The 100 days of a Techstars program, from an Associate
On supporting founders, networking in tech, and what being at an early-stage startup accelerator is like.
The summer after my sophomore year at UCLA, as many of my older friends disappeared into coveted consulting and finance internships, I worked with breakout early stage companies as an Associate at Techstars — the worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed.
I was the youngest person ever hired on the accelerator team at the Techstars healthcare program, partnered with the Cedars-Sinai health system in Los Angeles. Over an unbelievable 13 weeks, I helped support 9 innovative startups scale, build product, market, and pitch to investors alongside an incredibly supportive program team — and many, many mentors across the Techstars network.
With accelerator programs and communities in 150+ countries, 10,000+ mentors, and 300,000+ alumni strong, being a “Techstars company” has come to really mean something for a startup over the last few years. But when you’re at the shows put on for livestreamed demo days across the globe, the rallying behind founders, the excitement and sense of belonging, every time, there’s something greater than what those numbers might tell. And I don’t think it matters if you’re a founder or mentor or investor or even a program-side person, like me. This is something special. And for a while, I didn’t know what that was.
A few weeks after the program ended this October 2018, an investor friend jokingly brought up that being at a Techstars event is… kind of a spiritual experience. And he was exactly right.
You kind of have to be there to get it.
But if you weren’t, here’s some pictures from my program — Class 4, The Cedars-Sinai Accelerator Powered by Techstars. Congratulations, everyone!
What being a part of Techstars means to me
At the center of a large but intimate accelerator program, I was amazed at the sheer magnitude of the Techstars network, and watched as companies dealt with unique early-stage and vertical-specific problems in healthcare. After three months of something intense and magical, here are my learnings.
What #givefirst actually looks like
Techstars has an unpretentious mantra to deck the walls of its coworking spaces— #givefirst.
So quite literally, the beginning of every Techstars program kicks off with two weeks of what we call mentor madness — entire days filled with meetings with mentors, many of whom will continue being each team’s key mentors as they finish out the program and go forth out into the world. It’s putting founders to the stress test what they know about their business, how much conviction they have, and how they plan to wade through troubles in the crowded digital health market — a time to tear down weak links and build them up with better ones. Willing help from mentors who are deep industry experts, insurance and hospital execs, and successful ex-founders who’s been here before… a true godsend.
It’s a rush, it’s overwhelming, and it’s definitely discouraging to hear split early feedback on your business from some of the most experienced mentors out there. Potential customers too. Focus on differentiating the product. Actually, no, go with a content push. Spend more time building out the customer pipeline before you do product stuff. Wait, that’s a terrible idea. Why don’t you scope out your features more here and here? And infamously — Why don’t you just screw everything you’ve done so far and go direct to consumer!!!!! (and some teams decided to do just that, for the better)
All of this is exhausting, but the weird magic of it all being euphoric and productive at the end comes from the fact that hundreds of people flew out here, from all over the country. Just to meet you. Just to get excited about your business. And I don’t know, but that kind of simultaneous presence of people there, supporting you no matter what, is hugely validating on its own.
So after all that — I used to think that standing alone with a great idea that everyone also tells you is a great idea, is what validation looks like, but it’s not. Validation is having people stand by you and tell you honestly when they don’t believe in aspects of your idea — but they stick around anyway, because they believe in you to find your way through the thicket of those problems surrounding your business. And that’s what Techstars taught me — to be intentional about the kind of people I find myself around, and to be the person that does more than just give out expensive opinions and move on. Really be there, through everything.
Networking is hard, and as a student I’ve always felt that the way I’ve experienced it is not how it’s really supposed to be — long lines at career fairs, and cartwheeling through burning hoops to get to that “ask” part of the conversation with a busy stranger over the phone. And all. the. humble. bragging. you have to do to impress someone enough to refer you to the next.
Being at the program, I don’t know how many times I’ve casually walked into a conversation with executives where they asked me, not the other way around — “what’s your story? What’s next for you? Can I connect you to my colleague at X? They would be super helpful with what you’re looking for right now.” The crazy thing is that I never had to actually ask anyone to connect me to anyone else. They just wanted to save me stress and offered to help. I was deeply humbled by the existence of people like this, and that Techstars managed to build a community full of them.
Of course, you have to be good at asking for help to be a founder and you will have to ask many times, shamelessly; but when there are customers to woo and investors to catch up, I learned that it’s a huge load off your shoulder to be in an environment where important people connect with you authentically, care about you first, and anticipate exactly what you need before you even have to ask. It’s pretty amazing. So it’s no wonder that, a mentality like #givefirst produces founders that come back again and again to have conversations like this with new Techstars founders, even years later. I’m proud to officially be a part of this community.
So we’ve seen investors advertise their network as a value add to founders before, but Techstars delivers on this at a level that is quite literally global, and yet it still feels like family. Cheesy, but no less accurate.
