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.
Join Adam and the best network of mentors – Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders – for intimate half-hour conversations each week.
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Read the full transcript of Adam’s conversation with David Cohen.
Episode Summary
David Cohen started Techstars 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 borrowed directly from two early models: Y Combinator, then just getting started in the Bay Area, and a program at Charles River Ventures called QuickStart, which wrote $100,000 checks after a single twenty-minute meeting. David’s 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.
The mentorship model rests on a value Techstars calls Give First, which David has written up as a “Mentor Manifesto”: share your own experience without assuming it’s the right answer, ask more questions than you answer, 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 CEO told him bluntly that he and his co-founder had left half the money on the table as negotiators. David has since watched Techstars mentors get on a single call with an acquirer and double a company’s exit price, purely through experience the founders didn’t have themselves.
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 the kind of problem-obsession that outlasts a bad quarter. He argues founders fail less often because they run out of money and more 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 mentor named Walt Winchell: hire first for motivation, not skill or experience, since skills can be taught but motivation generally can’t. He applies a similar principle to leadership itself, arguing that the loudest person in a room is often mistaken for its leader when the better predictor is who is doing the most listening. 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 treats as evidence the Give First value was never just marketing.
What You’ll Learn
- Why David teaches founders to rely on their “two weapons on the sides of their face” rather than the “one liability on the front,” a habit founders say they notice about him.
- David teaches founders a therapy technique called reflective listening, repeating back what you think someone means before responding, to defuse tense negotiations with investors or customers.
- David treats a widely quoted line from WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, that usage is like oxygen for ideas, as the real test of whether a product idea is working.
- Why David compares joining Techstars to gaining a co-founder like Reid Hoffman, arguing the accelerator’s real value is the network of people who want a founder to succeed.
- David insists on firing high performers who aren’t living a company’s values, arguing founders who skip this step never really establish the culture they claim to want.
- Why David tells anyone chasing success to focus on genuinely caring about “unsucking the thing you’re trying to unsuck,” rather than treating work as just a job.
About David Cohen
David Cohen is the co-founder and CEO of Techstars, the startup accelerator he built with Brad Feld in 2006, which has since backed more than 5,000 companies with a combined market cap of over 145 billion dollars, including 29 billion-dollar companies. He grew up in DeLand, Florida, and 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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