Scaling Ambition
24 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 5 years ago - ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsOn Scaling Ambition you’ll hear from the founders looking to fulfil their potential by starting a globally ambitious company. In the process you'll discover the principles needed to succeed as an entrepreneur - not from abstract advice or sweeping statements but from real stories of people who made the leap and overcame the challenges on their path to start and scale a game-changing business.
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Episodes
#Bonus: Lavina Tien on Launching Entrepreneur First Hong Kong and the HK Startup Ecosystem
April 29, 2019 21:20 - 28 minutes - 40.7 MBEntrepreneur First Co-Founder and CEO Matt Clifford interviews EF Hong Kong General Manager Lavina Tien exploring her background and the Hong Kong startup ecosystem. In this episode they discuss: - Lavina’s background and why she was excited by EF’s mission - The Hong Kong startup ecosystem and the opportunities in the area - EF’s partnership with HAX, the world’s leading early stage hardware investor This was a great conversation with some great insight into Lavina’s story and the Hon...
#22 Joe White on Pioneering SAAS in the UK and Picking the Right VC
April 25, 2019 09:51 - 29 minutes - 55.9 MBJoe White, Entrepreneur, CFO and General Partner at Entrepreneur First. An entrepreneur at heart, Joe founded his first business - a digital design agency - while still at university racking up big name clients like Disney, LSE and Bain & Company. He then went on to co-found Moonfruit, a DIY website platform, building and launching one of the world’s first SAAS products in the process. More recently Joe has become a prominent angel investor and got involved with EF back in 2015, investing...
#21 Sai Ranganathan of SensorFlow on Making Buildings Energy Efficient through IoT
April 16, 2019 10:50 - 29 minutes - 41.2 MBSaikrishnan Ranganathan is the Co-Founder of SensorFlow, a company making buildings energy efficient at zero upfront cost. Hotels spend $40 billion on energy each year and commercial buildings spend $120 billion. These are not insignificant costs and the amazing thing is that with better automation these costs could be cut by up to 40%. People have been talking about applying IoT technology to create smart buildings for some time – but the challenges of doing this means nobody has reall...
#20 Chris Mairs on The Art of Angel Investing and Pre-Internet Entrepreneurship
April 05, 2019 11:36 - 28 minutes - 40.6 MBChris Mairs is an entrepreneur, Angel Investor and Venture Partner at EF. He is the co-founder of MetaSwitch, a communications technology business, where he was CTO for many years including a 2-year stint in Palo Alto working with his investors from Sequoia and their portfolio companies. More recently Chris has become a prominent angel investor, investing in over 70 companies, including many from EF – where he’s been involved from the very first cohort back in 2012. In this episode Chri...
#Bonus: Esha Tiwary on Launching Entrepreneur First Bangalore and the Indian Startup Ecosystem
January 10, 2019 21:55 - 28 minutes - 40.5 MBToday’s episode is a special one to celebrate the opening of EF Bangalore and in it, EF CEO Matt Clifford interviews EF Bangalore General Manager Esha Tiwary, exploring her background and the Indian startup ecosystem. When EF Co-Founders Matt & Alice decided to scale last year they made a list of the places where they believed EF could have the highest impact. India was high on that list because of its extraordinary talent pool – half of Silicon Valley is run by entrepreneurs and executi...
#18 Tom Pocock of CreditMint on Decentralising Corporate Lending and the Death of Utility Tokens
September 12, 2018 07:49 - 27 minutes - 39.9 MBTom Pocock is the Co-Founder of Credit Mint, a company that’s decentralising corporate lending by using a public blockchain as the shared ledger for corporate debt. The corporate debt industry is migrating from a bank-led model towards smaller lenders. But these new-wave lenders are tied to constant cycles of reconciliation, and trading is slow and expensive. On top of this, companies lose track of their creditors and the market is structurally illiquid. That’s where CreditMint comes i...
#17 Rohit Jha of Transcelestial on Transforming Communications Technology and Maximising Your Personal Impact
August 15, 2018 17:52 - 27 minutes - 51.7 MBRohit Jha is the Co-Founder of Transcelestial a company developing a laser communication solution to replace existing wireless communication technology. In the next decade 3 billion people and 50 billion devices will come online – but the global infrastructure we have in place at the moment isn’t sufficient to provide the required speed and flexibility to manage our needs as a planet. And that’s where Transcelestial comes in – they’re developing the fastest, long-distance, point-to-poin...
