The Program

TechStars Blog

22nd February 2012

Mentor Spotlight: Rand Fishkin and Undoing Geographic Bias

by Clare Tischer

Mentor: Rand Fishkin, CEO and Co-founder, SEOmoz
TechStars Program: Seattle

Andy Sack tells me your relationship with TechStars started very organically.
That’s true. My first relationship was with Andy but this most recent class I even knew some of the participants, Marcelo Calbucci, in particular. I visited to give a talk about inbound marketing for startups. From that, I met with a few of the teams and have been taking meetings here and there near the SEOmoz offices, chatting with the founders about what they are up to and how I can be of help.

What is about mentoring that makes it worth your time?
I’m extremely passionate about the city of Seattle and the start-up scene here. I’m of the belief that we have far more talent and capability than we get credit for. As a Seattle based startup who has had a nice run of things so far, one thing we have not been lucky with is raising money and part of that stems from a geographic bias that seems to work against us. I’d like to see that change and I know that being a mentor fosters that growth. I want to get us on exciting road maps.

What’s keeping you busy seasonally?
I recently did a speaking event with Hackers and Founders, an organization of about 4,500 people in the early stage technology world in Silicon Valley. Day to day, SEOmoz is growing month over month and we’re up to 50+ employees.

Growth is happening everywhere! The accelerator scene is alive and well.
Agreed. One of the things that excited me about last year was the $100K convertible note for TechStars companies. It encourages founders and people who either more risk-averse or in need of cash flow to to even consider TechStars in the first place. Then when they’re in, you see more energy as a program. These kind of incentives create a higher and higher calibre of companies applying and I think it’s wonderful. I’d love to see an increase in geographic diversity of mentors and the folks that do the actual funding too.


20th February 2012

How to Tell a Mentor He’s Wrong

by David Cohen

I write a monthly column for Inc Magazine called Dispatches from TechStars. Here’s an excerpt from a January 17, 2012 Inc Magazine article.

Rule No. 1 about start-up mentors: They are not omniscient. In fact, sometimes they’re just plain wrong.

It’s something that’s not always easy to see as an entrepreneur. You go to mentors for advice because they have see some of the things that you’re going to see and they’ve made some of the mistakes that you’re hoping not to make.

Still, they’re not running your business—you are. There’s no law that says you have to do what your mentor suggests. And the sooner you learn how to say “no” confidently, the easier it will be to manage these key relationships.

At TechStars, I have the privilege of working with hundreds of the best and brightest start-up mentors on the planet. We coach our mentors to take a Socratic approach and to provide data rather than decisions. But not all mentors (even some of ours) behave this way all the time. Sometimes a mentor firmly believes that she is right, and presents as fact what is actually strongly held belief.

The best mentors present their opinions simply as data and not as direction. They’re hoping that their past experience will help you. But since the best mentors are also hoping to learn from their relationship with you, they should also be open to being wrong and to learning from the experience. If they’re not, that’s a big red flag that you’ve got the wrong mentor.

So what happens when a mentor tells you what to do and you don’t agree?

Read the rest of the original article in its entirety at Inc.com.

17th February 2012

Job Openings at TechStars companies this week

by David Cohen

17th February 2012

Founder Stories: Occipital

by Clare Tischer

Occipital’s application to TechStars was submitted within five minutes of the final deadline. I’m sitting with Vikas Reddy on a Skype date with his co-founder, Jeff Powers, who is at Occipital’s San Francisco office. “That’s cutting it pretty close, guys,” I tell them. Applying by the early deadline is something heavily championed these days but Occipital was in the one of the early TechStars programs, 2008 in Boulder. The two met in school at Michigan, both officers in Tau Beta Pi. “We met at an event called Rock ‘n Bowl, at a light-up bowling lane place. Jeff had some delicious looking chicken wings so I traded him for some of my M&M’s.” Reddy laughs quietly. “Before applying we had been working together for awhile in this tiny apartment in New York City. Jeff was in Ann Arbor doing a talk on the day of the deadline. We had just been coding a whiteboard powered by LED light, so we were super busy. We applied before Jeff gave his talk and got an e-mail back from David Cohen within twenty minutes of hitting the submit button.”

When I ask what earth-moving details elicited such a prompt response, Powers says, “Likely who we are and our technical background. The product itself was receipt scanning. Taking your cell phone camera, snapping a shot of a receipt, and doing optical character recognition of it later.” Their hope was to build a personal activity tracking application which captured every purchase at every place you visit, including paper receipts which otherwise had no digital trail. With some TechStars fandom under my belt, I knew enough to know that this wasn’t their final product. So I ask. “How was the idea for RedLaser born?” “We were hanging out a lot with Paul Berberian in an basement office off of Pearl Street. We were brainstorming different business ideas. Vikas and I had just implemented a machine learning algorithm that could recognize so many things,” Powers reflects. “We were scratching our heads asking, but what should this recognize? It was frustrating. Then one morning before everyone else got into TechStars, we were looking at a desk and saw a barcode on a popular science magazine that someone had left behind. It had Einstein on the cover and it was an epiphany moment. We spent an entire day searching the web to see if anyone else was doing easy barcode scanning on the iPhone and we were giddy to realize nobody had.”

