Today, Techstars announced that Maëlle Gavet has joined as CEO.
When David Cohen, David Brown, Jared Polis, and I started Techstars in 2006, we could have never envisioned what it has become. Today, Techstars is a global organization with around 300 employees, invests in over 400 new companies each year, and has invested in more than 2,300 companies worldwide. In 2006, an accelerator was a new idea; today, it is an integral part of the global entrepreneurial ecosystem. Entrepreneurship, which in 2006 was just starting to become talked about again after the collapse of the Internet bubble, is a global phenomenon.
Maëlle is joining Techstars at an exciting time. David Cohen led the growth of Techstars from inception in 2006 to about 30 people. David Brown joined full-time in 2013 and did a spectacular job of growing Techstars to around 300 people and expanding it globally. Maëlle joins us to lead us on our next 10x growth.
David Cohen is taking a new role as Chairman of the Board. David Brown and I are each board members, joined by Stephanie Copeland, John China, Shanel Fields, and Maëlle. Having talked to many great potential CEOs, we are incredibly excited about working with Maëlle.
In 2010, when the world began to emerge from the global financial crisis, Techstars started its first wave of real growth. At the time, the regular rap on entrepreneurship was, “If you are serious about starting a high growth company, you should move to the bay area.” As expressed in my book Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem, I took the opposite view, where I asserted that every city with at least 100,000 people could build a thriving startup community and needed to do this as an important component of the socio-economic health of their city. As Techstars expanded throughout the world, we helped prove this.
Today, there are fantastic startup communities everywhere, and great companies created in many different places. Given the Covid pandemic’s impact on society, we are experiencing a new geographic distribution of people and entrepreneurs. Remote and distributed work is now a given as part of our entrepreneurial ecosystems. The need for entrepreneurship, innovative thinking, and transformation of traditional systems is more apparent than ever before.
Our society doesn’t merely need “more tech,” as evidenced by the growing backlash against Big Tech. A few days before meeting Maëlle for the first time, I read her book Trampled by Unicorns: Big Tech’s Empathy Problem and How to Fix It. I did my first call with her with an enormous smile on my face, as I felt immediate alignment with her value system before we even started talking. She reinforced our values’ alignment through our conversations and her actions while recruiting her to be CEO.
Maëlle – welcome to Techstars. I’m ready to help you in any way I can on the next phase of our journey.