Tag: techstars
When David Cohen and I first talked about TechStars in 2006, the concept of a “mentor” was front and center. Early on, we defined TechStars as a “mentorship-driven seed stage investment program” and have held deeply to that concept from the beginning. Today, the vast majority of accelerators use a mentorship model, which is something we are really proud of and thinks serves entrepreneurs everywhere extremely well.
When I was in Cambridge, England at the end of July for the Springboard Demo Day, Jon Bradford (the Springboard Managing Director) talked elloquently about how mentorship was a key part of the program. Springboard is a member of the TechStars Network and subsequently uses the same mentorship model that TechStars uses. During the day I got to meet a bunch of Springboard mentors – they were superb and also incredibly enthusiastic about the Springboard program that Jon had created. Jon then took me for a meeting at 10 Downing Street and on the way suggested that David and I write up a “Mentor Manifesto.” I thought it was a great idea, suggested it to David, who published his Mentor Manifesto yesterday. It follows:
- Be socratic.
- Expect nothing in return (you’ll be delighted with what you do get back).
- Be authentic / practice what you preach.
- Be direct. Tell the truth, however hard.
- Listen too.
- The best mentor relationships eventually become two-way.
- Be responsive.
- Adopt at least one company every single year. Experience counts.
- Clearly separate opinion from fact.
- Hold information in confidence.
- Clearly commit to mentor or do not. Either is fine.
- Know what you don’t know. Say I don’t know when you don’t know. “I don’t know” is preferable to bravado.
- Guide, don’t control. Teams must make their own decisions. Guide but never tell them what to do. Understand that it’s their company, not yours.
- Accept and communicate with other mentors that get involved.
- Be optimistic.
- Provide specific actionable advice, don’t be vague.
- Be challenging/robust but never destructive.
- Have empathy. Remember that startups are hard.
If you’ve read Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons To Accelerate Your Startup, you’ll recognize many of these. David’s added a few more concepts and synthesized / evolved a few. In typical TechStars fashion, view this as an evolving manifesto – comments are welcome (and encouraged!)
On September 13th the Bloomberg TV Show TechStars launches.
TechStars will be having launch parties in Boulder, New York, Boston, and Seattle. If you are an entrepreneur, or part of the entrepreneurial community in any of these cities, sign up now to participate.
I’ll be in Boulder and am really looking forward to an evening celebrating entrepreneurship and hanging out with a bunch of my favorite people.
David Cohen, the CEO of TechStars, is doing a weekly show called ThisWeekIn TechStars. Episode 3 – which is now up – is the story of the making of the Bloomberg show “TechStars” which premiers on September 13th.
David interviews Elizabeth Gould, the Bloomberg Executive Producer for the show. I’ve gotten to know Elizabeth over the past few years and she’s really incredible. While I’ve been interviewed for TV plenty of times, I’ve never participated in a long form show. In this case, the TechStars show will be seven episodes that are each 30 minutes long. While I play a small part, watching the process unfold, the work required to put together a show like this, and the effort that Elizabeth and her team put into this was remarkable and really cool to see and experience.
The interview with Elizabeth is a chance for David to turn the camera on her for once. Watching the interview makes me even more excited to see the series when it comes out. As a bonus, David also interviews David Tisch, the TechStars New York Managing Director, for his feelings on the experience of being filmed 24 hours a day for three months. While it’s all it a little meta, it’s good meta.
One of my favorite conferences of the year is Defrag happening in Boulder on November 9th and 10th. Eric Norlin is gearing up for it and just announced several scholarships for Defrag, underwritten by the Kauffman Foundation. The Kauffman scholarships are for students and entrepreneurs who can’t afford to attend Defrag, but would receive significant benefit from doing so. Eric is making a concerted effort to get more women to Defrag so he’s allocating 50% of the scholarships to women. For information on applying, take a look at the Defrag scholarship post.
On a completely different note, I love rockets. I’m a boy – I can’t help myself. This video of the launch of Juno on the APOD site gave me chills.
Finally, if you are a video watcher, take a look at ThisWeekIn TechStars. The first episode, hosted by David Cohen with me, Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC), and Ari Newman (Filtrbox – acquired by Jive) is up.
Ever since David Cohen and I started talking about TechStars in 2006, one of our goals was to be open about everything we did in the program. We viewed TechStars as an experiment in building companies, creating entrepreneurial communities, teaching people (and learning ourselves) about entrepreneurship and what’s required to create a high growth company, and working hard at perfecting a vision David had which we now call a “mentor-driven accelerator”.
Several years ago we started getting approached to do a documentary, TV show, or reality series around TechStars. We’ve done lots of video that’s up on the web, including the awesome Founders Series (2010 and 2009) that our friend Megan Sweeney did with us.
Last year we decided to work with Bloomberg on a six episode project documenting the first TechStars New York program. Rather than describe it, I encourage you to watch the trailer.
TechStars Trailer 8/01 from Vortex Media on Vimeo.
