Alice Bentinck

Early life and education

Bentinck grew up in the New Forest region of southern England. She attended the Godolphin School in Salisbury, an all-girls boarding school. There she enrolled in Young Enterprise, creating a business model for handmade purses. She then attended the Nottingham University Business School, graduating with a bachelor of arts in management studies, with first class honours.

Career

In 2008 Bentinck interned in the office of Tony Blair in London, where she also assisted the Africa Governance Initiative. From 2009 to 2011 she was a management consultant in the London office of McKinsey & Company.

In 2011 Bentinck and Matthew Clifford, a McKinsey colleague, founded Entrepreneur First, an accelerator that assists promising university graduates in the computer science and engineering fields to create their own startups and access seed funding. Bentinck serves as COO while Clifford is CEO. The six-month, cohort-based program receives more than 1,500 applications per year and accepts 100. In its first four years, Entrepreneur First helped establish 75 startups valued at $450 million.

Noticing that most individuals applying to Entrepreneur First were male, Bentinck and Clifford founded Code First: Girls in 2012. This nonprofit initiative provides free web programming courses for female university students from arts backgrounds, giving them skills to switch to the tech sector. In addition to courses, students are mentored by female industry professionals. The program is offered at Oxford, Durham, St Andrews, and Bristol universities. In its first year, Code First: Girls graduated 500 students. According to Bentinck, 70 percent of enrollees switched their career tracks to tech as a result of the courses.

In March 2015 Bentinck began blogging for Tech World on the topic "Turning Techies Into Founders".

Other activities

In 2014 Bentinck was appointed one of the Prime Minister's advisors for the Northern Future Forum in Helsinki.

She has been a member of the advisory board of Founders4Schools since April 2014, and a member of the Computer Science Department Industrial Liaison Board at Imperial College London since April 2015. In September 2015 she became a mentor for Girls in Tech London.

Honours and awards

In 2015 she was named one of the Fifty Most Inspiring Women in European Tech by the Inspiring Fifty organisation.

In 2014 she was named to several newspaper and magazine lists. She was named one of "The 1000 – London's Most Influential People" by the London Evening Standard, one of the "35 Women Under 35" by Management Today, and was cited as a "Rising Star" by Computer Weekly as part of their 2014 Most Influential Women in UK IT campaign. Additionally, the British Interactive Media Association included her on its BIMA Hot 100 of 2014.

In 2013 she was ranked No. 19 on The Drum's "30 Under 30 Women in Digital" list. She was a Top 25 finalist in the Tech City Movers and Shakers 2013 and the Girls in Tech Ones to Watch 2013.

Bentinck was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2016 Birthday Honours for services to business.

Personal

Bentinck has participated in competitive carriage driving since her youth.

Selected articles