Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup

Preface

Entrepreneurship is hard. Most startup companies fail. Even those entrepreneurs who have achieved success often have stories of staggering personal challenges and failures. The bone yard of unsuccessful entrepreneurial endeavors is very wide and very deep.

Enter TechStars, a mentorship-driven seed accelerator that has helped numerous fledgling companies attract over $25 million in venture capital and angel investment. How have so many founders of TechStars companies already gone on to sell their companies and to make millions so quickly? Why has TechStars generated so many disruptive and innovative companies?

It's the mentorship.

Having worked with thousands of entrepreneurs and hundreds of companies over the past 25 years, we have seen a number of issues come up over and over again. TechStars was created as a way to channel that experience for the benefit of first time entrepreneurs. But we didn't do it alone—we recruited more than 100 of the best Internet entrepreneurs on the planet to become mentors in the program.

Do More Faster was written to capture the TechStars mentors' unique insights into what it takes to make a startup successful. We thought hard about the key issues around early-stage entrepreneurship and organized them around seven themes: Idea and Vision, People, Working Effectively, Product, Fundraising, Legal and Structure, and Work and Life Balance.

Each theme or part contains a number of chapters that focus on common sayings heard around TechStars. Some of these ...