I mentored in the Techstars program in Berlin a few years ago. Nice people and they mean well. But in the end the program I mentored in was a dud. As far as I know none of the companies were invested in and the upfront screening wasn't great either. I.e. it was obvious to me early on in the program that there were no unicorns anywhere in sight.
Not that I'm an expert on spotting those of course. But as it turns out, my skepticism was justified as there were no investments at the end of the program and few of these companies (if any) survived very long after. I was kind of sad about that because there were a couple of founders I really liked there.
Several of the companies actually died early in the program because of the usual founder issues, or the lack of coherent plan. Apparently, none of these issues came up during screening.
I've stepped back a little from mentoring (at least for them) because it's kind of time consuming and I got the vibe that Techstars took my time a little too much for granted. You get invited to some events and I got the hoody (which is a nice one) and that's about the extent of their appreciation or engagement. The promise of a great network (to both mentors and founders) is hard to live up to if you don't nurture that network. And there's not a lot of that nurturing happening lately.
Would that most likely be an artifact of not enough in-flow/supply of startups to choose from?
If not, a mechanism to let the other participants anonymously vote and rate and comment such things, and then administrators can look at that data - and see what specific admin(s) was/were responsible for inviting them in, and then address the issue as close to the core as possible might of helped?
I live in Berlin and am an active mentor with the Berlin program, too. I also participated in TS in the US, actually the Seattle program in 2016 with Chris DeVore (author of this post).
> it's kind of time consuming and I got the vibe that Techstars took my time a little too much for granted.
The Give First ethos applies here. If you approach TS with this mentality, you'll get more out of it.
> The promise of a great network (to both mentors and founders) is hard to live up to if you don't nurture that network.
I agree that, perhaps, there should be more, consistent events to bring the network together. For instance, in Seattle, we had regular mixers that were just at Startup Hall--swing by, grab a beer from the keg, and have a chat. Events pulling the network together don't have to be a heavy life.
But I think you also get out of it what you put into it: Again, give first, and follow up with folks and you'll get more out of it.
That's the theory. I gave quite a lot of time to them first. There's just not a lot coming back in kind. Techstars seems a bit complacent about people giving them their time. But they are not a charity. So they've been cutting on giving back. From having talked to other mentors, the quality of the network used to be better when they were more engaged. Even the networking events seem to be very infrequent at this point and frankly the last few ones weren't great. Somehow that never recovered after COVID.
Give first as a general mantra sometimes works. But in situations where you're constantly giving to new people who have never gotten anything from you before, and therefore want the same "give" that you gave the earlier people means that you never get to the return part. Instead you're always giving. New people come in, want the same give that you gave others, and then at some point you're not getting the return because those new people are placed with even newer people. This is the revolving door of give, and why the give first never results in the... what next? Give first, get later? A lot of times it's give, give, give, with no return, until you finally tire out.
I was a mentor for the Austin program for every year but the last (2013-2022) until they recently closed it.. and "top mentor" a half dozen times. I also worked with a number of other programs once covid hit.
Overall, I had a blast, made some great friendships, and did most of my angel investing in companies I worked with through the program. One died, a handful were acquired, and the rest are still operational.
That said, I don't think that Techstars problem was only chasing the cash. I think it came down to the problem they were solving disappeared and they didn't shift.
Rewind to 2008 and the number of operators who had "been there, done that" successfully and were willing to share their time was exceptionally rare. By 2013 when they came to Austin, it was still uncommon but there were a few pockets here and there. Techstars was exceptional at collecting and coordinating them. Fast forward to 2018/19 and the sheer volume of people who had useful experience and the ability to share it was massive.
One of the things the article nailed is the need for a good Managing Director (MD). If you had a good one, they were able to leverage those local (and some remote) ecosystem to help validate ideas, streamline the founders' thinking, and focus them on the goals. If you had a weaker MD, sucks to be you. Techstars HQ's only role in that was picking the MD. Beyond that, you were on your own.
When covid hit, that ecosystem shifted and suddenly the number of people with experience and the ability to share it exploded, money flowed like water, and people's mindset shifted. The Techstars program didn't iterate and even lost the camaraderie that they'd fostered for years. When they took strong political stances for and against different groups, a bunch of mentors drifted away.
On the other side of covid, now we have way more people with experience, way less money, and way fewer social bonds. Techstars doesn't address those needs.