David Cohen talks more about it on the TechStars blog titled TechStars on Bloomberg TV. The first episode is launching on 9/13 at 9:30 EST on Bloomberg TV (and the web). We are going to have a bunch of events around the launch – look for more info on them in the coming days.
This was an amazingly fun project to be involved in. Our goal with it was to give a deeper view into the experience of creating a company from scratch. Having spent a lot of time with the Bloomberg folks who worked incredibly hard on this, I’m optimistic about the outcome.
August 3 and August 4 are busy days in Boulder for entrepreneurs and early stage investors. On the evening of August 3 is Open Angel Forum #4. In the morning of August 4 is TechStars Boulder Demo Day. These two events show off the cream of the crop for new early stage tech companies coming out of the Boulder entrepreneurial ecosystem.
If you are an angel or VC investor I still have a few golden tickets left for each event. The best way to get them is to email me.
Contact Management Tools For Google Apps: Rainmaker and WriteThat.Name
I’ve recently discovered two awesome tools for helping me manage my contacts in Google Apps. One is a TechStars Boulder company called Rainmaker and the other is a Paris-based company called Kwaga that has an app called WriteThat.Name.
I’ve got a large address book in Gmail (> 11,000 contacts). I get numerous new inbound contacts on a regular basis from people reaching out to me and Google automatically puts their email address in Google Contacts, which is cool. However, it doesn’t put any additional info – either from the email body (which often has contact info in it) or from other sources like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook – which often has a lot more contact info, including a photo.
Let’s start with WriteThat.Name. Once you tie it to you Google account, it automatically scans emails, parses out any contact info it finds, and automagically adds it to the contact record. I’ve been looking for this for a very long time (over a decade) – I’ve never understood why Microsoft didn’t build this into Outlook. Sure – there have been plenty of plug-ins along the way, but nothing that “just worked” invisibly in the background. WriteThat.Name does – beautifully. After using it for a week for free I paid for it. I met the CEO Philippe Laval at lunch the other day in Paris and gave him a big hug. Do yourself a favor – try it.
The next app is Rainmaker. This is from one of the TechStars Boulder teams from this year that is just killing it. You connect it up to your social networks and your Google account. You can then selectively, or in bulk, “make it rain” on your contacts where Rainmaker will use all the magic it can to enhance your existing contacts using whatever information it can find. Like WriteThat.Name, this information is going directly into your Contact database, enhancing it dramatically.
While there is a lot more that can be done, both of these applications make good on the promise of “my computer being smarter than me.” I find that I spend almost no time in my Contacts entering data and updating it any more. All the stuff I need is there – all the time – and I can call, email, IM, chat, txt, or whatever I want without having to search around for the info.
One last hint – before you crank up any program that you give write access to your Google App data, make sure you use Spanning Backup to backup your Google Contacts, Calendar, and Docs data (we are investors in Spanning Cloud Apps, the company that does Spanning Backup.) While I’ve had no issues with either Rainmaker or WriteThat.Name, better safe than sorry!
If you have an iPad, go look at Feld Thoughts in the browser on it right now. I’ll wait. If you don’t have an iPad, it looks like the following.
My friends at Onswipe did that. In one minute. All it took was one line of Javascript. Onswipe was in the TechStars NY program and did an awesome job. Not surprisingly they’ve put together an awesome investor group including Spark Capital and Betaworks.
As someone who loves magic services that dramatically improve my content, Onswipe is the king of the iPad so far. The key for me is that it be trivial to set up and work flawlessly. In this category, Onswipe has nailed it. And it’s beautiful – way better than trying to read my blog in Safari on an iPad.
They’ve launched with a bunch of publishers. If you are a VC that looks at PEHub, go take a look on an iPad. Or check out Slate on your iPad. And there are a lot more coming.
If you are a publisher and you want your site to be beautiful on the iPad in one minute, go sign up for the Onswipe beta now.
I’ve been spending some time with the current TechStars Boston class. This feels to me like the strongest class we’ve had in Boston so far and might be the one of the strongest TechStars classes overall. This class of companies in Boston is thinking big and is very diverse.
It’s been incredibly energizing watching each of the four TechStars cities (Boulder, NYC, Seattle, and Boston) up their game every single year. In Boston in particular, Katie Rae has done a great job engaging many great new mentors. I was lucky enough to have the chance to meet many of them on my last trip to Boston, and they all seemed very excited to be involved. They were feeding off of the energy of the companies in the program, just as it should be.
If you’re an angel investor or would like to become one, there’s a great two-for-one coming in Boston soon. June 15th is TechStars Demo Day, where the new crop of companies there will show their stuff for the first time in front of several hundred investors. If you’re an angel investor or a VC and you’d like an invitation, just drop TechStars a note. If you’ve never been to a TechStars Demo Day event before, you’re really missing out on something special. The day before, on June 14, Jon Pierce has put together a great event called Angel Boot Camp where those interested in learning more about angel investing can spend the day learning from those who do it well. It’s a great opportunity to learn and then see some great new TechStars companies the next day as well. Oh, and just in case you want to be really cool, don’t miss Coolio at the TechStars after-party on June 15th.