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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 help we’d get from Techstars after we left the accelerator, during the many challenging years that followed. As participants at Techstars, we are part of a community of people, before and after us, who care about our success and provide ideas and insights. For example, we received acquisition offers and Techstars guided us and helped us avoid selling too early, which would have been a tragic mistake. They helped us focus on our culture and pushed our team to define key elements of our culture, which we refer to as our “four Hs” (honest, hungry, humble, and happy) and that still exist today. Techstars actively helped us recruit Sameer Dholokia, who helped SendGrid from its early growth years through its IPO. Techstars representatives served on our board of directors from the beginning to well past $100 million in revenue. Countless customer introductions have been made by Techstars, which have been invaluable.

As I write this, SendGrid has just completed a public offering (NYSE: “SEND”) and now has more than 150,000 customers.¹ It has been an amazing journey with Techstars since that meeting with David at LAX about a decade ago. To this day, I still mentor at Techstars because I have seen firsthand the impact and power of giving first and doing more faster!

For me and many others, Techstars is for life.

Isaac SaldanaMay 2019

Note

1 1 Out of the 1,700‐plus companies in 13 countries to go through the Techstars accelerator programs, SendGrid is the first company to complete an IPO.