> When they took strong political stances for and against different groups, a bunch of mentors drifted away.
Out of curiousity, could you could elaborate on this a bit? I'm not that familiar with Techstars aside from being generally aware of them as a large accelerator for many years.
Having been through both Techstars and YC, this article is painfully accurate.
Being part of both networks has been an interesting experience in culture.
YC culture fosters an extremely strong network of founders, even outside the bay area. In London we're constantly pinging each other for advice - it really helps.
Techstars does not have this and makes little effort to do this. I remember speaking to some Techstars people in London trying to see if they might Foster more of the community here, but they had no interest in it unfortunately.
It's a real shame because some Techstars programs with the right MDs had YC quality (Shoutout to Connor), it's just the quality wasn't distributed or cultivated uniformly. It's heavily dependent on the MD of the program.
After getting to know the Boulder-area TechStars people, I tried to get a TechStars "chapter" going in San Diego back in 2010 and like so many things about the startup world in San Diego, it just wasn't going to happen. The San Diego M-F 9-5 lifestyle always was more important than taking over the world. Plus, in general I found mentoring San Diego tech startups to be essentially pointless: nobody listened, nobody cared, so why even bother. Finally I found the core TechStars organization to be a bunch of cats, un-herdable, no "there" there. I never liked the whole "star" thing as it reeked of "rock stars" and was a little too "bro" for me. Bottom line, it was screamingly clear TechStars was never going to compete with YC (which I've never been a fan of either, but at least they're organized and determined and focused), so no surprise when it never did.
> The San Diego M-F 9-5 lifestyle always was more important than taking over the world.
Sounds positive to me. Fuck your “world changing” startup idea. That’s just religion. You want me to work hard, treat me with respect and pay me (in that order).
edit: mark my words, there will come a time when you lose a highly valuable employee because you thought it was easier to treat people like a kubernetes configuration.
Its a startup. You will become fantastically rich as a founder/early employee if the startup takes over the world. You don't take over the world working a 9-5.
People entering this environment SHOULD know what they're signing up for. Its not like startups are the only jobs out there.
I was part of Techstars Seattle in 2019, though we were mentored by Chris's counterpart at Founders' Co-op (Aviel). It was also a partnership with Amazon, and I really don't have enough good things to say about that experience even though our company ceased to exist less than a year later.
I'm only half-surprised.
I had a great experience, we learned a ton, and if anything was going to set us up for success it was our time there. Companies are mostly doomed to fail, but our time in Seattle was pretty transformative for me personally. It allowed us to refine our focus and dedicate ourselves wholly to building something people wanted (which, turns out, wasn't that many people obviously). The support and guidance we received from Aviel, our Amazon partners, and fellow cohort members were unparalleled. Say what you want about VCs or Amazon or startup founders (and yeah there are many things to be said), but I really have nothing but great things to say about all of the individuals from our time there. Admittedly, my opinion doesn't carry any particular importance.
On the other hand, I'm not surprised at all when I reflect on the actual Techstars program. Techstars, as an organization, seemed totally in the periphery for much of the program. The lion's share of valuable advice and resources came not from the organization itself, but from everyone else.
Echoing another's sentiments, the value of Techstars seems heavily influenced by location and the mentors involved. We were lucky to only be thinking about two great programs, Seattle and NYC. If we had ended up somewhere else maybe I'd be completely unsurprised.
We went through Techstars Chicago in 2016 and found the network to be top-notch. We met so many incredible people who helped connect us to resources we could not have gotten otherwise.
I think Techstars' inability to pivot, go back to basics, and learn from their mistakes all contributed to their downfall. Now, I know they're not completely shutting down, but I don't know how they'll come back from this. They spent so many years touting that they were the anti-YC. Focusing on areas like the Bay Area means they're going to be competing with other programs and resources that have been part of that community for years. It's going to be an uphill climb for them and I don't think it's going to work.
I did Techstars in London in 2013 (an early cohort there) after spending a decade in the Bay Area. Back then, it felt like the glue holding the entire program together were the founders themselves and one particularly good Techstars staff member.
I felt proud going through the program until I learned about the branded programs emerging "Techstars Disney" and "Techstars Barclays". It felt like the prestige was vanishing, and I rarely mentioned it on my CV afterwards.
