Prince's Blog

3 Takeaways from 3 months at EF as a Talent Investor

I was fortunate enough to be offered an internship as a Talent Investor at Entrepreneurs First over summer in 2025. I believe that the last 3 months have been the most formative in my life thus far and will likely continue to be. Today is my last day as a TI here. I'm extremely grateful to Max Mugnaioni, James Richards, the rest of the EF team, and the founders of LD Summer 25 for making this the most interesting thing I've ever done.

Here are 3 takeaways from my internship.

1. Badge Collecting has an extremely high rate of diminishing returns (if you want to found)

Badge collecting is when you choose to optimize for prestige & signal over your rate of learning. An example of this would be choosing to be a SWE at a FAANG company over a Founding Engineer at an early stage start-up when your goal is to ultimately found a company yourself.

The appeal of badge collecting to young people is obvious:

My rationalization of badge collecting pre-EF was approximately the following:

  1. I want to build a company
  2. VC makes building a company easier
  3. VCs sneeze out money to people with badges
  4. Therefore, I should badge-max so I can raise more

There's definitely some truth to the above reasoning. However, there are many reasons why doing the above is stupid:

Therefore, optimize directly for learning as much as possible about building a huge company.

2. Spontaneous Interactions in high signal communities often end up being hugely informative

If you're young, you might have an idea of what you don't know, but there are still a bunch of things that you don't know that you don't know. The first problem (not knowing an answer to a question that you have) is easy to solve: just ask the question to someone. I argue that the second problem (not knowing what you don't know i.e. 'unknown unknowns') is a much harder problem to solve. Unfortunately, solving this second problem is crucial if you want to progress quickly.

Luckily, you can solve this second problem by interacting with people in the problem space! Being at EF has meant that I'm surrounded by great founders and investors who've advised great founders themselves. Since founding is something that I might like to do, this has helped unearth a bunch of questions that I didn't know I had and has also helped me learn a bunch of answers to questions that I didn't have.

A key example of this is when I semi-randomly reached out to one of the founders of Canopy Labs. Previously, I never knew that hiring was difficult. I also assumed it would be much easier for a company like Canopy Labs to hire people since they are building really cool technology. It was only after my call with one of the founders that I realised hiring is HARD.

This has consequently motivated me to seek out talented people even more so that I have a head start when I begin to hire.

Another example of this is when Maria (a TI at EF) introduced me to David from Asteroid (YC W25). David had a typical nerdy technical background but ended up being CEO at Asteroid (the story of how this happened is really funny). This led me to wonder about how a nerdy tech person could enjoy doing CEO-type stuff like sales and growth (things a nerdy tech person might never have previously been exposed to). David's answer to this was basically that his motivation to build a big company overruled his motivation to do nerdy things.

You never know what you can learn from someone until you talk to them. I'm really glad I've had the opportunity to speak to really smart people during my time at EF and I'm grateful to everyone who spoke to me.

3. Acting on your own volition is more rewarding than completing tasks set by others

This is more of a self-reflection thing rather than something I recommend to everyone. For some reason, I just don't like to be told what to do. Just tell me the overall objective that I'm optimising for (e.g., finding great talent), and let me do the rest.

I noticed that I have much lower energy completing tasks that were set to me. I imagine this is a mixture of 1) misalignment of the tasks with what I believe is useful and 2) considering the opportunity cost of doing this task vs. doing something I want to do, which would likely be more interesting to me.

Broadly speaking, this is a matter of unstructured games vs. structured games (the concept of which I learnt here at EF). A structured game is one where the rules and infrastructure of the game are well defined, e.g., a quantitative assessment. An unstructured game is where the rules and 'winning state' of the game are undefined, e.g., building a company. Growing up I've primarily played structured games (chess competitions, school exams, sports, etc.) and have only occasionally done unstructured things. It was only when I had (near) full autonomy at EF, which meant that I could really just run whatever I wanted (as long as I could convince someone to let me, which never was a big barrier). I've noticed that I feel more satisfaction when winning an unstructured game. It feels good to say that I did something on my own volition and that it went well.

tldr