Gig Wage demo day pitch

I don’t normally share a demo day pitch for one specific startup here on my blog. But this wasn’t just any demo day pitch. It’s just three minutes long, but very powerful. To read more about Gig Wage, check out “Why I Used My Startup’s Techstars Demo Day To Advocate For Other Black Founders” and …

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Book: The New Builders

Seth Levine (Foundry Group) and Elizabeth McBride (international business journalist) have released their new book “The New Builders: Face to Face with the True Future of Business.” It’s a fascinating look into who is really driving the entrepreneurial spirit forward today. The truth will surprise you. It’s not the white male tech founder that we …

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Talking about Scaled Operations

Here’s an interview I did with my friend Mark Peter Davis of Interplay Ventures. Mark was around when we first brought Techstars to NYC in 2011, and played a key role in helping us get off the ground there. At that time, we had just 4 locations and we were investing in 40 startups a …

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Congrats to DigitalOcean on their IPO this week

This week, DigitalOcean became a public company. Moisey Uretsky, Ben Uretsky, Alec Hartman, Mitch Wainer, and Jeff Carr founded the company and it’s been an incredible journey for them since they were in the Techstars Boulder Accelerator in 2012. That was class #17! In 2019, Yancey Spruill became CEO of DigitalOcean. I had gotten to …

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Listen to Techstars new CEO Maëlle Gavet on the #GiveFirst podcast

Brad Feld and I recently chatted with Maëlle Gavet who is the CEO of Techstars. I really encourage you to get to know her by listening in to hear more about where Techstars is headed in the future. Maëlle has only been in the job for about two months, and I have to say I’m …

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How did the 2020 pandemic impact startups?

Here’s a chart of financings that happened inside the Techstars portfolio during 2020 vs 2019. 2020, of course, will likely be known as the year of the pandemic. There were 623 discrete financings totaling approximately $3.1B in our existing portfolio of 1,751 active companies in 2020. By contrast in 2019, there were 619 financings totaling …

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file under: Startups