Funny though, I raised about $1M through the Techstars program, and over $10M through other VCs. The Techstars VCs were the least helpful (but this could have been the London ecosystem at the time. London, these days, is quite good when it comes to early stage, especially some of the syndicates like Ventures Together. I digress).
Techstars should have bought Indiehackers or built a community like HN. I realize Indiehackers might not be a perfect fit (bootstrap vs VC). The fact that I’m on HN just about every. Single. Day. Keeps YC top of mind way more than I could imagine it would otherwise.
You can't "build" a community like HN. Not even YC could (again) if they wanted to. Things like good mods is still just maintenance. It's a single lucky constellation of stars, and the gravitational pull after that.
I really hope if YC goes under that HN has some support from elsewhere. This is the only social media I do because of how good the insights are in the comments and I don’t think I could recreate the feed quality anywhere else, even on my own.
Do you think there are many VCs who daily HN too, which is why that comes to mind, or just the association is useful for you to reinforce the values of feeling like you're being witnessed?
I would say the daily subconscious reminder that I’m in a community that is run by an incubator. It keeps that incubator top of mind, it’s even in the URL. The built in marketing for YC helps keep them at the top.
At some point they simply stopped trying to compete with YC (probably because they can't). The terms are worse, the program is worse, and the only differentiation is not being in the Bay Area (which YC moved away from anyways).
The end result is ~nobody would choose Techstars over YC. In a power law business, that's a death sentence.
The geography thing is a big deal to me. It seems YC still requires SFO area during the duration of the program. Are there alternatives?
Techstars didn't seem appealing not for the concept, but because it smelled funny. I think there is room for a robust global YC-style program. I see a lot more opportunities outside of SFO than inside, and especially in significantly different markets (and especially in ones with lower cost-of-labor).
The problem with $20k for 6%, even back in 2016, is that it immediately filters serious founders unless hyperfocused on segments like university students (i.e. old YC) where there's a good reason for being broke. It's simply better to have a day job than to take that offer. The alleged value is in the accelerator itself, which here was nebulous at best.
Readit News
Not that I'm an expert on spotting those of course. But as it turns out, my skepticism was justified as there were no investments at the end of the program and few of these companies (if any) survived very long after. I was kind of sad about that because there were a couple of founders I really liked there.
Several of the companies actually died early in the program because of the usual founder issues, or the lack of coherent plan. Apparently, none of these issues came up during screening.
I've stepped back a little from mentoring (at least for them) because it's kind of time consuming and I got the vibe that Techstars took my time a little too much for granted. You get invited to some events and I got the hoody (which is a nice one) and that's about the extent of their appreciation or engagement. The promise of a great network (to both mentors and founders) is hard to live up to if you don't nurture that network. And there's not a lot of that nurturing happening lately.
If not, a mechanism to let the other participants anonymously vote and rate and comment such things, and then administrators can look at that data - and see what specific admin(s) was/were responsible for inviting them in, and then address the issue as close to the core as possible might of helped?
> it's kind of time consuming and I got the vibe that Techstars took my time a little too much for granted.
The Give First ethos applies here. If you approach TS with this mentality, you'll get more out of it.
> The promise of a great network (to both mentors and founders) is hard to live up to if you don't nurture that network.
I agree that, perhaps, there should be more, consistent events to bring the network together. For instance, in Seattle, we had regular mixers that were just at Startup Hall--swing by, grab a beer from the keg, and have a chat. Events pulling the network together don't have to be a heavy life.
But I think you also get out of it what you put into it: Again, give first, and follow up with folks and you'll get more out of it.
That's the theory. I gave quite a lot of time to them first. There's just not a lot coming back in kind. Techstars seems a bit complacent about people giving them their time. But they are not a charity. So they've been cutting on giving back. From having talked to other mentors, the quality of the network used to be better when they were more engaged. Even the networking events seem to be very infrequent at this point and frankly the last few ones weren't great. Somehow that never recovered after COVID.
I still mentor BTW. Just not via Techstars.
Does that apply to TechStars themselves, or just the people donating their time?
What were you expecting?
Overall, I had a blast, made some great friendships, and did most of my angel investing in companies I worked with through the program. One died, a handful were acquired, and the rest are still operational.
That said, I don't think that Techstars problem was only chasing the cash. I think it came down to the problem they were solving disappeared and they didn't shift.
