Is TechStars Really All That?

When I hold an information session or speak at an event about TechStars, I try to have a handful of TechStars alums on hand with me. Why? I tell my audiences that it’s rational to be skeptical of the glowing things I have to say about TechStars – heck, I’m basically contractually obligated to be a cheerleader!

But TechStars alums are another thing entirely. These folks have lived the program:  three months of insanely-intense company building, learning, and mentoring.

If you want to know whether TechStars is really all that and a bag of chips, the ~100 founders from our last four programs over the last three years are your best bet for the straight story.

Towards this end, we have assembled a slew of great blog posts written by TechStars alumni about the program. Never mind what the coaches have to say – listen to the players on the field!

TechStars is 100% driven by the mentorships it helps cultivate … The whole program is built around the idea that if you surround yourself with people who have been there, done that — they can help you avoid making the same mistakes they did. And believe me, it works.

Krista Paul / TravelFli / TechStars Boulder 2008

As soon as you arrive at the office, you’ll start connecting with 60+ mentors, most of whom have been in the trenches at least once, and understand how the sausage gets made. They’re eager to help, excited to teach, and even more excited to learn.

Alex Moore / Baydin / TechStars Boston 2009

TechStars is like a linear accelerator for your startup – you get to success … quickly and have access to incredible resources. Even if you know what you are doing, check it out. Even if you think giving up ANY equity is ridiculous, check it out… (’cause you are wrong).

Ari Newman / FiltrBox / TechStars Boulder 2007

I robbed [TechStars] blind. 6 points is a steal. Any start up with promise will earn these back ten-fold. You will get tremendous mentors, new customers, new partners, new investors, and a network of friends that will change your life.

George Aspland / Retel Technologies / TechStars Boulder 2009

[AccelGolf was] a pain in the ass during the acceptance process. First, we poked at the term sheet … and then continued to delay the decision as we did our diligence—we were confident that nothing could be as good as TechStars sounded.

We couldn’t have been more wrong.

William Sulinski / AccelGolf / TechStars Boston 2009

Imagine having the answer to everything. Better yet, imagine being able to get an answer for everything. And not just an answer, but the correct answer.

Mark O’Sullivan / Vanilla / TechStars Boulder 2009

It’s hard not to sound like we’re gushing when we talk about TechStars — honestly, it has been the greatest experience our team has had together. It totally transformed our business and gave us a stable platform of mentors, advice, and resources to launch from.

David Hoffman / NextBigSound / TechStars Boulder 2009

To simply say that [TechStars] was everything we could have asked for and more would be an understatement.

Isaac Keyet / Intense Debate / TechStars Boulder 2007

We encourage you to talk with the founders that have been through the TechStars program. You’ll find that they’re happy to be responsive to your questions. Just visit http://www.techstars.org/companies/ to find contact information for our alumni.

oneforty Well Wishes Charity Water Challenge

Last holiday season TechStars Boston 09 founder Laura Fitton (also known as @pistachio) decided to do something a little different by supporting Charity Water.  This year she sent out a Well Wishes “What can YOU do” challenge.  Challenge eh?  We can do that.

http://mycharitywater.org/techstarswellwishes

We set the bar at $3000 to raise, which will do a ton of good.  Charity Water is a very interesting organization with some very powerful reading on just why water.  We have joined Laura with the Well Wishes, and your organization can and should too!  Instructions on how to do this on their blog.

We have jumped out to $145 in the first hour! Would love if you can participate and share the page: http://mycharitywater.org/techstarswellwishes. View the page to see how close to the goal we are!

Also, we are very excited to see the news today about oneforty, congrats to the team!

Well hi there, Seattle!

We’re psyched to announce that TechStars is expanding to Seattle. We’ll run our first program there in the fall of 2010.

We’ve found the perfect person to run the program in Seattle. Andy Sack will be the Executive Director there. Andy is already well-known on the local startup scene as co-founder and Managing Partner of Seattle-based seed fund Founders’ Co-op, guest lecturer in entrepreneurship at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, and host of the weekly tech meetup Seattle Open Coffee. Andy has served as a TechStars mentor in both Boulder and Boston in the past, so he’s already intimately familiar with the program and how it works.

