Foreword
My first real interaction with Techstars was in the lobby of the Marriott hotel next to the LAX airport in early 2009. I had applied to the Techstars accelerator in Boulder a few weeks earlier and now I was meeting the cofounder, David Cohen, who had flown in for the day to meet several LA‐area companies for in‐person interviews.
I had built a few startups already, but I hadn’t found the success I was seeking. Something was missing. We had the talent. We had the idea. We had the drive. But still, we hadn’t been successful. It’s obvious now that we didn’t have some of the critical ingredients, such as mentorship and a network, to be successful. That day at LAX—meeting with David Cohen and learning about the Techstars approach to entrepreneurship—changed everything for me, for my cofounders, and for our company, SendGrid.
We participated in the third cohort of Techstars in Boulder in 2009. Techstars provides seasoned mentors to work with startups. These aren’t just any mentors, but people you can trust, who have your best interests in mind, and who want to see you succeed. Our mentors started adding value right away. They began buying our product for their own companies. They helped us think through pricing and marketing, so we would get those things right from the start. We even met our first nonfounding CEO, Jim Franklin, because he was a mentor at Techstars that summer. We found our first investors because of the accelerator program.
What we didn’t expect was the help we’d get from Techstars after we left the accelerator, during the many challenging years that followed. As participants at Techstars, we are part of a community of people, before and after us, who care about our success and provide ideas and insights. For example, we received acquisition offers and Techstars guided us and helped us avoid selling too early, which would have been a tragic mistake. They helped us focus on our culture and pushed our team to define key elements of our culture, which we refer to as our “four Hs” (honest, hungry, humble, and happy) and that still exist today. Techstars actively helped us recruit Sameer Dholokia, who helped SendGrid from its early growth years through its IPO. Techstars representatives served on our board of directors from the beginning to well past $100 million in revenue. Countless customer introductions have been made by Techstars, which have been invaluable.
As I write this, SendGrid has just completed a public offering (NYSE: “SEND”) and now has more than 150,000 customers.1 It has been an amazing journey with Techstars since that meeting with David at LAX about a decade ago. To this day, I still mentor at Techstars because I have seen firsthand the impact and power of giving first and doing more faster!
For me and many others, Techstars is for life.
Isaac SaldanaMay 2019
Note
1 1 Out of the 1,700‐plus companies in 13 countries to go through the Techstars accelerator programs, SendGrid is the first company to complete an IPO.
Preface
Entrepreneurship is hard. Starting with an idea that inspires you and creating a sustainable company is one of the most difficult tasks for people to achieve. Along the way, you will experience joy like you have never felt before and despair so deep that you will question everything about yourself.
It’s not surprising that most startups fail. Even entrepreneurs who have achieved success often have stories of staggering personal challenges and failures where they lose all of their savings and the money given to them by friends and families. Personal relationships get destroyed. Friends’ couches are slept on and much ramen is eaten. The boneyard of unsuccessful entrepreneurial endeavors is wide, deep, and filled with talented, smart, and motivated people who had great ideas but couldn’t overcome the challenges of going from an idea to a sustainable business.
We have been in that boneyard of failed businesses ourselves, which is why we decided to write this book. We started out aiming the book at the startup entrepreneur who has a great idea and wants to build a company around that idea. But we also think the book will provide insights to others, such as entrepreneurs who have been able to create a company but have not been as successful as they hoped. If you are involved in corporate innovation initiatives or product R&D, many of the ideas, tactics, and insights in this book will be applicable to you. Or perhaps you are a person with responsibility for community or economic development in your city or state. You will find the book to be helpful in jump‐starting entrepreneurship in your community. Do More Faster was written to help everyone wanting to understand, and put into action, the principles that accelerate going from an idea to a sustainable business.
We founded Techstars in 2006 with one idea in mind: to help entrepreneurs succeed. We believe that entrepreneurs create a better future for everyone and that they, and the companies they create, are the key to economic growth. The healthy startup communities that result from entrepreneurship improve the lives of people well beyond the direct reach of startup companies. Education and healthcare improve because of the increase in economic activity. Other businesses, such as retailers, service providers, and real estate, benefit. We have seen this positive cycle of entrepreneurship and the startup community play out firsthand over the past decade in Boulder, Colorado, where we live.
To get to a deep and lasting community‐wide economic impact, startup entrepreneurs need to first be able to navigate the twists and turns, pitfalls, and obstacles that can derail a good idea. Our approach at Techstars has proven to be successful in helping startups succeed. Our mentorship‐driven seed accelerators have helped more than a thousand fledgling companies attract more than $7 billion in investments and create tens of billions of dollars in enterprise value. More than 150 of the companies that have gone through a Techstars program have been acquired since we started.
Why has Techstars been able to help generate so many disruptive and innovative companies? What makes Techstars different from other venture capital firms and seed accelerators? How is Techstars able to expand so quickly and have programs running in over 30 different cities around the world?
It’s the mentorship. We create a bond between thoughtful, successful, serial entrepreneurs and startup entrepreneurs. This community, and the culture of giving first between mentors and startup entrepreneurs, is critical to helping startup entrepreneurs validate ideas, avoid critical mistakes, and position themselves for the best possible outcome. This isn’t a short‐term community that lasts only while the startup founder is at the accelerator; it’s a community that persists forever, becoming a construct we describe as “Techstars for life.”
As investors and entrepreneurs, we have worked with tens of thousands of founders and thousands of companies over the past 30 years of our careers. Even though many things evolve and change, we have seen the same issues come up over and over again. We created Techstars to channel the cumulative experience of successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs for the benefit of today’s startup entrepreneurs. But we don’t do it alone; we are helped by over 10,000 of the best entrepreneurs on the planet who are mentors at Techstars accelerator programs.
Organization of the Book
Do More Faster was first written in 2010 to capture Techstars mentors’ unique insights into what it takes to make a startup successful. At that time, Techstars was focused on accelerators to help entrepreneurs succeed and we had only a handful
