Do More Faster India. Brad Feld
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in 2007. As with the expansion of Techstars Accelerators around the world, we expect Techstars Studios to follow a similar expansion path. We are especially excited about the founding team of Techstars Studios. Along with the leadership of David Cohen (the co‐CEO of Techstars) will be Isaac Saldana, founder of SendGrid, and Mike Rowan, former VP of SendGrid Labs. We’ve worked closely with Isaac and Mike over the years and are psyched to have another chance to create something with them from the ground floor.
One of the things that sets Techstars apart from others is the consistency of what we do and the results we achieve. We frequently hear from participants in our programs—startup founders, mentors, corporate partners, and attendees at our Startup events—that regardless of location, program, or Techstars leaders, the same high‐quality standards and value are delivered. We attribute this to our Code of Conduct, which permeates all that we do at Techstars and is rigorously enforced.2 We hold ourselves and all others in the Techstars community to the highest levels of conduct because we believe we are ambassadors for the Techstars community, and we live in the public. Our code has three tenets: we give first, we act with integrity, and we treat all others with respect.
By giving first, we mean helping others whenever possible, and appreciating the help others give us. By acting with integrity, we mean being honest and transparent, protecting sensitive information, communicating with our investors, and disclosing conflicts of interest. And by treating others with respect, we mean committing to an open, nonhostile workplace, having zero tolerance for any form of discrimination or harassment, avoiding gossip, and promoting fair pay for equal work.
We believe all companies should operate with these principles, and by doing so they will achieve a harmony that leads to higher levels of engagement and better productivity, and will attract talented people at all levels.
In addition to our global reach, Techstars is committed to making an impact. The mission of our Techstars Foundation is to foster diversity and inclusion throughout the entrepreneurial ecosystem. We work with nonprofit organizations like Student Dream, Change Catalyst, and Patriot Boot Camp to help individuals and organizations make a positive impact in their local communities. Brad and his wife Amy Batchelor’s foundation, the Anchor Point Foundation, actively supports a broad range of efforts by individuals and organizations to improve their communities.
Although Techstars has grown significantly over the past decade, we remain committed to the core idea of Techstars: helping entrepreneurs with an idea to create a sustainable business. We are the worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed.
Co‐CEO David Brown with team members from around the world.
Notes
1 1 Techstars is growing rapidly. For a list of locations and a timeline with milestones, see http://history.techstars.com/.
2 2 See our Code of Conduct here: https://www.techstars.com/code-of-conduct/.
Foreword to Do More Faster India
Moving back to the United States, and a mix CD, changed my life.
In 2010, I moved to Boston for love—to follow my wife who was starting her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology. Ten years earlier, after graduating with a computer science degree from the University of Texas at Austin as an immigrant student from India, I became part of the founding team at a startup called United Devices. We had a fantastic run. I learned a ton as a developer, a team lead, and a product manager. My final role was to start and build operations in India and Europe. I set up and groomed our pre‐ and post‐sales organization in Europe, and eventually blossomed into a sales leader.
I left United Devices after our acquisition and moved to Boston to join my wife. Suddenly, I felt I was back to square one—back in the United States in a new city with no friends, no network, and no job. I was not sure what I wanted to do next, but I had to do something.
After spending some time being what I jokingly called a “kept man to my doctoral student wife,” I eventually decided it was time to work on something new again. I came up with the idea for Kinvey, a company that was going to build a cloud platform to make it easier for developers and enterprises to build and run the next generation of web, mobile, and wearable apps. I called it “Backend as a Service.” But I was at a loss on how I would go about doing it. Creating development platforms for mission‐critical apps required a lot of capital, a lot of time to build them correctly, and a hugely talented team, among myriad other things I was sure I hadn’t thought about.
Then I heard about the Techstars Accelerator in Boston. To make progress on Kinvey and get help, I had forced myself, a rank introvert in an extrovert’s disguise, to get plugged into the Boston startup community. Through numerous meetups, events, and one‐on‐one conversations, I started to hear a consistent buzz about this thing called Techstars Boston and their new managing director, Katie Rae. I had to meet her and learn more about this organization. I networked my way to finally meet Katie and many of the mentors she had assembled to support the Techstars program. I was blown away by everyone’s experience, empathy, thoughtfulness, and willingness to help.
I applied to the program, and our final interview was going to be in Austin, Texas. Katie was in Austin for the SXSW festival and she wanted to know if we could meet there. My team and I invited her to a tex‐mex lunch and at the end of the lunch we offered her a mix CD of songs by local Austin musicians as a thank you. I’m not sure if it was the food, the margaritas, the mix CD, our team, or our idea, but the next day I received an email from Katie that we were accepted into the Techstars Boston 2011 program.
The three months of the Techstars Boston program changed the trajectory of Kinvey, but not for the reasons you might think. During the program, we didn’t change our idea, we didn’t discover a new strategy, there were no pivots, we didn’t launch our product, nor did we win any customers or generate any revenue. Techstars Boston helped us create a network of successful, genuine, insightful, and connected mentors who continued to help us in every facet of building our startup. Katie Rae, Reed Sturtevant, Brad Feld, David Cohen, Nicole Stata, Joe Caruso, Jennifer Lum, Fred Destin, Rich Miner, Michael Mark—the list of helpful mentors goes on and on. I built friendships and bonds of trust with some of the brightest minds in technology, relationships that I know will endure for the rest of my career. The secret sauce of Techstars then and now is its ability to quickly help founders meet and derive value from mentors and other people who can meaningfully improve the course of their business. That is priceless.
By 2017, we grew Kinvey into the #1 Mobile Development Platform and Enterprise Health Cloud, and we earned the right to be the strategic digital application cloud platform vendor for many of the largest enterprises in the world. As a result, we were successfully acquired by Progress, creating a great outcome for all our investors, customers, and employees.
My Techstars experience created an indelible passion in me to help other founders and to invest in startups. A value of Techstars is to #givefirst, to give back to the community, and to help others experience this fabulous journey of creating a business. I have continued to give back over the years, and I’ve recently found myself gravitating toward startups in India, my home country.
I believe we are in the very early stages of a multi‐decade technology innovation juggernaut in India. I see a growing ecosystem of founding teams in India who can compete with the best teams and technologies around the world. Indian entrepreneurs know how world‐class products are built and scaled (because they started their careers in India, shipping customer‐facing products at companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon,