Business Incubator Series: An Interview With David Cohen, Founder And CEO, Startup Accelerator TechStars – Boulder, Colorado (Part 8)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What about those entrepreneurs who are completely not ready for your accelerator?

David: Yes. My guess is that’s somewhere around two thirds. A third of them might get into a program like this somewhere around the world at some point, or they might go on to have some level of success.

What we do is when we say no, we always try to provide local resources. Depending on the city, we’ll say, “In Boulder, there’s the Boulder Innovation Center,” for example.

We try to create awareness for the companies that don’t get in about other local resources they can use. We’re trying to do things that provide as much help as we can.

Obviously, we’re not going to take 500 companies into our program. It’s not what we do as investors. We want to find ways like the book [that we wrote] or through blogging, or through other local resources, to help people who don’t get into our program.

Irina: I read your book and love it. Tell us how it came about.

David: Brad [Feld, a co-founder of TechStars] and I wrote the book, Do More Faster, over five years. Working with early-stage companies, we were saying the same things over and over.

Those are the things we’ve organized into the seven themes of the book, each theme having five or ten chapters in it.

“Do more faster” is one of those things. It’s the core competitive advantage that startups have. Rather than writing the book ourselves completely, we tried to leverage what was really special about TechStars, which is the mentors who are around the program and the entrepreneurs who have been through it.

So, four fifths of the book is in the words of those other mentors and those entrepreneurs. As you read the book, every few pages, you meet somebody new. You [get] a first-person account of a specific piece of advice and why it matters. That’s what we tried to do with [the book].

We tried to make it like TechStars and our community and mentorship approach. We hope it’s useful not only to entrepreneurs, but to anyone who wants to be entrepreneurial, even inside of a big company.

Irina: Thank you, David. Fantastic insights. TechStars’ long-term goal of creating and supporting entrepreneurial ecosystems worldwide resonate strongly with the mission of our 1M/1M initiative, which was created to help a million entrepreneurs globally reach a million dollars in annual revenue. I hope we can find ways for our two globally-focused organizations to collaborate and do more faster.

This segment is part 8 in the series : Business Incubator Series: An Interview With David Cohen, Founder And CEO, Startup Accelerator TechStars – Boulder, Colorado
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