What is EF

Entrepreneur First EF (EF), is a incubator/talent investor program that enables individuals to pursue entrepreneurship with reduced risk. The program is split into 2 3 month sections. Form and IC. During “Form” you meet other people on the program, who are in the same boat as you, the talent in the room is exceptional and is the feeling is empowering within the office (At least initially). There are people from a wide range of backgrounds and capabilities and I felt that everyone’s contributions was worth listening to.

Initially within the program I intended on pursuing and building within the FHE space. It was clearly fairly early on that the current paradigms of computation, IE client side encrypting and server side decrypting is a norm that’s really hard to change, especially with the costs associated with FHE. When the program started I teamed up with Milette and whilst I believed the teaming was strong we set very strong goals to achieve that in hindsight was unobtainable, we spent to much time ideating within the trustless space. Which is something that ties heavily with FHE and blockchain technologies. We were unable to come up with a strong trustless need that isn’t already catered to so we ended the team fairly briefly after 4 days of working together.

After doing some desk research in the space I convinced myself that whatever I build within the program must have strong AI appeal. This is due to the LLM craze and funding to the space seemed much easier, since its an easier narrative to sell and it’s technically challenging too. For my next paring I was working with Vlad, and we covered a lot of potential ideas.

• Routing engines for specialised models (GPT marketplace didn’t exist at the time). Similar to POE.
• We considered providing computation to fine tuning models, and building RAG services.
• Output guidance for model generation, IE ensuring the output is JSON compliant
• Security guardrails for LLM, i.e prompt injection prevention and observability tooling for usage and generation of models.

However, eventually we ended the pairing due to the constant feeling of getting customer validation for a potential idea, as well as personal differences from work ethic.

At this point I felt fairly lost, I made a lot of commitments to security guard rails for LLMs and it was something I found very fascinating. It catered to my skills very well since I have ML and Cyber Security background so I continued going down the rabbit hole, even writing the code for a research paper. But to no avail it was clear to me at this point that if there was not something I do quickly that my time in EF will be over soon. For the remaining time period of EF I went to Turkiye - Istanbul for Dev connect where I fell back in love with blockchain. In the meantime there was attempts at doing co-founding in the last week. However the narrative within the cohort was fairly secluded and most individuals who weren’t in a team was shilling ideas and requesting other people to join such ideas. This defeated the whole point of co-founding and I felt all discussions that I had within this realm was de-moralising.

In hindsight I should of focussed on what I enjoyed working, I should of stayed within the blockchain space and initiated my discussions as such, I would of had the same issues but atleast I know I’d more more engaged in the realms I enjoy. Also speaking being more open to doing more customer identification and thinking through procedures before reaching out immediately would of been valuable, however this methodology was not favoured by EF where their main mechanism for quantifying success is the number of people who you speak to, which is highly flawed.

What’s next for me? I got a couple jobs in the pipeline, in the meantime I want to travel and I am working on a arbitrage bot , I hope this will keep me engaged for my technical side and I will still be pursuing the startup world, perhaps within an established early stage company or I will be building and release to the wild.