Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City

THE SPREAD OF TECHSTARS TO BOSTON AND SEATTLE

After the first year of TechStars, a number of entrepreneurs around the country reached out and asked if we’d bring TechStars to their city. Our mantra from the beginning was “quality over quantity,” and although we had done a bunch of things right in year one, we decided to use exactly the same construct for year two. As a result, TechStars didn’t expand beyond Boulder in its second year, although we helped other entrepreneurs get accelerators up and running by open sourcing and sharing the TechStars playbook.

After the second year we continued to be focused on quality and resisted the pull of an increasing number of entrepreneurs who wanted TechStars to come to their city. However, at some point, Bill Warner, a Boston-based entrepreneur who in 2008 had dedicated himself to reenergizing the Boston startup community, literally dragged us kicking and screaming to Boston.

Bill, who had previously founded Avid and Wildfile, two successful Boston-based companies, became exposed to TechStars when he met the founders from EventVue, a company in the first TechStars program. In 2008, Bill was working on the first MassTLC Innovation Unconference (http://startuprev.com/j2) and he wanted software to help manage it. This is what EventVue did and Bill ended up becoming an angel investor in the company. Shortly after, he came out to Boulder to see what was going on and learn more about TechStars.

He decided TechStars needed to be in Boston. He convinced ...