TechStars in New York City!

We’re excited to announce that TechStars is expanding to New York City, with our first program starting there in early 2011. As of today, applications for NYC are open and will close on November 21, 2010. The program will start in mid January, 2011 – see the schedule for full details.

We are so thrilled about coming to New York. The rapid growth and intensity of the New York tech scene has been well documented. We look forward to joining the movement and integrating a New York flavor of the TechStars program into this thriving entrepreneurial community.

I will be temporarily relocating to New York City during the program and will personally manage it there alongside David Tisch, a well known entrepreneur, angel investor and a native New Yorker. We will jointly run the program in 2011 to make sure it gets off to a great start.

We’re quite humbled by the welcome we have received so far. TechStars is built on a mentorship-driven approach and in New York, the biggest city in the world, there are lots of amazing mentors. Also, the way that both VC’s and angels in New York have come together is simply awesome.

TechStars mentors in NYC include Phin Barnes (First Round Capital), Alex Blum (KickApps), Matt Blumberg (Return Path), Brad Burnham (USV), Jeff Clavier, Dennis Crowley (FourSquare), Chris Dixon (Founder Collective), Roger Ehrenberg, Darren Herman (The Media Kitchen), Jennifer Hyman (Rent The Runway), Alex Iskold (Adaptive Blue), David Karp (Tumblr), Zach Klein (Boxee, Vimeo), Evan Korth (NYU/HackNY), Mike Lazerow (Buddy Media), Ben Lerer (ThrillList), Sam Lessin (Drop.io), Joey Levin (MindSpark, IAC), Howard Lindzon (StockTwits), Eric Litman (Medialets), John Maloney (Tumblr), Dave McClure, Hilary Mason (Bit.ly/HackNY), Jeremie Miller (Telehash), Howard Morgan (First Round Capital), Charlie O’Donnell (First Round Capital), Eric Paley (Founder Collective), Raphael Poplock (ESPN), Alex Rainert (FourSquare), Avner Ronen (Boxee), Naveen Selvadurai (FourSquare), Justin Shaffer (HotPotato), Tim Shey (NextNewNetworks), Andy Smith (Daily Burn), Rex Sorgatz (Kinda Sorta Media), Jon Steinberg (BuzzFeed), Vinicius Vacanti (YipIt), Albert Wenger (USV), Fred Wilson (USV) and many more.

We’re pleased to have incredibly wide support from the New York venture and angel community as well. We’re still finalizing the investing group, which already includes AOL Ventures, DFJ Gotham Ventures, FirstMark Capital, First Round Capital, Foundry Group, IA Ventures, Jove Ventures, Lerer Ventures, RRE Ventures, Social Leverage, Village Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, Peter Hershberg, Josh Stylman, David Tisch, Nate Westheimer, Kal Vepuri and more.

This is what we mean by community! We are absolutely elated to have all of these amazing people involved and supporting TechStars in NYC. It seems as though we’re getting a warm welcome not only from these investors, but from the NYC community in general.

Here are some of the early blogs that covered our NYC announcement today:

Silicon Alley Insider
Renowned Startup Factory TechStars Opens New York City Branch

TechCrunch
Startup Incubator TechStars Invades New York City

Forbes
TechStars Announces Its Fourth Boot Camp in NYC

ReadWriteWeb
TechStars Comes to the Big Apple

Xconomy
TechStars Expands to NYC

We hope you will join in our excitement in making New York the next home for TechStars. Applications for the New York program are open, so please help us spread the word! Tweet this post!

Comments Off

TechStars Turned Angels

I’ve written previously about the second order effects of TechStars. Now that we’ve completed four years, and 6 of the first 20 companies have already been acquired (or in the case of Occipital, had a major product acquired), we’re starting to see yet another nice side effect.

Jeff Powers and Vikas Reddy of Occipital (a TechStars 2008 company) recently invested in a TechStars company from 2010 called Orbotix (fka Gearbox). As far as I know, that’s the first past TechStars company founder investing in a new TechStars company. And Matt Galligan, one of the founders of Socialthing (a TechStars 2007 company that was acquired by AOL) has now founded and is CEO of SimpleGeo. Matt recently became an angel investor in an interesting stealth startup that was founded by one of his friends.

It’s so gratifying to not only see these founders of past TechStars companies doing amazing things with their own startups, but also that they are already giving back and helping other entrepreneurs reach their dreams as well by participating as angel investors. Congrats guys – you rock!

What is Graphic.ly up to?

Man, Graphic.ly is fun. Here’s a quick one minute video showing what they’ve been up to since leaving TechStars last summer. They’ve grown quite a bit, and have built some amazing technology for comic book lovers. Go full screen with this video to see the full awesomeness.

Venturing Around

With both excitement and disappointment I’ve decided that at the end of this summer after Demo Day, I am leaving my position as Community Manager at TechStars in order to travel the world. This is a really tough thing to do. The TechStars family really is family to me, but after four years the travel bug has really hit me.

What I have learned at TechStars is daunting. I was a very green entrepreneur when I started hanging around the office years ago. It feels as if I have changed as much as the web has. I don’t know what will be next for me, but I’m excited to find out. I’ll always continue to support TechStars in any way that I can, and I’ll surely spread the good word as I travel extensively over the next year.

I’ve had an absolutely amazing time at TechStars. The teams, staff, mentors and community are the brightest in the world. I’ve enjoyed every minute of this adventure, now time to find some more.

-Andrew

Occipital’s RedLaser acquired by eBay

I guess once the seal on the 2008 class was broken by DailyBurn, things started to happen. Recently, TechStars 2008 company Occipital announced that they had sold RedLaser, their popular bar code scanning application, to eBay. RedLaser quickly amassed millions of users.

Below is a great video interview by StartupTrek with Occipital co-founder Vikas Reddy, where he talks about applying and being accepted to TechStars, pivoting, and building RedLaser. This interview was done before they sold RedLaser, but you can read more about the sale to eBay on Occipital’s blog.

Occipital remains a freestanding company and will not be moving over to eBay. They’ve beefed up their team and are hard at work on their next secret project. Even though this isn’t technically an exit, it was still a big win for them and a little gift might still be in their future.

Congratulations to Jeff, Vikas, and the team. Knowing them, I fully expect to watch in amazement as these guys to use this as fuel to do bigger, better, and even more amazing stuff.

Video courtesy of StartupTrek – original story here.