I joined Techstars in 2013 and ran my first program in Spring of 2014. It has been an amazing journey, and I am so grateful to have the opportunity to work with incredible group of companies during my 7th program this winter.
Huge shout out to KJ Singh and Jill Canning who built Techstars NYC program into what it is today together with me. So very much appreciate everything that they’ve done for the founders, and NYC tech community.
Every program, and every group of founders is different and special in its own way. This winter, despite having absolutely terrible weather, we worked with stellar, very special and diverse group of founders and businesses.
We had 5 companies from NYC, and companies from Thailand, Spain, Romania, Austria, Detroit, LA and Montreal. 6 companies have female CEOs and 8 companies had female co-founders. Companies tackled industries ranging blockchain scalability, food-borne illnesses, security, storage, addiction recovery, genomics, construction, data science, recruiting and tracking KPIs.
The companies have made strong progress during the program, and have achieved very significant growth.
MEET THE COMPANIES
Acculis
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Altru
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The Clear Cut
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KPI Ready
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Kyso
for more information.
Loom Network
Loom Network provides scalable infrastructure for building blockchain apps on top of Ethereum.
Blockchain holds an awesome promise to be a new kind of distributed database and ledger. The problem is that due to the way blockchains are designed they are hard to scale. Loom Network provides the first ever infrastructure to make it easy for developers to build Dapps that get the trust and security of Ethereum, while maintaining the speed and costs to run efficiently at scale.
Loom Network’s co-founders Matt, Luke, and James have deep experience in developing large-scale applications, and were early in the blockchain space.
The founding teams’ motto is – we don’t write white papers, we ship code. They launched the company last May and have been very busy since! First, Loom Network developed for more information.
OneStep
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PathSpot
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Rootine
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Streamline Genomics
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Vertoe
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WATCH SELECT PITCH VIDEOS
THANK YOU MENTORS, ALUMNI & SPEKAKERS
We are incredibly lucky here at Techstars NYC to have support from the amazing tech community in NYC, our mentors, our 100+ alumni companies, and amazing speakers.
We are truly lucky to have incredibly engaged alumni, who are coming back to help the founders from business introductions to investor pitch. Alumni is a constant presence in Techstars NYC program and really shape the program. Special thank you to Brian Jeong, Sarah Adler, Erica Jain, Nathaniel Harley, Susannah Villa, Rob Douglas, Neha Singh, and Danielle Cohen-Shohet.
We felt really supported by 80 mentors who worked with the companies during the program — huge thank you, as always for your support.
Here are specific shout outs from the companies:
Acculis – Chris Fraser (VP of Strategic Accounts, GreatHorn), Yaakov Zar (Co-Founder & CSO, Dispatch), Ian Strug (Co-founder, Virgo), Jason Saltzman (Co-Founder and CEO, AlleyNYC), Jonny Cohen (Senior Associate, Thyra)
Altru – John Cantarella (Head of Global Partnerships, Facebook), John Hill (VP of Network, Techstars), Fayez Mohamood (Co-Founder & CEO, Bleucore), Sabrina Kelly (VP of People Operations, Techstars), Matt Straz (Founder and CEO, Namely)
The Clear Cut – Max Wendkos (Product Design Lead, Aaptiv), Danielle Cohen-Shohet (CEO, GlossGenius), Brian Jeong (CEO, Hawthorne), Matthew Friesen (Head of E-Commerece, Global Brands Group), Carrie Reynolds (Executive-Level Consultant, CSR Consulting)
kpiReady – Mohamood Fayez (Co-Founder & CEO, Bleucore), Mitch Wainer (Co-Founder, DigitalOcean), Fabiola Carcamo (VP Product, Vroom), John Hill (VP of Network, Techstars), Weston Stearns (VP of Growth, DataCamp)
Kyso – Jonathan Cornelissen (CEO, Datacamp), Adam Johnson (CEO, IOPipe), Alexis Le-Quoc (CTO, Datadog), Adam Feldman (Product Manager, Sidewalk labs), Max Wendkos (Product Design Lead, Aaptiv)
OneStep – Susanne Mitschke (CEO, Mindmate), Rahul Sidhu (CEO, Spidr), Ryan Shank (CEO, PhoneWagon)
PathSpot – Tobias Peggs (CEO, Square Root Urban Growers), Josh Hix (Co-Founder & CEO, Plated), Nick Devane (CEO, Foodworks), Jonny Cohen (Senior Associate, Thyra), Diana Pincus (Vice President, Supply Chain & Quality, littleBits), Mike Montero (Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer, Resy Network), Rob Edell, Adam Casson (co-founder, Inscope Medical Solutions), Brett Jackson (Managing Director, V1 VC), Ben Schultz (Hardware Project Manager, Peloton Cycle), Alexandre Winter (Founder & CEO, Placemeter), Frank Rimalovski (Executive Director, NYU Entrepreneurial Institute), Sean Grundy (Co-founder and CEO, Bevi), Jenny Fielding (Angel)
Rootine – Susanne Mitschke (CEO, Mindmate), Fiona McCarthy (VP of Product, Prolific Interactive)
Streamline Genomics – Chris Fraser (VP of Strategic Accounts, GreatHorn), Ian Strug (Co-founder, Virgo), Matt Schwartz (CEO & Co-Founder, Virgo)
TypingDNA – Joel Wishkovsky (Founder & CEO, Simple Contacts), Kevin O’Brien (CEO, GreatHorn, Techstars ’15) , Matt Kozlov (Managing Director, TS Healthcare Accelerator) , Jason Grad (Founder and CEO, Bstow), Thierry Schellenbach (CEO, Stream)
Vertoe – Dan Herman (CEO, Welcome), Todd Saunders (CEO, AdHawk), Trey Sisson (Founder), David Lapter (Chief Financial Officer, Dashlane)
THANK YOU ASSOCIATES
We feel very lucky to have had a stellar group of associates that absolutely crushed it during the program. Every single week we heard from the founders how helpful they found the associates. Abby, Alice, Jeff, Grace, Kyra, Khalil, Nastasia – thank you so much working really hard and making a difference.
