Brad Feld - Do More Faster India

I left United Devices after our acquisition and moved to Boston to join my wife. Suddenly, I felt I was back to square one—back in the United States in a new city with no friends, no network, and no job. I was not sure what I wanted to do next, but I had to do something.

After spending some time being what I jokingly called a “kept man to my doctoral student wife,” I eventually decided it was time to work on something new again. I came up with the idea for Kinvey, a company that was going to build a cloud platform to make it easier for developers and enterprises to build and run the next generation of web, mobile, and wearable apps. I called it “Backend as a Service.” But I was at a loss on how I would go about doing it. Creating development platforms for mission‐critical apps required a lot of capital, a lot of time to build them correctly, and a hugely talented team, among myriad other things I was sure I hadn’t thought about.

Then I heard about the Techstars Accelerator in Boston. To make progress on Kinvey and get help, I had forced myself, a rank introvert in an extrovert’s disguise, to get plugged into the Boston startup community. Through numerous meetups, events, and one‐on‐one conversations, I started to hear a consistent buzz about this thing called Techstars Boston and their new managing director, Katie Rae. I had to meet her and learn more about this organization. I networked my way to finally meet Katie and many of the mentors she had assembled to support the Techstars program. I was blown away by everyone’s experience, empathy, thoughtfulness, and willingness to help.

I applied to the program, and our final interview was going to be in Austin, Texas. Katie was in Austin for the SXSW festival and she wanted to know if we could meet there. My team and I invited her to a tex‐mex lunch and at the end of the lunch we offered her a mix CD of songs by local Austin musicians as a thank you. I’m not sure if it was the food, the margaritas, the mix CD, our team, or our idea, but the next day I received an email from Katie that we were accepted into the Techstars Boston 2011 program.

The three months of the Techstars Boston program changed the trajectory of Kinvey, but not for the reasons you might think. During the program, we didn’t change our idea, we didn’t discover a new strategy, there were no pivots, we didn’t launch our product, nor did we win any customers or generate any revenue. Techstars Boston helped us create a network of successful, genuine, insightful, and connected mentors who continued to help us in every facet of building our startup. Katie Rae, Reed Sturtevant, Brad Feld, David Cohen, Nicole Stata, Joe Caruso, Jennifer Lum, Fred Destin, Rich Miner, Michael Mark—the list of helpful mentors goes on and on. I built friendships and bonds of trust with some of the brightest minds in technology, relationships that I know will endure for the rest of my career. The secret sauce of Techstars then and now is its ability to quickly help founders meet and derive value from mentors and other people who can meaningfully improve the course of their business. That is priceless.

By 2017, we grew Kinvey into the #1 Mobile Development Platform and Enterprise Health Cloud, and we earned the right to be the strategic digital application cloud platform vendor for many of the largest enterprises in the world. As a result, we were successfully acquired by Progress, creating a great outcome for all our investors, customers, and employees.

My Techstars experience created an indelible passion in me to help other founders and to invest in startups. A value of Techstars is to #givefirst, to give back to the community, and to help others experience this fabulous journey of creating a business. I have continued to give back over the years, and I’ve recently found myself gravitating toward startups in India, my home country.

I believe we are in the very early stages of a multi‐decade technology innovation juggernaut in India. I see a growing ecosystem of founding teams in India who can compete with the best teams and technologies around the world. Indian entrepreneurs know how world‐class products are built and scaled (because they started their careers in India, shipping customer‐facing products at companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Yahoo, VMware, etc.) and they understand how world‐class teams are hired and nurtured. Indian entrepreneurs absorbed all the knowledge they could and digested every blog post, book, and podcast on how startups are built. Most importantly, our entrepreneurs have the vision, courage, and tenacity to believe that they can build seminal, transformative technologies and teams and turn those into world‐leading companies.

The founding teams in India will bring a new age of technology entrepreneurship fueled by two massive opportunities. For the first opportunity, Indian entrepreneurs will focus on digitally transforming countless markets within India alone. With a rapidly growing consumer market the demand for new products and services will skyrocket. And with increasing purchasing power of Indian consumers, the digitization opportunities in large markets like healthcare, shipping, logistics, retail, and manufacturing are poised to become a consumption engine for homegrown innovation and disruption.

The size and socioeconomic, linguistic, and cultural complexity of India makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for a non‐Indian team to understand local needs and build successful startup businesses that cater to the Indian market. The time is ripe for Indian entrepreneurs to build, scale, and create significant enterprise value by just focusing on the Indian customer.

The second opportunity for Indian entrepreneurs is to become competitive in global markets. In addition to now having world‐class product‐talent, the growth of cloud and SaaS tools allows Indian entrepreneurs to service, support, market, and sell to customers anywhere in the world. At the same time, the lower cost basis of building and supporting products from India enables Indian startups to deliver industry‐leading solutions at disruptive price points.

I expect the startup revolution in India to happen quickly, but entrepreneurs need access to local and global talent, capital, customers, partners, mentors, fellow founders, universities, government, and other service providers who can help them. I personally saw Techstars bring all these ingredients together in Boston and they helped rejuvenate Boston’s startup ecosystem in a short period of time. In less than 10 years, Techstars Boston has accelerated over 175 startups with a 1,000+‐strong mentor network, creating over 3,000 jobs and raising over $1 billion in capital, leading to more than 30 exits already. This ecosystem is now self‐propagating and it is paying it forward to the next generation of entrepreneurs. I believe Techstars can do the same thing across numerous cities in India, and founders all across the country will benefit from this transformation.

I used to dream of an India where technology innovation and disruption could bring value to over a billion people, create millions of jobs, unlock thousands of crores of rupees in new economic value, and move the country forward for the better. After my Techstars experience I know that dream can become a reality. I want to live in that world. I believe we can, and we will.

Sravish Sridhar Founder/CEO, Kinvey Techstars Boston 2011 Boston, Massachusetts August 2019

David Cohen and Brad Feld

David is Managing Partner of Techstars and Brad is Managing Partner of Foundry Group.

When we started Techstars in 2006 we were focused on helping entrepreneurs succeed in one location, Boulder, Colorado. Do More Faster was first published in 2011 and this newly revised edition will appear in 2019. Since our founding, Techstars has grown to become the worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed. We scaled Startup Week, Startup Weekend, and Startup Accelerators that collectively have created tens of billions of dollars in value and tens of thousands of jobs. Startup Weekend takes place in 630 cities in 110 countries with over 70,000 attendees annually. Startup Week is provided in 147 cities in 16 countries with over 100,000 participants annually. And our three‐month Startup Accelerators operate in more than 30 cities in 15 countries and have helped more than 1,700 companies.