Chasing Unicorns: The Playbook Behind Techstars' Billion-Dollar Startups

Techstars Founder and CEO David Cohen has a new book out, and this one distills two decades of pattern-spotting into a single framework for building enduring companies.

“Chasing Unicorns: The Techstars Playbook for Building Billion-Dollar Startups,” co-authored with entrepreneur and investor Amir Hegazi, draws on Techstars' work with more than 5,000 startups to answer a simple question: why do only a handful of startups become billion-dollar companies while thousands of others stall?

David and Amir's answer is a framework they call PRIDE:

• Pain-Lock — find a massive, painful problem worth solving
• Refine — narrow relentlessly until your solution becomes indispensable
• Install — build repeatable systems that scale beyond the founder
• Dominate — maximize value before pursuing new markets
• Expand — grow without losing what made your company exceptional

The book isn't just theory. It's built on candid interviews with founders behind 13 Techstars unicorns, tracing the sequence of decisions, not just the ideas, that separated them from the pack. Interviews included:

• Isaac Saldana of SendGrid
• Mitch Wainer of DigitalOcean
• Kurt Workman of Owlet
• Jonathan Levin of Chainalysis
• Etosha Cave of Twelve
• Manny Medina of Outreach
• Stan Bokov of TradingView
• James Garvey of Self Financial
• Itamar Zur of Veho
• Matt Oppenheimer of Remitly
• Kyle Porter of Salesloft
• David Blake of Degreed
• Jon Lensing of OpenLoop

Early praise has been strong. Adam Grant calls it a book that "takes you into the trenches with successful entrepreneurs," while Eric Ries says the founder interviews are "a goldmine for anyone who wants to understand what it really takes to build a unicorn."

For anyone building, scaling, or investing in startups, Chasing Unicorns is worth a read. It's available now in paperback and Kindle.

View a sample of the book.