WHAT FOUNDERS LEARNED IN THE PROGRAM
Alykhan, CEO of Altru
If you aren’t being rejected more than accepted, you’re not asking for enough, reaching high enough, and valuing yourself enough. Try new things, ask people who scare you to help you, and begin to believe failing really is learning. If you’re winning constantly, you’re in a rut.” – Tarah M. Wheeler
Vinnie, CTO of Altru
The importance of networking, and how every person you meet, in any context, has the potential to bring about another hire, an investment, a new customer, or access to an even broader network.
Olivia, CEO of Clear Cut
I learned in Techstars was that regardless of your industry metrics are critical and actually enable you to think bigger picture. Prior to the program I was so in the weeds that at times I didn’t know where I was going. I also assumed KPIs were more relevant for hard-core tech companies. Today when I speak about our business I find myself using numbers in nearly every sentence.
Ali, CEO of kpiReady
Kyle, COO of Clear Cut
I learned to not let “perfect be the enemy of better”. At times we were hesitant to move ahead because we knew our plans were not fully formed. The team at Techstars encouraged us to just focus on getting better each and every day. As a result we have had incredible traction in the program!
The power of giving first. It amplifies and deepens everything.
Eva, CEO of One Step
Get good at sales. Everything at its core is sales – fundraising, acquiring customers and recruiting.
Christine, CEO of PathSpot
Techstars will not only make your business, your customers, and your team better, but it will also make you as a founder stronger if you fully immerse yourself in learning from the amazing staff, cohort, and mentors that it will expose you too.
Josette, CEO of Streamline Genomics
It’s never too early to join Techstars.
Raul, CEO of TypingDNA
- Being from eastern Europe we know how hard life can get at times, we’re trained to survive in difficult situations and because of that we didn’t expect to learn so much. We ended up improving our website, demos, marketing strategy, conversion funnel strategy, our products, the way we communicate, and ultimately Techstars helped us gain a larger vision about where our technology fits in the grand scheme of things.
- We thought that “do more faster” has to do only with quantity, the amount of time you put into something shall translate to a larger deal of work being done. Putting everything at speed allowed us to super focus and develop a state of flow where we understand sharper and deeper what has to be done to succeed in our business.
- Mentors, alumni, associates, program managers, they’ve all put their ass on the line for us. When you’re a small startup doing something like we do, you feel a lot of skepticism around, and that is good to a certain degree but it is not productive. Having people around set up to help you succeed, that is incredibly productive.
Sid, CEO of Vertoe
- Focus on deep funnel (product) – Just by focusing and nailing the deep funnel (higher conversion rates, fast and great performing website), you’re able to maximize the efficiency of your existing marketing channels while putting your new channels in the best position to generate great ROI. For as little as a 5-10% improvement in conversion rates, you boost all your marketing channels!
- Networking and mentorship – There are so many good mentors who are always willing to help. Don’t hesitate to reach out as you’ll be surprised by the #GiveFirst value that’s ingrained in Techstars.
Neha, CMO of Vertoe
Although there were so many other learnings in the program, the biggest one for me has to be the importance of optimizing your deep funnels first.
Just by focussing on bottom up approach, we were laser focussed on refining our product to provide a seamless experience for our customers – it helped us increase our conversion rate, show week on week growth. This approach has also helped us improve the efficiency of our marketing spend.
Other learnings: Givefirst, Importance of tracking weekly KPIs.
GOOD LUCK TECHSTARS NYC WINTER 2018
We had so much fun this winter working together with this talented group of founders. Join us in wishing them best of luck!