Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City

TECHSTARS EXPANDS TO NEW YORK

TechStars now had a replicable model and accelerators were appearing around the world. We helped enable a lot of them by open sourcing the TechStars approach. However, we still knew there were other cities that we’d love to expand to. New York was one of these, and we were again fortunate to find someone to pull us to New York. This time it was David Tisch, a native New Yorker who was incredibly passionate about helping build the New York startup community. Following is David Tisch’s story of how TechStars New York came together.

It was on or about August 25, 2010, when we sent out the first e-mail asking someone to be a mentor for TechStars NYC. This is the moment we started, the moment I knew this was real and there was no turning back. Within 48 hours, we had 40 of the top entrepreneurs in NYC on board to mentor companies we hadn’t even found yet. We quickly raised four programs’ worth of funding from 25 of NYC’s best investors.

NYC’s startup community is thriving right now, as has been well documented, and TechStars finds itself at the heart of it. Looking back, the establishment of TechStars in NYC has helped coalesce the startup community and is one of many factors at work.

Early on, I noticed that many of the mentors didn’t know each other. This surprised me as I assumed that all the entrepreneurs in NYC working in and around the Internet would know each other. But that was wrong, and TechStars has become the place for mentors to meet each ...