Was it true that there was a potentially in-demand product that no one had built well yet– an existing pain in need of a technology? Yes. And so RedLaser was built, a scanning application that is compatible with iPhone, Windows phones, and Android that as of this date has been downloaded over 15 million times. Barcodes can be scanned and immediately you can check prices to see if a better deal is available elsewhere.

Occipital announced that it had sold RedLaser to online marketplace giant eBay in early 2010 for an undisclosed amount. They both credit the eBay sale as happening at an opportune time. They had taken RedLaser as far as they had, it was in the top five for about three months in the App Store, and had already been featured in an iPhone app commercial. “If we had kept it, it would have been a monumental task,” says Reddy. As a mutual acquaintance of his by that time in the Boulder tech scene, I remember another friend teasingly using RedLaser to scan the bottles of wine Occipital had bought to celebrate, wary of how much they had (or hadn’t) spend on their friends that night.

Wanting to get back to the bigger problems they had originally set out to solve, Powers and Reddy kept chugging with Occipital. After RedLaser and only six months after completing TechStars, the Occipital team built 360 Panorama, a real-time panorama creation tool available for iPhone, iOS, and Android.

360 Panorama photo by David Bannerman

“How did you decide what to create next?” Reddy answers first. “What we were looking for was augmented reality ideas, looking around for ways that we could enable it. One of those things that’s needed for augmented reality is tracking. It didn’t even exist for rotating your phone around and taking a panoramic photo. No one had taken that core idea and built the technology. Programs existed but they were all manual and you had to stitch them together during or after taking the photo. We had 360 Panorama in the works by the end of 2009.” Last August, Occipital publicly announced their first major investment, a $7M Series A led by Foundry Group. The founders wrote: It’s going to be a wild ride, and where we’re going, we don’t need roads. Now the company spends its days building the platform that other developers can leverage.

“We are computer vision enthusiasts,” says Powers. “We’re so excited about computers and phones with a sense of sight. Computers can read text on the internet and enable certain things but what they can’t do, generally speaking, is see. It’s a combination of mathematics and computer science.” Reddy agrees. “Our top goal is to push forward the state of technology and change the world. I know it sounds a little cheesy but it’s not about making money. We want to be able to look back and know that we changed things and weren’t some flash in the pan. That’s what drives us and gets us up in the morning– the ability to create magical experiences.” Before I leave their office, I note their heads-down, passionate engineers and managers, a small team of eight. The only break they have taken since I arrived about an hour ago was to excitedly test whether or not running the microwave in the kitchen was negatively affecting the network speed in one of their realtime tests. It was. Magic indeed.


15th February 2012

Mentor Spotlight: Cyril Ebersweiler and the China Market

by Clare Tischer

Mentor: Cyril Ebersweiler, Visionary Punk
TechStars Program: Boston

You work all over the world. What makes the Boston tech scene unique?
I think it’s definitely the people. I’m living in between China and the U.S. so Boston is a long distance relationship. I’m French and I live in Boston for a few months at a time. The people in Cambridge are very accessible, a bunch of great folks willing to help everywhere they can. Most of them are extremely successful yet low-key and humble. It’s great that you can get their support or grab coffee with almost anyone. There is no need for formal introductions or the extra layer of sophistication. People are naturally open.

How did your relationship with TechStars begin?
I got involved during Boston’s second year. Sean O’Sullivan is my investing partner based in Europe and I’m in China and the U.S. We wanted to be part of the TechStars adventure so we became mentors during the second year program in Boston. For me, it was interesting that I decided to spend the entire year at the program on-site. I spent three months with teams from beginning to the end. It was a fantastic time in my life and a long love story.

Who are you still in touch with regularly?
In 2010, Marginize and SocialSci. In 2011, I went back to Boston and spent two weeks with the teams helping out where I could and doing group lectures. I stayed in touch with GrabCad. 

When the founders come to you for feedback, what’s your specialty?
Most of the time, it’s all about product. It’s been quite some time in working on the product and finding out what makes sense. Since I’m a fundamental geek, it was all about creating something useful that people love. I really enjoy building things for the world and I love Demo Day. You could really witness the founders’ improvements over the course of the program and for me, we shared a very little part of the feeling– being onstage in front of everyone. As a mentor, you’re so proud of them and can’t wait to see them continue to build a company out of it. 

