On community building, hiring, and leading global teams: a conversation with David Brown, founder and CEO of Techstars
I spoke with David Brown, founder and CEO of Techstars, a global platform for investment and innovation. Since its founding in 2006, Techstars has accepted over 2K companies into its accelerator, including SendGrid, DigitalOcean, PillPack, and ClassPass.
David shared more on supporting early stage companies, creating engaged global communities, the early days of founding Techstars, how he incorporated previous startup learnings in founding Techstars, his daily habits, and his advice for founders.
On finding his first few hires, David shares the story of Andrew Hyde, Techstars’ first community manager. He founded Startup Weekend, a weekend long event for people to come together to launch new startups (now an integral part of Techstars), and volunteered to manage the first summer cohort at Techstars. Eventually, it was quite apparent that he had helped the accelerator and its companies so much that he was, for all intents and purposes, a crucial member of the team. Making his involvement official was just a natural next step.
On working with multiple co-founders, David notes the importance of having clear comparative advantages and corresponding areas of focus. Having more team members involved, including well known investors like Brad Feld was quite helpful in spreading the word about the accelerator and attracting top startups to apply and engage. However, beyond the general marketing, each co-founder had their designated circle of focus. Whenever a decision had to be made or a problem or opportunity arose, they would label the situation and assign it to the appropriate co-founder. In this way, they defaulted to 1 point person for most tasks, which was quite helpful in executing efficiently and effectively.
On supporting seed stage companies, David highlights the importance of advice and connections. Listen to founders’ challenges, understand their needs, even implicit ones, and offer advice, encouragement, and high impact introductions, but do keep in mind that investors are solely coaches, and it is the founders themselves who have the best knowledge of their businesses and thereby make the ultimate decisions (even if contrary to investor advice).
On creating engaged communities, David underscores the importance of volunteers with a pay it forward mentality and a long term oriented approach to relationship building. The Techstars community has a give first attitude without an expectation of immediate reward or benefit but rather a long term view on cultivating a strong, supportive global family.
On leading international teams, David notes the importance of being globally distributed from the start and being conscious of cultural differences. For example, in global all-hands meetings, be mindful of avoiding terminology that is colloquial or otherwise understood only in particular countries.
On startup lessons he brought to founding Techstars, David recalls deciding on the initial Techstars funding for startups based on the amount of money he needed to bootstrap and launch his prior businesses.
On advice for founders during COVID and in building in a post-COVID world, David notes the importance of focusing on underlying consumer behavioral change. These grassroots shifts will be the ultimate drivers of paradigm shifts we expect to see and be determinants of what trends are solely temporary versus what trends are permanent. As with previous downturns, people in the COVID crisis will have new learned behavior patterns (such as using grocery delivery services) that will stimulate the economy in new ways, creating massive opportunities for strategic founders well positioned to capture this value.
On his favorite daily habit, David shares the importance of reading, even if just 15 minutes, each day. It is incredibly helpful to take a step back and have a period, however short, of distraction free time for learning.
