David Cohen

David Cohen and I have co-hosted the Give First podcast for 71 episodes. I think our host ratio is 80/20 David/Brad, and he’s covered everything in 2021 because I was burned out on all things public-facing and needed a break. He figured a good way to get me back in the mix would be to interview me about entrepreneurship and mental health, so that’s what Episode 71 is about. Listen & subscribe to the Give First podcast on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , and more .

In 2010, David Cohen and I wrote a book titled Do More Faster . It was filled with stories and advice from founders, investors, and mentors from around the first two years of Techstars. This was the first book I wrote. David and I learned the joy and pain of writing a book. We were lucky to get to work with Bill Falloon, who has been my long-time editor on all the books I’ve written. Bill guided us through the process and helped us understand what was required to put together a real book. ...

If you are looking for something powerful, creative, provocative, and beautifully done, go look at True Blue by Eliot Peper and team. In 2017, I wrote a post titled A Clever Short Story About Discrimination about the short story that Eliot had written. It was an idea that David Cohen had. He shared it with Eliot, who then wrote the short story. David then funded a project for Eliot to turn it into an “internet public art project.” ...

Today’s #GivingThanks is to David Cohen , one of the founders and co-CEO of Techstars . If David has done something that has touched your life is a positive way and you want to give thanks to him, make a donation online to the Techstars Foundation . I met David on one of my random days in 2006. I can’t remember who introduced us, but David reminds me that it took him four months to get a meeting with me. He knew he had 15 minutes so he got right down to it as is his nature. We were in my old Superior office (the one about the liquor store where I met Lucy Sanders and so many other great people for the first time.) We said hello, David introduced himself to me, and we sat down. David then slid something across the table and sat silently while I read it. ...

I love origin stories. Yesterday at the kickoff of Techstars FounderCon, I stood on stage with David Cohen and David Brown as we went through the origin story of Techstars, followed by a build up of what has happened over the past seven amazing years. As the 50+ people working for Techstars stood on the stage at the end, I got chills. Afterwards I got feedback from a number of the 500 people in the audience that it was extremely useful context for them, many of whom joined the extended Techstars network in the past two years. ...

When David Cohen and I came up with the idea for the Global Accelerator Network (GAN) in 2010, we counted roughly 100 accelerator programs around the US that were founded following the Techstars model. We labeled Techstars a “mentor driven accelerator” and reached out to others who were using the same approach to create what became GAN. From that initial outreach, 16 high quality accelerator programs joined us to launch the network. ...

Sean Wise, a professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, has an awesome web interview series called The Naked Entrepreneur Show. Sean is the interviewer for a 45 minute studio show that is entirely produced by students at Ryerson. When I was in Toronto in the fall, I did an episode with him – it’s definitely in the top 10 of the interviews I’ve done. David Cohen, the CEO of TechStars, also did an interview on The Naked Entrepreneur. ...

Over at the TechStars blog today, David Cohen introduced the new Managing Director for TechStars in New York, Eugene Chung . Thirty-five great candidates were interviewed for this position; the only offer we extended was to Eugene. His background includes NY-area investments BuzzFeed and Bedrocket while he was at New Enterprise Associates. Prior to that, he worked at Warbug Pincus and Morgan Stanley. We were looking for deep competence and culture fit with TechStars and we found it with Eugene. ...

A few weeks ago I did a long interview with Jason Calacanis on This Week In Startups . I got a bunch of positive feedback on it and thought it was one of the better long form interviews I’ve done in a while. The other day Jason released an interview that he recently did with David Cohen, the CEO of TechStars . I listened to it earlier today – it was also excellent. I highly recommend it if you are interested in TechStars, accelerators, early stage investing, ramping your startup, and how David thinks about angel investing from his fund Bullet Time Ventures. ...

I’ve always enjoyed Greg Galant’s interviews on Venture Voice. He interviewed me early on (Show #10) and the list of folks he has interviewed is dynamite. Greg just interviewed David Cohen on TechStars. The show notes give you a great outline of the interview content where David answers a lot of questions about TechStars , why it exists, how it works, and why you should care. Don’t forget – TechStars applications are now open.