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
Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup, in detail
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.
The most recurring theme is speed: the title is not hyperbole. Almost every contributor emphasizes that the biggest risk for an early-stage startup is not moving too fast — it is moving too slowly, validating too little, and preserving too much of the original idea when the market is already telling you something different. The corollary is that doing more faster requires a high tolerance for imperfect information and a process for learning from failure quickly rather than avoiding it.
The book is most useful in the earliest stages of building a company. It speaks to the experience of the first six to eighteen months — before product-market fit, before significant funding, when everything is hypothesis. Founders further along may find many of the lessons already internalized, but for people at the beginning, the book functions well as a set of calibrations from people who have been through it.
The big ideas
- 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.