What’s been keeping you busy the past few months? Tell me about Hackathons.
One of our Chinaccelerator founders won TechCrunch Disrupt. Our new batch starts in June. In the meantime, I’ve launched Haxlr8r which is based in the Bay Area and really focused on hardware. It starts on the March 1st. For entrepreneurs working on devices, we bring them to the market faster by making sure they get everything they need in terms of physical need and mentoring. By the end, we hope they are ready to manufacture since the investment mentality is so much scarier and difficult for investors when compared to software. I’m also investing here and there. Hackathons are a coding contest that we hold over a few days. The China market is extremely different than the American market. It’s not as mature. There’s a lot of groundwork to be done in inspiring people to create things. It’s about leveraging various platforms in order to build an interesting, fun product. It’s all about programming. Hopefully you can find a business partner. We organize it all over China once a month.


13th February 2012

Startup Poaching Etiquette: Be a Richard, Not a Dick!

by Clare Tischer

Below is a guest post by Sravish Sridhar, CEO and Founder of Kinvey, a TechStars team from Boston’s Spring 2011 program.

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As we continue to build Kinvey, I regularly ask myself if I’m doing things right. As the CEO of an early-stage startup, one of the more important tasks on my plate is to put together the best team possible. The quality, passion and performance of every member in our team sets the standard for how well we will do as a business.

I’ve spoken to numerous mentors of mine about how to recruit and how to attract the best talent. During one such mentor conversation, one of my favorites, Sean Lindsay (on a side note – I just want to hug him every time I see him; which he hates, but tolerates), gave me some great advice on how to successfully find great talent in Boston by using recruiting firms.

When I decided to take Sean’s advice and put it in practice, I found out that some of the recruiters I had reached out to, were trying to source candidates from other startups. Yowzza! I was overcome by a huge ethical question – What is the correct startup poaching etiquette? After all, if someone came after one of my team members, I would, let’s just say, NOT BE VERY HAPPY!

While all this was happening I chanced on a Twitter exchange that Gabriel Weinberg, Founder of DuckDuckGo, had about this very issue. He was (rightfully) ticked off that another startup was trying to poach talent from his company.

I then asked myself, “What is MY startup poaching etiquette? Am I a Richard? Or, am I a Dick?”

After much thought and many conversations with my mentors and other startup CEOs, I wrote down 4 commandments that I swear to stay true to, whilst I try to attract talent to join Kinvey –
Thou shalt NOT poach from a startup whose CEO is your friend!
Thou shalt NOT poach from a startup that has not raised a round of funding!
Thou shalt NOT poach from a startup that has less than 10 people!
Thou shalt NOT poach from a funded startup whose CEO is your friend, until you’ve talked to said CEO and received his/her OK!

See the flowchart here.

It’s your turn. Am I missing anything? Any advice? Weigh in at the original post.

10th February 2012

Job Openings at TechStars companies this week

by David Cohen

8th February 2012

Mentor Spotlight: Pat Condon and the Consumption of Computing

by Clare Tischer

Mentor: Pat Condon, Founder of Rackspace Hosting
TechStars Program: Cloud

What are you working on lately?
I spend most of my time at Rackspace thinking about what’s next for the company – lines of business we should be in, where we should go as a company from spending time with customers. SMB customers tend to pull us forward, they are early adopters moreso than bigger companies. One of the unique insights we have is that out of our hundreds of thousands of companies, many are startup in nature. It gives us a first look in terms of where things are going in a macro view.

How did you first meet Jason Seats?
I knew Jason through Slicehost. He was looking for new projects and TechStars Cloud was such a perfect opportunity for him. We have been connected the whole time. He and I work together as mentors on another project, 3 Day Startup, which is geared toward undergrads and grads and based in Austin. As a mentor or a student, you learn on the fly in that program.

This is our inaugural class for Cloud. What’s exciting about cloud infrastructure?
That’s easy. Every generation has a kind of big moment where there’s a shift in the way things are done. Ours is the way computing is being consumed. Now it’s being done over the web and not in some back room. It drives the price down and when things become cheaper, there are more ways to utilize things. It used to be that everyone had to generate their own electricity locally, paying for what you used. With Cloud, instead of digging a theoretical well at your house, you just pay for what you use over the web and as a result everyone is going online in bigger, broader ways. Looking at what our customers at Rackspace are doing, I see something new that amazes me on a daily basis.

At the time of this conversation, Cloud has just begun. Have you met the founders yet?
I met with half of the founders yesterday and it’s a great group of companies. One thing that’s different about this program is that it’s vertically focused so you end up getting companies that are more similiar than they are different. Everyone is somehow related to cloud infrastructure and I think they will collaborate because they’re using the same technologies and it will increase both the quality of mentoring and how they support one another as a class. I’m so excited to watch it unfold.