David Cohen is the founder and managing partner at Techstars, so a few amazing stats on techstars first, they have a total of 762 companies of which 90% are active or have been acquired, having raised more than 2bn in funding, as for David he is a serial entrepreneur having founded Pinpoint Technologies which was acquired by ZOLL Medical Corporation in 1999. and David was also the founder and CEO of earFeeder.com, a music service which was sold to SonicSwap.com in 2006.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How David made the transition from Founder to VC with Techstars and Fund I?
2.) Fund I is one of the most successful funds in history; what was the structure with Fund I? Why did David choose a $5m fund size? How did he decide initial to follow on ratio?
3.) Why was David so valuation sensitive with Fund I? Why was David so rigid on a consistent cheque size on Fund I?
4.) Why did David decide to expand from being a solo GP fund? What are the challenges and complexities of fund scaling and did David approach this?
5.) Question from Ari Newman: What does David think about uncapped notes? Why does David like big boring companies? Brett Jackson: How did you meet Ryan Graves @ Uber and how did the Uber deal come about? Jason Seats: Where does David still see inefficiencies in the current venture model?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
David's Fave Book: The Soul Of Money
David's Fave Blog: Mattermark Daily
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