#16 Nadav Rosenberg on Successful Selling, The Art of Investing and The Future of Cryptocurrencies
July 17, 2018 10:00 - 28 minutes - 40.5 MBNadav Rosenberg is a General Partner and Head of Commercial at EF. Previously, he flew helicopters in the Israeli army for 10 years, worked as a consultant with McKinsey after earning an MBA from INSEAD and was a member of the founding team of Groupon in the UK. He also led Israeli startup Taboola’s expansion and operations in Europe and Australia before joining EF. One of the things that first time founders struggle with is commercialising their technology and building their client base ...
#15 Jesse Shemen of Papercup on Auto-Translating The World's Video and Raising Your First Round
June 26, 2018 07:45 - 27 minutes - 38.8 MBJesse Shemen is the CEO and Co-Founder of Papercup, a company that auto-translates the voice track on videos into the world’s languages. People spend an average of 5 hours watching video every single day but the problem for creators looking to maximise views is that while subtitles are helpful, people want to hear videos in their own language and quality dubbing is prohibitively expensive. That’s where Papercup comes in - they auto-translate the voice track on videos using a groundbrea...
#14 Hannah Burrow of Kiroku on Disrupting Dentistry, Pitching at the Palace and Low Tech "Pretotyping"
June 12, 2018 07:31 - 27 minutes - 38.3 MBHannah Burrow is the CEO and Co-Founder of Kiroku, a company that automatically writes clinical notes for dentists. Kiroku which is Japanese for "to document or record” uses a unique combination of speech recognition and natural language processing to produce expert level notes which has the potential to save $40 billion worldwide in the dental market alone. Hannah met her co founder Jay on EF8 and since pitching to investors at Demo Day they’ve been developing the product further and ...
#13 Vadim Toader of Proportunity on Outperforming the Property Market with AI
June 05, 2018 13:38 - 29 minutes - 41.7 MBVadim Toader is the CEO Co-Founder of Proportunity a company that uses machine learning to form accurate real estate forecasts, so investors can make better decisions. By comparing more than 100 sets of data, including historical price growth and crime rates, Proportunity can spot good deals before the market, which enables them to make a data driven decision and help fund first time buyers by putting up a percentage of their deposit and helping with financing. Vadim met his co founder...
#12 David Hunter of Optimal Labs on Revolutionising Human Nutrition
May 29, 2018 18:31 - 28 minutes - 40.5 MBDavid Hunter is the CEO and Co-Founder of Optimal Labs a company that applies cutting-edge deep reinforcement learning to create intelligent autopilots for farms, improving the efficiency, reliability and quality of food production. High tech greenhouses can produce 10-40x yield of traditional farming and they’re universally scalable and deployable anywhere. And the implications of AI controlled farms are potentially huge – with higher quality food, produced faster and more reliably, peop...
#11 Current Cohort Member Jake Woodhouse on his First Six Weeks at EF
May 23, 2018 08:19 - 28 minutes - 39.6 MBJake Woodhouse is a member of the current EFLD10 cohort. Up to this point on the podcast I’ve spoken to EF Co-Founders Matt Clifford and Alice Bentinck as well as the founders of some of EF’s most exciting companies. But who better to speak to get a flavour of what EF actually does than someone in the middle of the current cohort in London – and that’s exactly what today’s episode with Jake is all about. Jake studied Management at University before working in the shipping industry for s...
#10 Dev Amratia of nPlan on Rebuilding Construction with AI
May 14, 2018 16:10 - 29 minutes - 41.1 MBDev Amratia is the CEO and Co-Founder of nPlan a company that uses machine learning to analyse construction schedules, determine where the biggest risks lie and then recommend improvements. Whether it’s a new stadium or transport system, construction projects are consistently delayed and nPlan is committed to solving this problem by using all available data on these projects to optimise planning schedules. Dev and his cofounder Alan were on EF9, and since pitching at the EF Demo day h...
#9 Alice Bentinck on Finding Your Co-Founder
May 08, 2018 17:14 - 25 minutes - 35.7 MBAlice Bentinck co-founded EF with Matt Clifford in 2011, back when people thought the idea of inorganic team building was crazy. Seven years on, with the EF model validated from a number of successful exits and investment from Linkedin Co-Founder Reid Hoffman it’s clear that Matt and Alice weren’t that crazy after all. In this conversation with Alice we talk about the mechanics of the EF process and how it actually works, discussing a range of topics including: - The process of choosing ...
#8 Joe Root of Permutive on Customising User Experience in Real Time
May 01, 2018 09:59 - 25 minutes - 47.7 MBJoe Root is the Co-Founder of Permutive a company that helps publishers and marketers to customize user experience in real-time - on every device, across every channel. Joe and his co-founder Tim were on EF2 and their company has gone from strength to strength in recent years, dealing with millions of users for the world’s biggest publishers like The Times on a daily basis and recently raising their Series A round. Joe earned a BEng in computing from Imperial and a Masters in Computer ...
