and Seattle. We have since expanded to other locations throughout the world and work with global corporations, communities, and business schools to drive entrepreneurship. The chapters in this edition of Do More Faster reflect our early years as a startup in the United States and the challenges that startup entrepreneurs face. Our next book, Do Even More Faster, picks up where this book leaves off and provides insights on scaling up your business. It also reflects our global expansion to Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
We thought carefully about the key issues around early‐stage entrepreneurship and organized those issues around seven themes: Idea and Vision, People, Working Effectively, Product, Fundraising, Legal and Structure, and Work–Life Harmony. The recurring lessons have stood the test of time and we’ve freshened up and updated these sections.
Each theme contains the personal experience, insights, and firsthand accounts of the startup entrepreneurs and mentors who are involved with Techstars. The chapters are short, targeted, and focus on common sayings heard around Techstars. Some of these sayings, such as the title of this book, are mantras of ours. A few are well‐worn clichés. But all of them are critical ideas that have withstood the test of time and can help you to become a successful entrepreneur. You’ll also encounter what seems to be contradictory advice between some of the chapters, but we view it as a balanced perspective showing the complexities of startup challenges. Entrepreneurship is not a one‐size‐fits‐all endeavor.
Although mastering these themes doesn’t ensure success for every first‐time entrepreneur, our experience is that understanding the challenges, hearing personal stories, and consuming advice from mentors and startup entrepreneurs can be very helpful. You’ll realize that you aren’t alone in facing these challenges and will see that successful entrepreneurs have trudged down the same path as you.
While Techstars is focused on technology companies, the principles and advice throughout the book apply to other types of startup ventures as well. They also can be helpful to established companies exploring new, innovative approaches to their businesses, as well as organizations working on economic and community development initiatives. So, whether you’re creating a world‐changing app, starting a restaurant, creating a nonprofit, building a startup community, or increasing innovation in your organization, Do More Faster will help accelerate your success.
In the spirit of Techstars, this book is community‐oriented and mentorship‐driven. It’s also very personal, as we wanted to help the reader put a name to a face. For that reason, we have included many photos to bring the stories to life. The stories form a cohesive narrative, but they also stand alone.
Techstars is a magical thing. We hope you’ll find the perspectives and stories in this book to be powerful and useful to you and your startup. Let us know what you think. Come visit us at Techstars.com or email us at [email protected] or [email protected].
David Cohen and Brad FeldMay 2019Boulder, Colorado
About Techstars
Techstars started as an idea in 2006, when David Cohen sent an email to David Brown about a novel way to help entrepreneurs accelerate their businesses. Since then it has grown into the worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed. In a little over a decade, Techstars accelerators have funded more than 1,700 companies in more than 30 locations in 13 countries.1 About 80% of these companies are successful: they have become profitable, have been bought by notable companies such as Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook, and they have gone on to raise more than $7 billion in venture capital and angel investors.
We believe that Techstars represents something special. We’re often told that it feels like an entrepreneurial revival. What’s the secret to Techstars’ rapid growth and success rate of companies going through accelerator programs? The reasons can be distilled into three unique ingredients: practicing the principles of Do More Faster, integrating mentorship deeply within the accelerators, and promoting community by giving first.
At Techstars, we practice the principles outlined in this book. We run intensive, three‐month programs for startup entrepreneurs—not a full year, not six months, and definitely not 9‐to‐5. Our accelerators remove all the distractions and force the entrepreneurs to focus solely on their startup. We do this once a year in each location that we run an accelerator. We bring together 10 startups (from between 500 and 1,000 applicants) with around 100 local mentors, who are top entrepreneurs and investors, for each three‐month program, then focus intensive mentorship on them and tie them into our global network. After 13 weeks, the program culminates with a series of events during which the startups pitch their ideas to hundreds of investors.
Another key ingredient is mentorship. You’ll often hear us describe Techstars as “mentorship driven.” We carefully select people who are interested in deeply engaging with entrepreneurs—not simply to get the inside track on investing or give high‐level feedback or tell biographical stories. Our mentors are selected because they want to help entrepreneurs avoid roadblocks that will prevent them from getting their idea to the market. Each of the 10,000 mentors who participates in Techstars accelerators or community programs is asked to focus on a single company or, if she has a great deal of free time, at most two. We carefully avoid fly‐by mentorship in which someone successful or famous stops by an accelerator to impart some generic wisdom and give shallow feedback on each company. At Techstars, we’re only interested in deep and engaged mentorship, where mentors want to develop a relationship with an entrepreneur and be involved for the long haul. Our approach results in around five mentors working closely with each company. This is the magic of Techstars—a focused group of amazing mentors paired with each company to help them excel and accelerate.
Techstars is also about community. When we started Techstars, one of our primary goals was to connect and improve our local startup community in Boulder. We wanted more passionate and skilled businesspeople in Boulder, engaged local angel investors, and entrepreneurs. We wanted Boulder to be known to the world as a credible place for talented entrepreneurs. We wanted the best, brightest, and most experienced entrepreneurs to become mentors and work together on new and exciting startups. Fundamentally, we wanted our community to be better. Our mentors help for the same reasons.
We believe that a culture of sustained mentorship is the secret weapon of successful startup communities. Because of Techstars, we’ve noticed that mentorship and community eventually come full circle. The founders of early Techstars companies are now mentors to the founders of newer ones. Some of the founders who have been through Techstars are starting their second, third, or fourth company. Alumni of the accelerators have started making their own angel investments, and several venture capital funds have now been started by alumni. The life‐changing value of highly engaged mentorship is now ingrained into the very fabric of who they are. In turn, they give back every day.
Today, more than a decade after founding Techstars, we are on the path to achieving its vision as the worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed. We work with corporate partners like Target, Ford, Barclays, Amazon, and over 50 others to supercharge growth by accelerating innovation and cultural transformation. Startup Week, Startup Weekend, and Startup Accelerators have helped to create tens of billions of dollars in value and tens of thousands of jobs. We currently provide our Startup Weekend in 630 cities in 110 countries with over 70,000 attendees annually. Startup Week takes place in 147 cities in 16 countries with over 100,000 participants annually. And our three‐month Startup Accelerators have helped more than 1,700 companies.
In 2019 we launched a new initiative called Techstars Studio, which will allow Techstars to source new company concepts from Techstars alumni founders, community leaders, venture capitalists, mentors, and corporate partners. The Techstars Studio will then build prototypes, test market adoption, and select the most promising concepts for launch. The first Techstars Studio will