Do More Faster India, 2nd Edition

Foreword

My first real interaction with Techstars was in the lobby of the Marriott hotel next to the LAX airport in early 2009. I had applied to the Techstars accelerator in Boulder a few weeks earlier and now I was meeting the cofounder, David Cohen, who had flown in for the day to meet several LA‐area companies for in‐person interviews.

I had built a few startups already, but I hadn’t found the success I was seeking. Something was missing. We had the talent. We had the idea. We had the drive. But still, we hadn’t been successful. It’s obvious now that we didn’t have some of the critical ingredients, such as mentorship and a network, to be successful. That day at LAX—meeting with David Cohen and learning about the Techstars approach to entrepreneurship—changed everything for me, for my cofounders, and for our company, SendGrid.

We participated in the third cohort of Techstars in Boulder in 2009. Techstars provides seasoned mentors to work with startups. These aren’t just any mentors, but people you can trust, who have your best interests in mind, and who want to see you succeed. Our mentors started adding value right away. They began buying our product for their own companies. They helped us think through pricing and marketing, so we would get those things right from the start. We even met our first nonfounding CEO, Jim Franklin, because he was a mentor at Techstars that summer. We found our first investors because of the accelerator program.

What we didn’t expect was the ...