Do More Faster

by Brad Feld

  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 david.cohen@techstars.com or brad@feld.com.

  David Cohen and Brad Feld

  May 2019

  Boulder, 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 be in Boulder, just like the first Techstars accelerator was in 2007. As with the expansion of Techstars Accelerators around the world, we expect Techstars Studios to follow a similar expansion path. We are especially excited about the founding team of Techstars Studios. Along with the leadership of David Cohen (the co-CEO of Techstars) will be Isaac Saldana, founder of SendGrid, and Mike Rowan, former VP of SendGrid Labs. We’ve worked closely with Isaac and Mike over the years and are psyched to have another chance to create something with them from the ground floor.

  One of the things that sets Techstars apart from others is the consistency of what we do and the results we achieve. We frequently hear from participants in our programs—startup founders, mentors, corporate partners, and attendees at our Startup events—that regardless of location, program, or Techstars leaders, the same high-quality standards and value are delivered. We attribute this to our Code of Conduct, which permeates all that we do at Techstars and is rigorously enforced.2 We hold ourselves and all others in the Techstars community to the highest levels of conduct because we believe we are ambassadors for the Techstars community, and we live in the public. Our code has three tenets: we give first, we act with integrity, and we treat all others with respect.

  By giving first, we mean helping others whenever possible, and appreciating the help others give us. By acting with integrity, we mean being honest and transparent, protecting sensitive information, communicating with our investors, and disclosing conflicts of interest. And by treating others with respec
t, we mean committing to an open, nonhostile workplace, having zero tolerance for any form of discrimination or harassment, avoiding gossip, and promoting fair pay for equal work.

  We believe all companies should operate with these principles, and by doing so they will achieve a harmony that leads to higher levels of engagement and better productivity, and will attract talented people at all levels.

  In addition to our global reach, Techstars is committed to making an impact. The mission of our Techstars Foundation is to foster diversity and inclusion throughout the entrepreneurial ecosystem. We work with nonprofit organizations like Student Dream, Change Catalyst, and Patriot Boot Camp to help individuals and organizations make a positive impact in their local communities. Brad and his wife Amy Batchelor’s foundation, the Anchor Point Foundation, actively supports a broad range of efforts by individuals and organizations to improve their communities.

  Although Techstars has grown significantly over the past decade, we remain committed to the core idea of Techstars: helping entrepreneurs with an idea to create a sustainable business. We are the worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed.

  Notes

  1Techstars is growing rapidly. For a list of locations and a timeline with milestones, see http://history.techstars.com/.

  2See our Code of Conduct here: https://www.techstars.com/code-of-conduct/.

  Introduction

  When startup founders first get to Techstars accelerators, they receive the red-carpet treatment from us. They are introduced to the Techstars team—many of whom have gone through the program, sold their company, and come back to work with us. They get to meet the mentors, many of whom are well-known within the startup community, and have earned national and international reputations. They get to talk about themselves, their idea, their vision and aspirations, and to have interested people ask them thoughtful questions. They immediately start developing relationships with the other founders in the program.

  Then, reality sets in.

  If we could sum up that reality in one word, it’s intensity. The amount of work that needs to be done—data to collect and validate, meetings with mentors, follow-up contact with people, processing of feedback, and exploration of options—all happens so quickly and in such a short, compressed time, that many founders are shocked by the daunting task ahead.

  We have found that the right mindset and approach to being a startup entrepreneur is the key to reducing that shock to hours, if not minutes. The following introductory chapters provide a perspective into what successful startup entrepreneurs are doing and thinking, and how they approach the startup challenge.

  Chapter 1

  Do More Faster

  David Cohen

  David is a cofounder and the co-CEO of Techstars.

  Startups do almost everything at a disadvantage. Initially, most startups have less money than their competitors. They have less credibility and fewer customers. They have fewer employees, which means there are fewer people focused on marketing, sales, and product development. Resources are scarce at a startup.

  But, as in the martial arts, the best startups use the weight of their opponents to compete more effectively. Bureaucracy slows down larger companies. People do less in larger companies because making a mistake can be politically costly. Risk takers who are wrong get fired or lose power internally. The larger the company, the more likely it is to be slow and fraught with internal politics.

  If there’s one competitive advantage that most startups have, it’s that they can do more faster. And because they can do more faster, they can learn more faster. Startups can immediately throw things away that don’t work, because no one cares, anyway. Nobody is trying to protect a brand that doesn’t exist, and there isn’t any reason to be afraid of small failures. Startups know that that’s just part of the process.

  If you ask CEOs of major companies what they’re most worried about, one common answer is, “a couple of people in a garage somewhere.” Why would a major company be worried about that? Because their larger and more established competitors have too much to lose to try something radically different. There’s too much at stake for these large companies to try to blow up the market to disrupt the existing players. Relatively speaking, startups have nothing to lose and everything to gain by trying radical or nonobvious things. Larger companies are often baffled at just how much a startup can get done—and it scares them.

  One of the things we talk with startups at Techstars about is that they have to do more faster. This doesn’t mean doing random stuff—they still have to be thoughtful. But if they’re not hyperproductive as small, nimble companies, then they’re fighting from a real disadvantage. There is no advantage to being a startup if you can’t do more faster. I’m such a big believer in this that I originally named my own first angel fund Bullet Time Ventures. It’s named after the move from the movie The Matrix, where Neo is so fast that he can easily dodge bullets. To him, his enemies move in slow motion, so he has an obvious advantage over them that can make all the difference in the virtual world he lives in. The same is true in the startup world.

  When Occipital was in Techstars in 2008, they were faster than a speeding bullet. As a visual search company, they tried several products before having a runaway hit with RedLaser. All of their products were interesting, but what really paid off for Occipital was their ability to try their ideas quickly and throw away what didn’t work while focusing on what did work. RedLaser was actually the fourth product Occipital worked on over a six-month time frame. On the surface, this may sound disorganized and random, but Jeff Powers and Vikas Reddy were deliberate about assessing progress at every step and vigilant about throwing away ideas and prototypes that 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.