didn’t work.
There are multiple examples of Techstars companies that learned to do more faster. Next Big Sound built an incredibly beautiful and functional product in under three months. SendGrid figured out how to scale their email delivery infrastructure to 20 million emails a day in under a year. Oneforty rallied a community of thousands of Twitter application developers in just a few months. Intense Debate went from concept to being installed on hundreds of blogs in the course of a single summer. Companies that work seem to move at lightning speed. By contrast, the ones that don’t seem to always be talking about releases and features that are coming “in a few months.” How do the fast companies do it? They focus on what matters and make massive progress in the areas that actually have an impact.
At Techstars and as an investor, I’ve been involved with startups that couldn’t do more faster. They were just as slow to execute as larger competitors. They employed too much process too early, tried to convince themselves that they were absolutely right before taking risks, and thought too long at the expense of getting things done. Their great ideas couldn’t save them. It turns out that giving up your one obvious competitive advantage often proves to be deadly. If a startup can’t do more faster, it usually just gets dead faster.
The view leaving David Cohen’s office at the Techstars Bunker. The founders will often jump up to slap the phrase on the way out after a meeting.
Chapter 2 Do or Do Not; There Is No Try
Brad Feld
Brad is a partner at Foundry Group and one of the cofounders of Techstars.
When I grow up I want to be like Yoda (except for the short green part). Until then, I’ll just do my best to incorporate his philosophy into my life, summarized in the following:
$DO | ! $DO; try
Try: command not found
I’ve always found this Yoda quote to epitomize how I try to live my life. Ever since I was a little kid, I never really understood what “try” meant. There were lots of things I did and lots of things I failed at. However, even when I failed, I viewed myself as having “done it,” even if I wasn’t successful. When I wanted to master something, I did it a lot. I didn’t try to do it—I did it and accepted the failure along with the success.
Throughout the years I have heard many people say, “You should try this,” or “You should try that.” Sometimes it was trivial (for example, “You should try foie gras.”—yuck, I’m a vegetarian); other times, it was complex (“You should try to learn how to play the piano”). My parents taught me early on that “No” or “I’m not interested” was an acceptable answer to the “you should” directive, so I was rarely intimidated when faced with something new. I also started to understand the difference between preference (for example, try foie gras and see if you like it) and accomplishment (try to learn how to play the piano). I realized preference was unimportant in the context of accomplishment, but the inverse mattered—namely, that accomplishment was important in the context of preference. Specifically, you could accomplish a wide range of things whether you preferred them or not, but when you tried to accomplish that thing (playing the piano), it mattered a lot whether you preferred it. Prefer the guitar over the piano? You’ll probably never be accomplished at the piano.
Now, ponder the phrase “You should try entrepreneurship.” What exactly does that really mean? Then there’s “You should try to start a company.” Or “You should try to build a product.” Or even “You should try to sell something to someone.” Try? Really? If you prefer entrepreneurship, or think you have a preference for entrepreneurship, just go for it. You might fail—but that’s okay and is part of the process. If you start a company that ultimately fails, you are still an entrepreneur. And your next step should be to go start another company.
If you don’t have a preference for entrepreneurship (or—more specifically—entrepreneurship doesn’t interest you), you have no business creating a company in the first place. Starting a company is extremely difficult and requires commitment on many levels. Ultimately, you don’t really “try to start a company”—you either do it or you don’t.
Do or do not—there is no try.
Theme One: Idea and Vision
Most people think that the core of a startup is a singular, amazing, world-changing, and earth-shattering idea. It turns out that this is almost always completely wrong. Take it from us, we have had thousands of ideas pitched to us and very few are earth shattering! Here’s a sample of email pitches we have gotten.
Good Morning David!I have an excellent idea that will transform the world and I would like to join your accelerator to make it happen! I can’t tell you what it is but trust me, it will make both of us a lot of money!Dear Mr. Feld,I hope this email finds you doing well. I am a chemical engineer and I have created a novel technology that will make coal-fired power plants more efficient, lowering operating costs, which will translate into lower prices at the fuel pump.Hey David and Brad—Do you know how many cars and trucks there are in the good old US of A? 253 million! And each car and truck can use the technology I’m developing. Each and every one. I have an idea that will probably take a year to finish up and after that, I’ll be your first multibillion-dollar company!
It’s a value of ours to respond to any reasonable email, but we can’t respond to these inquiries based on the information we have. We’re interested in helping entrepreneurs succeed, and without knowing your idea we can’t possibly know if we can help you. Next, we have no interest in helping anyone succeed in a dying industry. It’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic—the end result is the same regardless of what you do. New coal plant construction has declined nearly 80% globally in the past 10 years, whereas both solar (1,600%) and wind (685%) have increased dramatically in that time frame. Last, pitching the size of the market doesn’t have any bearing on whether your product will be purchased by anybody.
The “earth-shattering” ideas are mostly in the mind of the unreasonably optimistic startup entrepreneur.
Many successful startups started doing something else. At Techstars, many of the companies that have gone through the accelerator are now working on something very different from their original idea. Some of these companies are working in the same general domain but with a completely different application or product area. A surprising number of them are unrecognizable from the description of the business on their original application to Techstars.
When Alex White of Next Big Sound showed up at Techstars, he was immediately confronted with a chorus of “We love you but your idea sucks.” He dropped that original concept a week into the Techstars accelerator, built something amazing, and Next Big Sound ended up being acquired by Pandora several years later. Jeff Powers and Vikas Reddy of Occipital spent the summer working on some sort of image compositing software before landing on the spectacularly successful RedLaser iPhone app that eBay subsequently acquired. Since then, Occipital has launched a string of successful products and is changing the world of augmented and virtual reality. We aren’t even sure we remember what Joe Aigboboh and Jesse Tevelow of J-Squared Media were working on when they showed up at Techstars, but we had a feeling they were awesome, which they then demonstrated by launching a series of successful Facebook applications on the heels of Facebook’s F8 launch. J-Squared Media eventually became PlayQ, which is now a very successful game studio in