Rewind to 2008 and the number of operators who had "been there, done that" successfully and were willing to share their time was exceptionally rare. By 2013 when they came to Austin, it was still uncommon but there were a few pockets here and there. Techstars was exceptional at collecting and coordinating them. Fast forward to 2018/19 and the sheer volume of people who had useful experience and the ability to share it was massive.
One of the things the article nailed is the need for a good Managing Director (MD). If you had a good one, they were able to leverage those local (and some remote) ecosystem to help validate ideas, streamline the founders' thinking, and focus them on the goals. If you had a weaker MD, sucks to be you. Techstars HQ's only role in that was picking the MD. Beyond that, you were on your own.
When covid hit, that ecosystem shifted and suddenly the number of people with experience and the ability to share it exploded, money flowed like water, and people's mindset shifted. The Techstars program didn't iterate and even lost the camaraderie that they'd fostered for years. When they took strong political stances for and against different groups, a bunch of mentors drifted away.
On the other side of covid, now we have way more people with experience, way less money, and way fewer social bonds. Techstars doesn't address those needs.
Out of curiousity, could you could elaborate on this a bit? I'm not that familiar with Techstars aside from being generally aware of them as a large accelerator for many years.
Being part of both networks has been an interesting experience in culture.
YC culture fosters an extremely strong network of founders, even outside the bay area. In London we're constantly pinging each other for advice - it really helps.
Techstars does not have this and makes little effort to do this. I remember speaking to some Techstars people in London trying to see if they might Foster more of the community here, but they had no interest in it unfortunately.
It's a real shame because some Techstars programs with the right MDs had YC quality (Shoutout to Connor), it's just the quality wasn't distributed or cultivated uniformly. It's heavily dependent on the MD of the program.
Sounds positive to me. Fuck your “world changing” startup idea. That’s just religion. You want me to work hard, treat me with respect and pay me (in that order).
edit: mark my words, there will come a time when you lose a highly valuable employee because you thought it was easier to treat people like a kubernetes configuration.
People entering this environment SHOULD know what they're signing up for. Its not like startups are the only jobs out there.
I'm only half-surprised.
I had a great experience, we learned a ton, and if anything was going to set us up for success it was our time there. Companies are mostly doomed to fail, but our time in Seattle was pretty transformative for me personally. It allowed us to refine our focus and dedicate ourselves wholly to building something people wanted (which, turns out, wasn't that many people obviously). The support and guidance we received from Aviel, our Amazon partners, and fellow cohort members were unparalleled. Say what you want about VCs or Amazon or startup founders (and yeah there are many things to be said), but I really have nothing but great things to say about all of the individuals from our time there. Admittedly, my opinion doesn't carry any particular importance.
On the other hand, I'm not surprised at all when I reflect on the actual Techstars program. Techstars, as an organization, seemed totally in the periphery for much of the program. The lion's share of valuable advice and resources came not from the organization itself, but from everyone else.
Echoing another's sentiments, the value of Techstars seems heavily influenced by location and the mentors involved. We were lucky to only be thinking about two great programs, Seattle and NYC. If we had ended up somewhere else maybe I'd be completely unsurprised.
We went through Techstars Chicago in 2016 and found the network to be top-notch. We met so many incredible people who helped connect us to resources we could not have gotten otherwise.
I think Techstars' inability to pivot, go back to basics, and learn from their mistakes all contributed to their downfall. Now, I know they're not completely shutting down, but I don't know how they'll come back from this. They spent so many years touting that they were the anti-YC. Focusing on areas like the Bay Area means they're going to be competing with other programs and resources that have been part of that community for years. It's going to be an uphill climb for them and I don't think it's going to work.
I felt proud going through the program until I learned about the branded programs emerging "Techstars Disney" and "Techstars Barclays". It felt like the prestige was vanishing, and I rarely mentioned it on my CV afterwards.
Funny though, I raised about $1M through the Techstars program, and over $10M through other VCs. The Techstars VCs were the least helpful (but this could have been the London ecosystem at the time. London, these days, is quite good when it comes to early stage, especially some of the syndicates like Ventures Together. I digress).
https://www.techstars.com/newsroom/investment-terms
The end result is ~nobody would choose Techstars over YC. In a power law business, that's a death sentence.
Techstars didn't seem appealing not for the concept, but because it smelled funny. I think there is room for a robust global YC-style program. I see a lot more opportunities outside of SFO than inside, and especially in significantly different markets (and especially in ones with lower cost-of-labor).