Talk to Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup like its author wrote you back.
Get the ideas that fit your life — not generic summaries.
- Chat with the book
- Audiobook-style main ideas
- Adapts to your life and goals
- Helps you take action
What it argues
Do More Faster is a collection of short essays and lessons drawn from the TechStars accelerator program, organized by Brad Feld and David Cohen, the program's co-founders. TechStars launched in Boulder in 2007 and had become, by the time this book was published in 2010, one of the more respected startup accelerators in the United States. The book compiles advice from TechStars mentors — experienced entrepreneurs and investors — organized around seven themes: idea and vision, people, execution, product, fundraising, legal and structure, and the work and life balance that founders rarely discuss honestly.
The format is a series of short pieces, each two to six pages, written by a different mentor or drawn from founder experience in the program. Feld and Cohen contribute a handful of pieces themselves, but much of the value comes from the range of voices: people like Eric Ries (early contributor to lean startup thinking), Mark Suster (venture capitalist and former entrepreneur), and dozens of others who have built or funded early-stage companies. The short format means no single idea gets extended treatment, but it also means the book can be read in chunks and revisited at specific points in a startup's development.
What it gets right
- 1.
Speed is a competitive advantage at the earliest stage. The founders who move fastest to test their assumptions, regardless of how imperfect the test, learn faster than those who wait for a polished product to validate.
- 2.
Give before you get. The most useful relationships in the startup ecosystem — with mentors, investors, and potential co-founders — are built through contribution before anyone has asked for anything.
- 3.
The idea is the least important part of the startup. Every contributor who has built and sold companies says the idea was wrong in some important way, and execution in the presence of uncertainty was the actual work.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Brad Feld is a managing director at Foundry Group, a venture capital firm he co-founded in Boulder, Colorado. He has been an early-stage technology investor and entrepreneur since 1987 and is one of the founders of the TechStars accelerator network. He is also the co-author of Venture Deals, one of the most widely used guides to startup financing. David Cohen is co-founder and chairman of TechStars, which has grown from a single program in Boulder to a global network of accelerators. Cohen is an active angel investor and startup mentor.
