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ОглавлениеPreface
Entrepreneurship is hard. Starting with an idea that inspires you and creating a sustainable company is one of the most difficult tasks for people to achieve. Along the way, you will experience joy like you have never felt before and despair so deep that you will question everything about yourself.
It’s not surprising that most startups fail. Even entrepreneurs who have achieved success often have stories of staggering personal challenges and failures where they lose all of their savings and the money given to them by friends and families. Personal relationships get destroyed. Friends’ couches are slept on and much ramen is eaten. The boneyard of unsuccessful entrepreneurial endeavors is wide, deep, and filled with talented, smart, and motivated people who had great ideas but couldn’t overcome the challenges of going from an idea to a sustainable business.
We have been in that boneyard of failed businesses ourselves, which is why we decided to write this book. We started out aiming the book at the startup entrepreneur who has a great idea and wants to build a company around that idea. But we also think the book will provide insights to others, such as entrepreneurs who have been able to create a company but have not been as successful as they hoped. If you are involved in corporate innovation initiatives or product R&D, many of the ideas, tactics, and insights in this book will be applicable to you. Or perhaps you are a person with responsibility for community or economic development in your city or state. You will find the book to be helpful in jump‐starting entrepreneurship in your community. Do More Faster was written to help everyone wanting to understand, and put into action, the principles that accelerate going from an idea to a sustainable business.
We founded Techstars in 2006 with one idea in mind: to help entrepreneurs succeed. We believe that entrepreneurs create a better future for everyone and that they, and the companies they create, are the key to economic growth. The healthy startup communities that result from entrepreneurship improve the lives of people well beyond the direct reach of startup companies. Education and healthcare improve because of the increase in economic activity. Other businesses, such as retailers, service providers, and real estate, benefit. We have seen this positive cycle of entrepreneurship and the startup community play out firsthand over the past decade in Boulder, Colorado, where we live.
To get to a deep and lasting community‐wide economic impact, startup entrepreneurs need to first be able to navigate the twists and turns, pitfalls, and obstacles that can derail a good idea. Our approach at Techstars has proven to be successful in helping startups succeed. Our mentorship‐driven seed accelerators have helped more than a thousand fledgling companies attract more than $7 billion in investments and create tens of billions of dollars in enterprise value. More than 150 of the companies that have gone through a Techstars program have been acquired since we started.
Why has Techstars been able to help generate so many disruptive and innovative companies? What makes Techstars different from other venture capital firms and seed accelerators? How is Techstars able to expand so quickly and have programs running in over 30 different cities around the world?
It’s the mentorship. We create a bond between thoughtful, successful, serial entrepreneurs and startup entrepreneurs. This community, and the culture of giving first between mentors and startup entrepreneurs, is critical to helping startup entrepreneurs validate ideas, avoid critical mistakes, and position themselves for the best possible outcome. This isn’t a short‐term community that lasts only while the startup founder is at the accelerator; it’s a community that persists forever, becoming a construct we describe as “Techstars for life.”
As investors and entrepreneurs, we have worked with tens of thousands of founders and thousands of companies over the past 30 years of our careers. Even though many things evolve and change, we have seen the same issues come up over and over again. We created Techstars to channel the cumulative experience of successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs for the benefit of today’s startup entrepreneurs. But we don’t do it alone; we are helped by over 10,000 of the best entrepreneurs on the planet who are mentors at Techstars accelerator programs.
Organization of the Book
Do More Faster was first written in 2010 to capture Techstars mentors’ unique insights into what it takes to make a startup successful. At that time, Techstars was focused on accelerators to help entrepreneurs succeed and we had only a handful of locations—in Boulder, Boston, and Seattle. We have since expanded to other locations throughout the world and work with global corporations, communities, and business schools to drive entrepreneurship. The chapters in this edition of Do More Faster reflect our early years as a startup in the United States and the challenges that startup entrepreneurs face. Our next book, Do Even More Faster, picks up where this book leaves off and provides insights on scaling up your business. It also reflects our global expansion to Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
We thought carefully about the key issues around early‐stage entrepreneurship and organized those issues around seven themes: Idea and Vision, People, Working Effectively, Product, Fundraising, Legal and Structure, and Work–Life Harmony. The recurring lessons have stood the test of time and we’ve freshened up and updated these sections.
Each theme contains the personal experience, insights, and firsthand accounts of the startup entrepreneurs and mentors who are involved with Techstars. The chapters are short, targeted, and focus on common sayings heard around Techstars. Some of these sayings, such as the title of this book, are mantras of ours. A few are well‐worn clichés. But all of them are critical ideas that have withstood the test of time and can help you to become a successful entrepreneur. You’ll also encounter what seems to be contradictory advice between some of the chapters, but we view it as a balanced perspective showing the complexities of startup challenges. Entrepreneurship is not a one‐size‐fits‐all endeavor.
Although mastering these themes doesn’t ensure success for every first‐time entrepreneur, our experience is that understanding the challenges, hearing personal stories, and consuming advice from mentors and startup entrepreneurs can be very helpful. You’ll realize that you aren’t alone in facing these challenges and will see that successful entrepreneurs have trudged down the same path as you.
While Techstars is focused on technology companies, the principles and advice throughout the book apply to other types of startup ventures as well. They also can be helpful to established companies exploring new, innovative approaches to their businesses, as well as organizations working on economic and community development initiatives. So, whether you’re creating a world‐changing app, starting a restaurant, creating a nonprofit, building a startup community, or increasing innovation in your organization, Do More Faster will help accelerate your success.
In the spirit of Techstars, this book is community‐oriented and mentorship‐driven. It’s also very personal, as we wanted to help the reader put a name to a face. For that reason, we have included many photos to bring the stories to life. The stories form a cohesive narrative, but they also stand alone.
Techstars is a magical thing. We hope you’ll find the perspectives and stories in this book to be powerful and useful to you and your startup. Let us know what you think. Come visit us at Techstars.com or email us at david.cohen@techstars.com or brad@feld.com.
David Cohen and Brad FeldMay 2019Boulder, Colorado
