This article is a fluff piece on EF. EF is not a very large part of London's startup scene. In a couple of years of various startup heavy tech meetups in London, I've yet to meet anyone who's gone through EF. Which is not to dismiss them, I'm sure they're good, but with a title like that you'd expect them to have actually explored what's going on in London rather than just marketing an individual incubator.
Definite PR article for EF. I live in Shoreditch, have my own startup, go to a lot of events and have barely heard of them. The events I've got more out of include:<p><a href="http://3-beards.com/dontpitchmebro" rel="nofollow">http://3-beards.com/dontpitchmebro</a> - Interesting pitches, usually very high quality. The group that run it do a lot of cool startup events.<p><a href="http://www.meetup.com/HNLondon/" rel="nofollow">http://www.meetup.com/HNLondon/</a> - Geeky fun, though has been getting increasingly commercial<p>Lately the best meetup has been "lean coffee" (<a href="http://leancoffee.org/" rel="nofollow">http://leancoffee.org/</a>) , the quality of people and feedback I have got from that meeting has been superb. I suggest starting one in your area.<p>Overall I am negative on accelerators. Perhaps I am bias as I have enough savings/income from an existing small business that I don't need my living expenses paid for what I think may be giving away too much of your business. Though I look forward to reading other peoples experiences.
EF turned me - a Computer Science graduate with a vague interest in startups - into the founder of an angel-backed startup.<p>The pace of learning during the six pace programme is rapid, but that's not what I see as most important. I'm most grateful for them giving me the opportunity to start my own thing straight out of university.<p>Without EF, I would have been forced to get a graduate job at a tech company in order to pay the bills. Building a startup in London would have been orders of magnitude harder. I know people who are trying to build products in their spare time, and it's tough.<p>Thanks to EF, I'm now running a five-person company with nearly 10,000 users.<p>Oh, and I met my co-founder on the programme. Not bad.
> for women are generally outnumbered on Britain’s science-degree courses, especially among PhD<p>That's really not true. Physics undergraduate in most universities is perhaps 1:10 male:female. Postgraduate (PhD) is pretty much half/half in my experience. My department is physics/space/climate and we have more girls than boys now I think.<p>Perhaps the scene is worse in computer science, but I've been to a few machine vision conferences and women are pretty well represented.<p>EDIT: That said, engineering undergraduate was atrocious at my university. I had some friends doing civil/mechanical and it was maybe 1:20. Comp sci was pretty good though, as was maths. Biology and chemistry (and biochemistry) always seem to attract girls too.
I just went through EF - while the cost of living in London is awful, the EF stipend more than covers it. I wouldn't have even considered moving back to the UK (much less to London) had EF not been able to assure me that they could deliver on the mentoring, connections, and financial support that they advertise.<p>In 3 months I learnt a lot about a variety of industries as we very rapidly iterated through teams and ideas, and I'm now developing instrumentation and software that will be launched into space later this year.<p>It certainly beats the opportunities I've had in finance and academia over the past few years!
My lawyer lives in London. He's from silicon valley and has helped hundreds of startups, including some of the biggest.<p>His observation about London is that the cost of living is simply so high, that it is impossible to have a real startup culture here.
There's equal opportunity and equal outcome, they propose to tackle the problem with equal outcome. With more women taking degrees in the UK one must ask why they are less seen in STEM based subjects and not try to artificially level the playing field.<p>My personal opinion is that the issue is a social one, where we are still awaking from a period where women must do certain jobs and men must do others. You don't see many women as bin collectors although they are more than qualified for the job. I think the best place to tackle this stigma is in Primary and Secondary Schools. The results will take a few years to filter up all the way from Primary to University.<p>Meanwhile, start-ups should be judged equally based on their quality and not discriminated by who is attempting it. There is a ridiculous notion that we can artificially change the end result and somehow that won't lead to issues.
EF is a relatively new Accelerator (< 4 years I think) which essentially means that their early incubated startups will only now be showing their real potential. IMO their future seems both solid and exciting : 3 out of top 5 up-and-coming AI startups in London have been created through EF cohorts - #1 being Google's DeepMind.<p>via <a href="http://uk.businessinsider.com/10-british-ai-companies-to-look-out-for-in-2016-2015-12" rel="nofollow">http://uk.businessinsider.com/10-british-ai-companies-to-loo...</a>