TechStars is coming to New York City. The first program runs from 1/10/11 to 4/8/11. Applications are open now. The NY mentor list is stunning and includes the following:
Phin Barnes (First Round Capital), Alex Blum (KickApps), Matt Blumberg (Return Path), Brad Burnham (USV), Jeff Clavier, Dennis Crowley (FourSquare), Chris Dixon (Founder Collective), Roger Ehrenberg, Darren Herman (The Media Kitchen), Jennifer Hyman (Rent The Runway), Alex Iskold (Adaptive Blue), David Karp (Tumblr), Zach Klein (Boxee, Vimeo), Evan Korth (NYU/HackNY), Mike Lazerow (Buddy Media), Ben Lerer (ThrillList), Sam Lessin (Drop.io), Joey Levin (MindSpark, IAC), Howard Lindzon (StockTwits), Eric Litman (Medialets), John Maloney (Tumblr), Dave McClure, Hilary Mason (Bit.ly/HackNY), Jeremie Miller (Telehash), Howard Morgan (First Round Capital), Charlie O’Donnell (First Round Capital), Eric Paley (Founder Collective), Raphael Poplock (ESPN), Alex Rainert (FourSquare), Avner Ronen (Boxee), Naveen Selvadurai (FourSquare), Justin Shaffer (HotPotato), Tim Shey (NextNewNetworks), Andy Smith (Daily Burn), Rex Sorgatz (Kinda Sorta Media), Jon Steinberg (BuzzFeed), Vinicius Vacanti (YipIt), Albert Wenger (USV), Fred Wilson (USV)
David Cohen, who is relocating to NY for January to March of next year, and David Tisch (I’m encouraging him to change his name to just Tisch to save me the brain damage of “which David”) will be running the program. When we went about setting up the NY program, we evolved our funding model to be as inclusive of the local VC / angel community as we could. We’ve created a long term funding model, which I expect David Cohen will write about at some point, that we implemented in TechStars Seattle and will be rolling out to Boulder and Boston this year. As a result, the investors in TechStars NY include many local financial investors such as:
AOL Ventures, DFJ Gotham Ventures, FirstMark Capital, First Round Capital, Foundry Group, IA Ventures, Jove Ventures, Lerer Ventures, RRE Ventures, Social Leverage, Village Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, Peter Hershberg, Josh Stylman, David Tisch, Nate Westheimer, and Kal Vepuri.
When David first talked to me about his idea for TechStars in 2006, if you had asked me if we’d have Boulder, Boston, Seattle, and NY programs up and running by 2010 I would have chuckled (a real chuckle, not my evil laugh chuckle.) The Seattle program is crushing it already and I’m excited to go spend time up there. And I can’t wait to see the NY program start cranking.
We’ve got a few other interesting pieces of TechStars news coming over the next month – look out for them! And, if you are an entrepreneur interested in the TechStars NY program, apply now so you can come to TechStars for a Day on 11/20/10.