#7 Rafael Jorda Siquier on Democratising Satellites for Space Missions
April 24, 2018 10:00 - 27 minutes - 51.3 MBRafael Jorda Siquier is the founder of Open Cosmos, a company making space missions simple and affordable. They provide customers with a development kit and simulator so they can build the technology at their own pace and when they’re ready, Open Cosmos takes care of all the paperwork, integrates it into their nano-satellite alongside other customers and puts it into space. This has game changing implications for a number of industries, because making satellite more accessible opens up th...
#6 Alex Appelbe of Metis Labs on Building the Factory of the Future
April 17, 2018 09:03 - 21 minutes - 40.1 MBAlex Appelbe is the Co-Founder of Metis Labs a company providing general intelligence for industrial systems by using deep reinforcement learning to build the factory brain. Alex and his co-founder Bashir were on EF8 and they started Metis Labs by saving energy in processing factories - helping one of the largest beverage manufacturers in the world to reduce energy consumption in each of their locations. Alex is a mechanical engineer with a Master’s in Industrial Systems from Cambridge ...
#5 Alesis Novik of AimBrain on Using Biometrics to Kill the Password
April 10, 2018 09:32 - 21 minutes - 39.6 MBAlesis Novik is a Co-Founder of AimBrain, AimBrain, a Biometric Identity as-a-Service platform for global financial institutions. Alesis and his co-founder Andrius were on EF3 and what they’re doing in simple terms is effectively replacing standard passwords and pins with voice, facial and behavioural recognition systems that can be used in isolation or in combination with each other. Alesis gained a Master's degree in Artificial Intelligence from the Edinburgh and completed three year...
#4 Ed Miller of Scape on Mapping Urban Environments for Augmented Reality
April 04, 2018 11:30 - 18 minutes - 35.6 MBEd Miller is the Co-Founder of Scape, which is building the location infrastructure for city-scale augmented reality & location-based services. Ed and his co-founder Huub were on EF7 and their mapping and location technology allows devices to understand their position in the world, with incredible accuracy and efficiency, which is why they’ve been able to make such rapid progress since starting up. Ed has been working in the field of interactive imagery (VR, AR & 360 video) for the pas...
#3 Mostafa El Sayed of Automata on Revolutionising Robotics
March 27, 2018 11:36 - 23 minutes - 44.7 MBMostafa El Sayed, Co-Founder of Automata, which is working to make robotics affordable and accessible by installing it in the workplace. Mostafa and his co-founder Suryansh were on EF4 and their first product, Eva is a bench top robot arm that can be set up in minutes, costs a fraction of other industrial arms, and can be used in a range of industries including metals, pharmaceuticals and electronics manufacturing. Mostafa didn’t have a have a history in robotics before starting Automat...
#2 Noor Shaker of GTN on Disrupting Drug Discovery
March 06, 2018 20:49 - 22 minutes - 42.4 MBNoor Shaker, Co-Founder of GTN, a company that uses quantum physics and machine learning to search the huge space of potential drug molecules and discover drugs that were previously hidden from view. This means GTN can discover better drugs, more quickly, at half the cost. Noor and her co-founder Vid met on EF8 and after combining their expertise in machine learning and quantum physics respectively to found GTN, they’ve made rapid progress, recently closing a big funding round. Noor wa...
#1 Theo Saville of Cloud NC on Transforming Manufacturing
March 06, 2018 20:44 - 19 minutes - 37.1 MBTheo Saville is the Co-Founder of Cloud NC, whose mission is to make the CNC milling machines used in many manufacturing processes one click devices that can produce a part easily and efficiently, effectively halving their cost. Theo and his co-founder Chris met on EF5 and have gone from strength to strength since founding the company, expanding their team and raising funding to develop their technology further. Theo studied Engineering at Warwick and gained a masters in manufacturing,...
#0 Matt Clifford on Scaling Your Ambition
March 06, 2018 18:28 - 29 minutes - 55.1 MBIn today’s episode I kick off the podcast by speaking to EF Co-Founder Matt Clifford. Matt Co-Founded EF with Alice Bentinck back in 2011 and since then EF has gone from strength to strength, building hundreds of companies worth over $400m including Magic Pony Technology, Tractable and StackHut. After starting London, EF has now set up additional programmes in Singapore and Berlin and recently raising funding from LinkedIn Co-Founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman to continue scalin...