What real founder journeys look like
I knew that the narrative of the rockstar genius founder going out to fundraise in a blaze of glory and making huge product decisions by some combination of accident and god given intuition was kind of bullshit, but it’s hard to know what goes unsaid in a founder story. Narrative is more important than ever, and we control it fiercely.
What I do know now from working with these companies is not just what it takes to be a great founder, but what it takes to support founders. And maybe that’s all there is. Your team and circle of support means everything.
As a healthcare accelerator, many of the founders I worked with came from clinical backgrounds, and I believe that alone drew a very specific type of people to gather here. These weren’t young people with nothing to lose, they were physicians, surgeons, people who directly touched other people’s lives and made a difference already — that nevertheless saw big problems in the way their patients were being treated for sickness. They left comfortable and respected careers to change that, often for underserved people — like parents with newborns in the NICU, feeling totally powerless, patients that don’t know what high-stakes treatments they’re consenting to, millions of women who are left out of the conversation about their own health as they focus on their families and careers. And in that way, being a founder is to be a visionary. But I think because the objectives were always so selfless, rejections hurt more, every misaligned incentive more frustrating. So after having seen all of this, what I really admire founders for, more than anything, is their emotional strength, the support they give each other, and how they tend to their team in times of discouragement.
I watched as some founders masterfully managed large distributed teams across flipped time zones, and others struggle through having to let key team members go or hire new ones that just weren’t a perfect fit. I watched them leave their families and friends across the country, even across oceans, to participate in this three-month program. And what really makes a great team, in all of this? Maybe just consider this thing that really happened:
Two weeks before demo day, the culminating event of our program, as everyone rushed to put together pitches and product demos… A co-founder & CEO had a terrible family emergency. He had been practicing and practicing the pitch that wasn’t in his first language, and moved here for the program while the rest of his team stayed abroad, but now suddenly had to go. His co-founder got on a flight here from Poland within four hours of the news. He landed in LA, took over everything, and stayed up to memorize a pitch he had never seen before and took his co-founder’s place in. a. single. day.
Great teams are for times of trouble which, when you’re early… happens any time and all the time. Now I know many, many great teams like these, and how they work.
What great people see in others with a lot of growth ahead
Coming into this program, and realizing from day one how junior I was in my career (and life in general) compared to everyone else, I had a lot of reservations about what I can say and contribute. People have told me repeatedly that startups need to fail early and fail fast, but I really cared about those companies — what could I possibly do to help them grow through this formative period?
The answer was more generous than I thought. I did pretty much everything, from making coffee to designing product features.
The thing I feel people don’t talk enough about on startups, is that when you’re early, everything is also amplified. If you have a bad team member, that hurts so much more than if you’re bigger. A poorly scoped feature can lose you deals with important customers never to return, especially in an enterprise sales environment. Why should any founder have me on their team or let me own projects that would have so much influence over what happens next? This kind of pressure, especially as I worked alongside other Associates with years more industry experience, forced me to try things I’ve never done before to help a business grow.
What I’ve come to appreciate most about being here, being around great founders, is that people don’t care how old you are — they care how good you are, how willing you are to grow, and that you care about their products as much as they do. And that’s exactly what I came to do. In fact, as a practiced writer with good UX sense, I quickly found that I was valuable for helping companies build compelling narratives around their products, align conflicting stakeholder interests in a product across multiple hand-offs (i.e. B2B2C), and making product experiences thoughtful for end users no matter what.
In the end, not every day was glamorous, but I got to help teams roadmap, model data, build investor decks, design a website, come up with a marketing strategy, wireframe a dashboard, talk to customers, fundraise, and… everything in between. It took some long hours and sitting at dinner sill thinking about the next day ahead, but those problems kept me up in real ways that made me care about people and think intentionally about the future of technology. And the real important thing I took away at the end of the day, and my open letter to every founder and team I’ve worked with this summer, is this:
After long nights spent on the couch after everyone’s gone home, all the late night calls and all-nighters pulled writing decks with pitches with you, because your co-founder went missing, contracts fell through, and the vision you have of your business saving thousands of lives at the hospital got shut out because no one saw it the way you do, no one wanted to pay for it, sometimes you had to stomach it and sometimes you turned it around. But I was there, I saw all of it, most of all — your fortitude and conviction to keep going, and I feel so fortunate that you let me be there with you through these hard times.
I’m infinitely grateful for the patience and trust amazing founders gave me, and for pushing me to contribute meaningfully to companies that are going to change the world. And just like that, my summer comes to a close.
Now, with two years left to graduation, I’m looking to work with more great teams building impactful products. If you know a good one, let me know!
If you want to talk about startups, product, or just stuff like movies, reach me at — sollee921@ucla.edu.
Thanks for reading!
-Sol
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