The Bridge W27: AI-Native Founder Residency

About the Opportunity

Entrepreneur First is looking for 50 AI-native founders for its Winter 2027 cohort of The Bridge in San Francisco.

This is not a conventional job. The Bridge is designed for founders at the beginning of the company-building journey: people ready to find an exceptional co-founder, build rapidly, ship into the market, and create a company capable of becoming generational.

The thesis behind W27 is simple: the next generation of great companies will not merely use AI. They will be structured around it.

What AI-Native Means

Using ChatGPT, Claude, or Cursor every day is not enough. EF is looking for founders who think about the company itself as a system.

Instead of responding to every new problem by hiring another person, AI-native founders ask whether a workflow can become a system, whether an agent can execute it, what context it needs, how it should be evaluated, and where a human must remain in control.

The result can be radically different company architecture: small teams producing what previously required organizations many times their size.

Who EF Is Looking For

• Founders who think in systems and believe the future belongs to those who can orchestrate intelligence.
• Builders who understand what their evals measure.
• People who deliberately decide which parts of their company should remain human, and why.
• Founders who continually re-test assumptions against the rapidly moving AI frontier.
• People willing to replace repetitive execution with systems capable of executing autonomously.
• Ambitious founders interested in tackling important, difficult problems rather than simply building another AI interface.

What You Will Do

Join a highly selected group of founders in San Francisco with one mission: find a co-founder, build, ship, and scale.

You will work alongside other ambitious technical and commercial founders while developing the foundations of an AI-native company.

The goal is not simply to prototype an AI product. It is to discover what kind of company becomes possible when AI changes the underlying assumptions around team size, execution, organizational structure, and leverage.

What You Will Explore

The W27 Thesis

The previous generation of companies used software to make humans more productive. The current generation increasingly uses AI to accelerate individual workflows.

EF believes the next transition is more fundamental: AI moves from assisting people who execute work to executing the work itself, while founders orchestrate the system and humans handle the places where judgment and accountability matter.

That transition can produce companies that look structurally different from the organizations that came before them. Not 90 people doing the work of 90. Potentially nine people producing what previously required ninety.

About Entrepreneur First

Entrepreneur First backs exceptional individuals at the very beginning of their founder journey.

Over the past decade, EF has backed hundreds of companies and built a model around identifying ambitious founders before the eventual company is obvious.

EF recently announced a $200M fund backed by technology leaders and founders including Demis Hassabis, Eric Schmidt, Patrick and John Collison, Reid Hoffman, Jeff Dean, Mati Staniszewski, and others.

Is This for You?

This could be a fit if you are already asking which workflows still require a person, what an agent could own end-to-end, what should remain human, and how you would evaluate whether the system is performing well.

If those questions already shape how you build, EF wants to hear from you.