• Entrepreneurs First invests in young founders, focusing on ambition over industry experience.
• EF helped Kelvin Cui, 25, and Mustafah Khan, 23, develop their startup, Peripheral Labs.
• Some startups have raised as much as $15 million in seed funding within the first few months.

When searching for the next generation of successful founders and entrepreneurs, Alice Bentinck and her team at Entrepreneurs First look for a specific set of traits, and they're not the kind you'd find on a résumé.

"We like megalomaniacs," Bentinck, CEO and cofounder of Entrepreneurs First, told Business Insider. "We like people who have a desire for power and who are looking at a way of gaining power and expressing their ambition through that power."

Founded in 2011, Entrepreneurs First is a San Francisco-based talent investor that backs early-stage founders — often between 18 and 30 — and boasts a portfolio valued at more than $16 billion.

The firm works with hundreds of people each year across Europe, India, and North America, helping them build startups from the ground up. Some have raised as much as $15 million in seed funding within months.

Key to that success is identifying founders early — often before they have an idea for their startup.

"When we select people, we don't ask about ideas at all. We just want to understand them and their behavior and the way they think," Bentinck said.

Some of the founders that Entrepreneurs First backs start with little more than technical experience and a set of interests they've explored deeply.

Kelvin Cui and Mustafah Khan, cofounders of startup Peripheral Labs, are two of them.

Business Insider's Young Geniuses series spotlights the next generation of founders, innovators, and thinkers trying to reshape industries and solve global challenges. See more stories from the series, or reach out to editor Peter Gelling to share your own story.

Cui and Khan met while building self-driving cars at the University of Toronto and entered Entrepreneurs First's program without a defined startup idea. "EF 100% helped us develop it," Cui told Business Insider.

Founded in 2024, Peripheral Labs is building AI models designed to reconstruct live sports in photorealistic 3D. Their goal is to allow viewers to experience games from any angle.

The traits that matter most show up early

For Bentinck, the qualities that define successful founders tend to emerge before a career path fully takes shape.

"We find that once somebody's spent two or three years within a certain industry, it does change the way they think. It can make them more conservative," she said.

That's why Entrepreneurs First focuses on people at the start of their careers, when their thinking is still flexible, and their obsessions are easier to spot.

"It doesn't really matter what they're obsessive about," she added. What matters is depth — people "who can go really deep and want to find out everything about a topic" and challenge the status quo through that focus.

That kind of behavior often matters more for success than experience, she said.

Cui, 25, and Khan, 23, for example, didn't just study robotics — they built self-driving cars together over multiple years, outside of traditional coursework. "You're not necessarily being paid to do it. You're doing it sort of out of sheer interest and passion," Khan said.

Likewise, the duo didn't start at Entrepreneurs First with a polished business plan. Instead, they spent their early months testing ideas and talking directly to potential customers, including "every single team, broadcaster, league possible," Cui said.

"The main thing that we got out of EF is the scale and the ambition that we have to embody in order to build a company like this," Cui said, adding that, "We want to have our cameras in every single stadium, every single arena."

There must be absolute conviction

Bentinck said the strongest candidates are those who don't see failure as an option. "They can only see a situation where they succeed," she said. When "you push and probe them, they don't understand why they wouldn't be able to do it."

Because when doubt creeps in, she said, it shifts attention away from opportunity and toward risk: "As soon as you flip into trying to avoid failure, you're basically lining yourself up to trip over."

That conviction doesn't always look like the typical extroverted confidence so often associated with successful founders.

"A lot of our founders are introverts who have understood what it takes to succeed, and are committed enough to success that they adopt the behaviors that are typically associated with extroverts, particularly around social skills," Bentinck said.

Testing behavior, not résumés

Entrepreneurs First looks for these traits through real-world observation rather than polished applications. The firm works with about 500 people each year, using interviews and selection hackathons to evaluate candidates under pressure.

The hackathon acts as a work test: can someone form a team, generate ideas, and execute quickly? Even collaboration isn't judged in a conventional way.

"Working well with others isn't necessarily a positive indicator," Bentinck said, noting that some "very spiky individuals" have gone on to succeed.

In a model built on speed, where founders can go from no idea to raising millions within months, Entrepreneurs First embodies the core belief that experience can be built, but obsession, ambition, and conviction are harder to teach.