Techstars Alchemist Blockchain Accelerator — Recap of Week 2

I recently joined Techstars Alchemist Blockchain Accelerator as a Business Associate in New York City. Over 13 weeks, I look forward to working with the inaugural class comprised of 10 inspiring early-stage blockchain startups (Alkemi, AnyLedger.io, Autom(8), Blockade Games, Embleema, Gilded, Paperchain, Paperstreet, Trixta, Veracity Protocol.)

The following provides a high-level overview of Week 2 of the accelerator program as well as a few personal insights.

Re-read recap of Week 1 to get up to speed.

This week, the pace accelerated with the kick-off of mentor madness.

Mentor Madness

34 mentor meetings over the course of 4 days. 20 minutes in-person and virtual meetings with industry thoughts leaders, blockchain professionals, and functional experts. This is the power of Techstars mentorship-driven process.

Part speed-dating, part TED talk, founders pitch their companies, ask advice, and answer questions, all while being inspiring enough to engage mentors. At the end of the end, mentors debrief to provide written feedback to startups, potentially offer to be a lead mentor, and discuss top and worst pitches.

This week I had the opportunity to shadow the Trixta, Anyledger, and Blockade Games teams through their mentor meetings.

Key lessons learned:

1. Refine the pitch based on who you are talking to.
2. Prepare asks and issues that you are trying to resolve and make sure they are relevant for your mentor.
3. Do your research ahead of meetings — review mentor bios, social media profiles (LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium), and find commonalities.
4. Demos help.
5. Chemistry matters.
6. 100% follow-up and follow-through by email.
7. “You should absolutely not issue a token.” “You are probably the only business where a token makes sense”. Expect conflicting opinions from mentors — it is up to founders to synthesize and decide what to do.
8. On finding product-market fit: customer discovery calls are important to understand the needs of your customers; focus on collecting as much data as possible.

Thank you to this week’s incredible list of Mentors:

1. Adam Meghji — Co-Founder & CTO at Universe.com — @adammeghji
2. Agha Khan — Business Development Crypto Services at KPMG — @QCBlockchain
3. Alex Iskold — Co-Founder & Managing Director at 2048 Ventures — @alexiskold
4. Alex McDougall — Chief Investment Officer at Bicameral Ventures — @AlexM_Bicameral
5. Babak Kia — CTO at Boston University — @BabakKia
6. Chris Fine — Founder & CEO at Integrative Technologies
7. Christopher McDowell—Vice President, Finance at Workframe
8. Cody Burke—Director of Investor Relations at Stratasys — @codyburke970
9. Dani Grant—Analyst at Union Square Ventures — https://twitter.com/thedanigrant
10. Frank Van Gansbeke—Founder / CEO Goose Creek Ventures LLP — @FrankVGansbeke
11. Frederick Steinmann—Consultant at PwC — @FredLSteinmann
12. Jeremy Phillips—Sr. Product Manager at Capital One — @jeremyjjp
13. Katherine Wu— Director of Business Development at Messari — @katherineykwu
14. Kerem Kolcuoglu—Strategy Director at MLG Blockchain Consulting
15. Kesem Frank—Co-Founder, COO at AION Network — @kesemfr
16. Lane Rettig—Core Developer at Ethereum — @lrettig
17. Luke Cherrington—VC & Accelerator at ZX Ventures
18. Martin Rerak—CEO at TokenSquare — @MartinRerak
19. Matt McKibbin—Founder & Chief Decentralization Officer at DecentraNet — @Matt_McKibbin
20. Matt Spoke—Co-Founder, CEO AION at Network — @mattspoke
21. Megan Groves—Founder at InterimCMO — @_megangroves
22. Michael Jablon—COO at Agoric
23. nithin eapen—Founder & CEO at Chance River
24. Paul Menchov—Co-Founder & CTO at CoinList
25. Ran Neu-Ner—Founder & CEO at Onchain Capital — @cryptomanran
26. Rohan Reddy—Advisor at Y2X
27. sam cassatt—Chief Strategy Officer at ConsenSys — @samcassatt
28. Sam Williams—Co-Founder & CEO at Arweave — @samecwilliams
29. Shidan Gouran — Co-Founder & CEO at Global Blockchain Tech. Corp — @shidan
30. Stephane Boisvert—Managing Director at Pivotal Software
31. Stephen Wink—Partner at Latham & Watkins — @SteveWink1
32. Steven Nerayoff—CEO & Founder at Alchemist — @stevennerayoff
33. Sunil Rao—Director, Head of US Escrow Solutions at Barclays
34. Ted Moskovitz— Founder at DecentraNet — @teddymosk

