Techstars NYC is on a roll. I couldn’t believe my eyes when more than 500 companies applied on the last day of the application period (about one company every three minutes!), bringing the total to just under 1,700 companies. Man, do we have our work cut out for us! There are some amazing companies in this mix this year and narrowing them down is going to be an enormous challenge. This all starts tomorrow with a day long our selection meeting in NYC where we will get down to a manageable set of finalists.
Nicole Glaros has been spending much of her time in NYC lately, and she will be on the ground there full time starting in April for the duration of our Spring program. I’l be spending a great deal of time in NYC as well and both Nicole and I will be helping teach the ropes to the new Managing Director there who we announced earlier today, Eugene Chung.
To say that Eugene has thoroughly impressed everyone at Techstars is simply a massive understatement. We interviewed 35 candidates for the Managing Director role and in the end the choice was obvious to us. His passion and energy are contagious, and everyone we talked to who had worked with Eugene had amazing things to say about his hustle and work ethic. I experienced Eugene’s creativity and hard work first hand during our extended interview process. Let’s just say when he sets his mind to something, he’s pretty tenacious. Eugene was previously at NEA where he worked on NYC-area companies BuzzFeed and Bedrocket, and before that he was at Warburg Pincus and Morgan Stanley. He’s got a great background as an investor and we’re simply thrilled to have him join the Techstars team.
Eugene put his thoughts about joining Techstars on his personal blog this morning.
I couldn’t be more excited about the growing team at Techstars which is now over thirty nationally. I get to work with the most amazing people every day. Great companies. Great mentors. And a great and growing team here at Techstars.
