Advice on TechStars Co-Founders
During TechStars you have tremendous potential to get your company to a point where it makes sense to take investment and start growing it. To get to that phase, you need to meet with a lot of mentors, contacts provided by mentors/TechStars, potential partners, go to presentations, and explore many other things that make TechStars an awesome program.
If you are a single founder, I strongly suggest getting a co-founder or two. You will be busy most days with meetings, events, and talking to clients so your product won’t move forward as fast. Some days you start your day at 8am and finish at 9pm with only a few minutes in between to touch your keyboard. Other days, you have two different events going on at the same and as a single founder you won’t be able to take advantage of that. In addition, there are events where lots of mentors are in the room so is best to talk to as many as you can so you can eventually choose a lead mentor.
SendGrid has two other co-founders: Tim Jenkins and Jose Lopez. During TechStars I was mainly in meetings while Jose and Tim worked on the technical aspects of SendGrid. Jose helped when we had schedule conflicts and we all contributed to strategy. So we took advantage of meeting the awesome mentors TechStars has and we still had the product moving forward. It was also great to have these guys for moral support when things didn’t go as planned. At the end, we had our lead mentors, a great product, and awesome investors. So if you’re thinking about TechStars look for a great co-founder and go ahead and apply.