David Cohen is the co-founder and CEO of Techstars, one of the largest and most successful startup accelerators in the world. Techstars has backed more than 5,000 companies – including 29 billion-dollar companies – that have a combined market cap of more than $145 billion. David joins Adam to share his journey and his best lessons and advice. David and Adam discuss a wide range of topics: entrepreneurship, leadership, mentorship, communication and persuasion, innovation, intrinsic motivation, AI, and more.
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Read the full transcript of Adam’s conversation with David Cohen.
Episode Summary
David Cohen, the co-founder and CEO of Techstars, started the accelerator in 2006 after several rounds as a founder himself, building and selling an ambulance dispatch software company called Pinpoint Technologies before a few later ventures had mixed results. Techstars drew inspiration from early models including Y Combinator, then just getting started in the Bay Area, and a program at Charles River Ventures called QuickStart, which, as David recalls, made investment decisions after a single twenty-minute meeting. According to David, his co-founder, Brad Feld, coined the word “accelerator” for the combination of small early investment and structured mentorship they built. Part of David’s motivation was personal: he wanted to strengthen the startup community in Boulder, Colorado, where he still lives.
David wrote a “Mentor Manifesto,” a collection of the social norms that grew up around Techstars mentoring: share your own experience without assuming it’s the right answer, be Socratic and ask a lot of questions, and support whatever the founder ultimately decides to do. He points to a concrete example of why this matters. Years after selling his own dispatch company, the acquiring company’s CEO told David’s team that they had left half the money on the table. David has since seen Techstars get the right mentor on the phone with an acquirer and double the exit price, because someone who has done 100 deals is advocating for the founders.
When evaluating founders to back, David looks past the pitch deck for what he calls intrinsic motivation, pointing to PillPack, whose founders had personal family experience with people taking the wrong medication, as founders who were determined not to let it happen to anyone else. He argues running out of money is only the symptom: talented founders fail because they develop tunnel vision, ignoring what the market is telling them until the money is already gone.
David’s own hiring philosophy traces back to a specific piece of advice from a longtime personal mentor: hire first for motivation, not skill or experience, since, as David puts it, skills can be learned but you have to have the motivation first. On leadership, he says people often assume the loudest person in the room is the leader, when it is often the person with the best listening skills. Techstars has also, by David’s own account, helped launch dozens of competing accelerators around the world, several of which the company later acquired for a dollar when they wanted to join forces, which he offers as an example of living the company’s Give First value even when it didn’t seem to benefit Techstars directly.
What You’ll Learn
- Listen more than you talk: David tells founders they have two weapons on the sides of their face and one liability on the front, and he says the most effective leaders in a boardroom are often the best listeners.
- Use reflective listening in important conversations: David says repeating back what you think someone means, then asking whether you have it right, either earns a correction or confirms the real issue, such as an investor’s concern about valuation.
- Get your product in front of customers early, David says, because, in a line from WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, usage is like oxygen for ideas.
- Build on a strong network: David says the real product Techstars offers is not capital or even the program but a network of people who want founders to succeed, much like having a co-founder as well connected as Reid Hoffman.
- Hire and fire based on your values, David says: high performers who are not living the company’s values need to go, and many leaders miss that.
- Work on something you truly care about, David says, because when you care about unsucking the thing you are trying to unsuck, everything else tends to fall into place.
About David Cohen
David Cohen is the co-founder and CEO of Techstars, the startup accelerator he co-founded in 2006 with Brad Feld, David Brown, and Jared Polis, which has backed thousands of companies, including 29 that Techstars counts as having reached billion-dollar valuations. He built his first company, an ambulance dispatch software business called Pinpoint Technologies, before founding Techstars. David lives in Boulder, Colorado, where part of his original motivation for starting Techstars was strengthening the local startup community. He is also a co-author of the book Do More Faster.
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