CTO Coffee Chat — the Lean ☕ Method

Lean Coffee is a great tool to facilitate a structured, but agenda-less meeting. Participants gather, build an agenda, and begin talking. Conversations are directed and productive because the agenda for the meeting is democratically generated. I tried this tool at our weekly CTO coffee chat and was surprised by its simple effectiveness.

Steps:

• Set up a personal kanban (Ready / Doing / Done / Insights).
• Ask everyone to write down topics to be discussed (3 minutes).
• Ask everyone to vote on top 2 topics.
• Spend 5 minutes discussing the top-voted topics.
• Discuss and generate insights.
• After 5 minutes, decide whether to continue to discuss a given topic or move on the next.

Key topics discussed:

• Are you using a token? How to secure 3rd party tokens?
• Hiring too soon / late / technical recruiting.
• Security on untrusted computers.
• How to prepare for non-technical mentors.
• Other topics not covered (making non-tech co-founders care more about tech, enterprise-grade security, social features, when React, when to prioritize performance, hosting services, security concerns with transfer gateways)

If you have any insights on these topics, please DM me or comment below.

All Hands

In our weekly All Hands, founders discussed their weekly highs, lows, and fun stories. Founders then practiced their pitches before walking through updates on their KPIs.

Key lessons:

1. KPIs hold people accountable, but only if they are properly defined.
2. At this stage, founders still have trouble defining leading indicators (vs. lagging indicators.)
3. In a customer discovery phase, a startup should focus its KPIs on increasing the top of the funnel.

David Brown Breakfast / Founder Story

The associates had the privilege of having breakfast with David Brown, the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Techstars. He asked the associates about our backgrounds and later shared some personal insights. I highly admire Techstars open culture and non-hierarchical structure — it’s rare for CEOs to take the time to meet and answer questions from employees.

David later gave a Founder Talk to the whole cohort recounting the founding story behind Techstars.

Key lessons:

• David is a serial entrepreneur, 54 years old, and has never had a job interview in his entire life.
• Techstars was founded in 2006 to pay it forward to help other entrepreneurs. It was one of the first “accelerators,” before the term accelerator was part of the common startup lexicon.
• Success is in the numbers: 1600 companies have been founded, 80% are still in business, 10% have been acquired or gone public, and only 10% of have failed. Techstars companies have raised $6.2 billion in funding and have an aggregate market cap value of $17.7 billion.
• The program has grown tremendously with over 45 accelerators programs globally. Startups are born everywhere around the world and Techstars democratizes access to startup resources to founders wherever they may be. Techstars also operates Startup Weekend (54 hours crash course in starting a business) in 1000 cities around the world across 120 countries. Finally, Techstars has a ~$150 million fund that primarily invests in accelerator graduates.
• Techstars is focused on experiential learning. The power of Techstars comes from receiving conflicting feedback from various mentors and making decisions under pressure.
• The dream of creating a company takes a lot of hard work. Founders need to be willing to take risks and remain persistent in the face of adversity. Negotiation advantages are real and mentors can help with information asymmetry.

Demo / Business Model Canvas with Embleema / Veracity / AnyLedger

We had the opportunity to see several live demos this week. There is almost nothing more powerful than a great product demonstration. When done correctly, a demo allows the customer to see and feel how things will be better if they use the product.

Also, Zac helped facilitate business model canvas (BMC) sessions. The BMC reflects systematically on a business model, so founders can focus on a business model segment by segment. Teams define customer segments, customer relationships, channels, value proposition, key activities, key resources, key partners, revenue streams, and cost structure. Distilling a business model into one-page is a challenging task but the exercise highlights key tradeoffs and helps prioritize activity.

Strategyzer | Business Model Canvas

Fun for the week

I received my first limited edition Techstars Plasma Bear from Blockade Games. Claim yours below while supplies still last.

This week, the autom(8) team hosted a delicious BBQ for our family dinner. We capped off the week celebrating Richie’s birthday.