To me, the real story here is the way that the Seattle community has galvanized around TechStars. It’s really quite amazing and humbling. Just take a look at the Seattle mentor list for the evidence. Also, the way that the VCs and angels in Seattle have come together is simply awesome. The funding group includes Bezos Expeditions, Buerk Dale Victor, DFJ, Founder’s Co-op, Ignition Partners, Madrona Venture Group, Maveron, OVP, Second Avenue Partners, Trilogy Partners, WRF Capital, Voyager Capital, Vulcan Capital and many prominent angel investors. Wow.

“It’s incredible to see the support TechStars has engendered from the venture and angel community in Seattle. So many key investors and entrepreneurs have raised their hands and said we want to make this effort successful, and we’re willing to put our time and resources behind it. If community support is an indicator of where this program is headed, we literally could not have had a better start.” – Greg Gottesman, Madrona Venture Group

We were also thrilled to see the media and community reaction yesterday when the news broke. We’ve seen more than 500 tweets in the last 24 hours and read stories from great blogs such as Seattle’s TechFlash, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, PEHub, Xconomy, and many more. Thanks to everyone for getting us off to such a great start in Seattle. It appears that the community there is as excited as we are!

Applications for the Seattle program will open in May, but we’re already accepting applications for our Boston program. Applications for Boulder will open in January as well. Please see the schedule for the latest information.

RedLaser: Three Months On Top of the App Store

2008 TechStars Alumni Occipital have been bringing in the sales on top of the iTunes App Store for almost three months now. RedLaser is their app that turns any iPhone into a bar code scanner.

How does an app get to the top though?  The growth, by early charts, happened by every paid user resulting in two more.  For RedLaser the growth came after an app update that made the scanner ‘impossibly accurate.’  It was good before, but now it is great.

MoblieCrunch has a post titled Bar-code Scanning RedLaser iPhone App reaches 750K downloads, over $1M in revenue which revealed total downloads and has some snazzy graphs of the first week of growth.

For the first two months in the app store top five, the app never hit #1.  It teetered between #2 and #5.  While they often reached #1 in the Top Grossing category, the app didn’t tip, but it didn’t go away either.  On December 3rd they hit #1.  By this time they were almost tipping the coveted $1M in sales.

They are working on some very interesting computer vision apps to fill the gap when, one day, RedLaser drops out of the top five.  Congrats to Vikas and Jeff, it has been amazing watching Occipital grow.

You can follow Occipital on twitter here.

The Importance of Co-Founders

Although some folks are renaissance guys or gals who can do everything, the statistical rates of success for sole founders of tech companies are not attractive. TechStars has been helping fledgling tech companies for over three years now, and we’ve found that the magic number of founders seems to be 2.6 or so. Yeah, it sucks to be the .6 guy .

Finding co-founders however is tough. Really tough. These relationships are more like marriages than work relationships. I’ve certainly spent more hours with at least one of my repeat-offender co-founders than I have with my wife!

Recently, a program called Founder Dating emerged in CA. A group of smart folks here in Boston decided we needed something like that in our local ecosystem, and are making it happen. The first event is behing held next week Wednesday 12/16 at 1800 ET at MS N.E.R.D. You can learn more and sign up here.

So if you have a great startup you’re working on and you need a technical co-founder, or a marketing co-founder or a bizdev co-founder, sign up! If you’re co-founder material and are looking for a new startup to sink your teeth into, we want to hear from you!

ReTel Technologies closes $1M in funding

ReTel Technologies was one of the teams featured in The Founders video series from the summer of 2009. In that series, you can see Scott sleeping like a burrito and going all around the world to work with early customers.

When I first met Scott, Adam, and George in the O’Hare airport for an interview, I vividly remember being completely surprised and impressed by their approach to their business. It was a really practical and unique approach to a very specific problem that provided clear value. These guys were on top of the numbers that would drive their business, already had one early customer helping them test their solution, and had a very clear vision of where they were heading. In short, I knew I was talking to 3 dudes who “got it.”

We were pleased to see that TechCrunch had news of their $1M in funding from SoftTech VC, Hyde Park Angels, FF Angel, Maples Investments, eonBusiness and Zelkova Ventures, and other angels this week.

On December 9th, ReTel will compete with 6 other finalists in the Amazon AWS Startup Challenge – wish them luck with this, and as they continue down the long path of building a great company together. Congrats guys!