Never going home again

My name is Anne Marie, and I was part of the very first NAHSS in 2012. Together with Wouter and Lucia, I then became the first NAHSS Program Board, in 2013. I am very proud to see how many students have since then gone to China through the NAHSS!

7 years later: I am a partner at venture capital fund Entrepreneur First (EF), and I live in Singapore. After my year on the NAHSS board, I did my master in Cambridge, after which I became the 3rd employee at (at the time nonprofit) EF in London. We are investors, but unusual investors: we find and select individuals who we think could be good founders before they have a team or even an idea for a company. We pay you a salary for 3 months, and help you find a cofounder and an idea. Should you find something you want to work on, we then invest $100k in your idea, for which we then get 10% of your company. If you haven't found anything, no hard feelings. Sounds crazy, but it's not: we have now funded over 200 startups through this method, and the total value of our portfolio is $2bn. You may have heard of EF startup Magic Pony (bought by Twitter for $150m). Reid Hoffman (the founder of Linkedin) is part of our board, and we now have $200 million "under management" (think: money that rich people/institutions give to us to invest on their behalf). When I started, that was $250,000!

I am responsible for growth at EF. After a year and a half in London, someone from our then 8-person team needed to go to Asia. Thanks to my NAHSS experience, I was seen as a good candidate to open our first international office. My team in Singapore has grown to 40 people, and I have also set up EF offices in Berlin, Hong Kong(!), Paris, and Bangalore.

This sounds like a ridiculous commercial, but I'm serious: my board year at NAHSS was perhaps the most important preparation for my current job that I could have imagined. My current team is 80% Asian, and managing people from different cultural backgrounds is interesting, but also difficult. The NAHSS made sure I knew a little better what to expect. Additionally, being good at "scouting" individuals with potential proves to be very valuable - that is literally what venture capitalists do. I never expected this to be so relevant again. In addition, setting up Hong Kong was much easier because I already knew my way around Hong Kong ;).

See you in China!