When Amir Hegazi and I first started talking about writing a book together, we kept coming back to one central puzzle. Over the last two decades at Techstars, I’ve had the privilege of working with more than 5,000 startup teams. Across thousands of pitch decks, late-night mentoring sessions, and board meetings, you start to spot patterns.
Most of these startups had talented teams and great passion. Yet only a rare handful break out to become billion-dollar companies while thousands of others hit a plateau. Why?
Amir and I decided to sit down, analyze the data across Techstars’ portfolio, and—more importantly—talk candidly with the founders who actually built those breakout companies.
The result is our new book: Chasing Unicorns: The Techstars Playbook for Building Billion-Dollar Startups.
At its core, the book boils down two decades of pattern-recognition into a practical, five-step framework we call PRIDE:
- Pain-Lock: Find a massive, truly painful problem that is worth solving.
- Refine: Narrow your focus relentlessly until your product becomes indispensable.
- Install: Build repeatable systems that let the company scale far beyond the founder.
- Dominate: Maximize your depth and value in your core market before chasing new ones.
- Expand: Scale fast without diluting the culture or core magic that made you special.
This isn’t a book of high-level theory. It’s built on raw, in-the-trenches interviews with founders behind over a dozen Techstars unicorns—folks like Isaac Saldana (SendGrid), Mitch Wainer (DigitalOcean), Jonathan Levin (Chainalysis), Etosha Cave (Twelve), Manny Medina (Outreach), and Matt Oppenheimer (Remitly). We traced the exact sequence of decisions, not just the initial ideas, that separated them from the pack.
What we discovered and documented is that top startups don’t just do the right things. They do them in the right order. And, it turns out that doing the right things in the wrong order can be a real trap.
It’s been humbling to see early feedback from people I respect deeply. Adam Grant called it a book that “takes you into the trenches with successful entrepreneurs,” and Eric Ries noted that the founder interviews are “a goldmine for anyone who wants to understand what it really takes to build a unicorn.”
Whether you’re in the early stages of building, scaling your team, or investing in founders, I hope Chasing Unicorns gives you a clear lens on what matters most.
It’s available now on Amazon in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle.
As always, I’d love to hear what you think after you dive in.
