EF does not communicate the point of the start of the program very well. It’s crucial to understand that the program starts the very moment they release the candidate profiles. People will immediately start networking and prequalifying teams. This effectively means that the programme starts roughly 1 month before the official start and 2 weeks before the Kick-Off Weekend.
People who join late are at a huge disadvantage, so don’t let them tell you that it doesn’t matter if you’re late. It’s false. In my case, I was heavily involved in humanitarian aid for Ukrainian refugees, the largest migration crisis since WW2, and was not in a mental or logistical place to start the program. However, I was assured that the start would not matter too much. It does matter a lot. There were other people who joined very late and they did not find good matches.
The first weeks are absolutely crucial. Do all your self-discovery before the program. I should have asked myself things like:
What do I mean by this distinction?
Advisors & angels: specialists or more senior execs who have some skin in the game with your company, usually equity.
VC investors: professionals who sift through thousands of companies looking for investments that will return 100X.
The big difference is the kind of things you talk about to both. VCs don’t have skin in the game before they invest, they have no reason to help you before they invest. There is a careful balance of telling them about problems and actually making things look investable. Everyone knows that you’re likely to pivot a million times and that you know very little. However, if already at pitching stage there are major problems, such as a very small total addressable market, or a bad team-company fit, then you’re not investable.
Once they invest however, incentives change drastically and now both of you have a big interest in helping each other. After the investment VCs have skin in the game and if they’re able to increase your valuation by 2X, they will be 2X better off.
For instance, sharing any kind of issues such as doubts about team fit, mental health or family issues pre-IC will be extremely detrimental to whether you’re investable. This is super hard at EF, because you meet the team and become friends with them, so it’s natural to share worries etc. However, remember not to treat them as advisors or mentors before they invest.
Expect that everything you share with EF team members, will end up in their databases. This is crappy, because in 1:1 conversations, there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. Expect that everything that EF people can get their hands on, will end up in their database, which they will use to evaluate whether you are investable.
In other words, talk to them as you would to a VC, do not share problems with EF, unless these are problems that an investor should now about. So, for instance, do not talk about emotional worries, mental health, potential disputes with your cofounder. They will ask about these things, you have no obligation to tell them.
Here is an example scenario. This actually happened to me. EF team member has a 1:1 check in with you and asks “how productive have you been with your co-founder last week?”. Both of you are honest and say that you went off for a holiday and weren’t productive at all. This would be a totally normal response to other founders, angels or a VCs who has already invested, yet to a pre-investment VC that’s a red flag. Or “have you met the weekly goals that you’ve set?” - it takes weeks of getting to know each other and the problem domains to set good goals. That’s not something that happens over night, even with extremely experiences managers. The only team I’ve been in, we’ve responded to these questions honestly, and the consequence was that the EF team put a lot of pressure on us to split up.