also the most common question I got was “what’s the crowd like?”. So here is my very poor and biased attempt at answering it. Keep in mind that the “common weaknesses/strengths” are extremely subjective and biased.
Type in EF or the cohort name (e.g. BE9, LD5) into LinkedIn and you will find the kind of profiles who go through EF.
EF attracts ambitious ~25-35 year olds (in my cohort it was min 23, max 42). My gut feeling, after looking at 4 cohorts (Berlin, London, Paris, Toronto) is that EF cohorts have a similar composition. I would categorise these as follows:
Both, business and tech. People who already have built some kind of company, usually a small startup, and sometimes more traditional companies with low potential to scale. Mostly either small failed startups, side hustles, or traditional non-scalable businesses. In that mix, there are some impressive ones too. For instance, one guy scaled his company to 30 employees and reached 100% market saturation with a small gadgets business. There is someone who bootstrapped a proptech app and had hundreds of paying customers. I’ve not met anyone whose business was Series A funded.
They’ve spent a few years in a top consulting firm. Maybe the went to a fancy business school or studied econ or finance. Many of them worked in business roles at startups as well.
Just good devs, with a decent mix of specialised and full-stack. You could probably find someone for most ideas.
The hyper-specialists with deep insider knowledge. Examples: lawyer with 15 experience in a very specific legal field. Examples PhD in batteries, PhD in genomics.
Totally agree with Casey’s view on this. Her Twitter.