4 ms·

It feels more like their franchising. Find a local incubator/ seed/ VC opportunity with good local roots, and brand a program there for 3 months. It benefits bo

It feels more like their franchising. Find a local incubator/ seed/ VC opportunity with good local roots, and brand a program there for 3 months. It benefits both sides, TS portfolio grows and the local shop gets a big nod of legitimacy from outside their market. It adds momentum to the local scene, expands their portfolio with minimal costs, and hasn't seemed to drastically water down their image. Or maybe it has - I'm not quite sure... There are many times I would have loved to go through TechStars, but I feel that the key benefit of the program is the networking & 'friction' with other great entrepreneurs & the top VCs, I'm not so sure how it will keep scaling without degrading those key aspects. As in, I imagine it was easy to get the most high profile mentors or VCs to Boulder or NYC once/ twice a year. Now, they're supposed to hit up like 7+ programs? Different demo days...

saryant 13y ago
I'm not sure I'd call it franchising. Even with the recent TechStars Cloud class in San Antonio, about as non-startup a city as you can find, the program didn't seem to have any trouble attracting mentors and VCs. Demo day was packed with VCs from around the country and AFAIK a lot of the companies from the latest batch have had no trouble raising seed. (I'm not a TS alum, but I work out of the coworking space TS uses in San Antonio)
- btrautsc 13y ago
  Point taken, maybe the wrong term/ my lack of specific knowledge. My personal thoughts though are in this industry (and this side of it), a huge advantage to TS & YC is relational. I'm not sure how well or how long relational scales.
dandrewsen 13y ago
I think that the more accurate term is horizontal expansion, rather than franchising.
seats 13y ago
The way that it scales is to not try and spread the 'most high profile mentors' to all cities, but to source effectively orthogonal sets of high value people that support each program. Horizontal vs vertical scaling as dandrewsen mentions.

saryant 13y ago

I'm not sure I'd call it franchising. Even with the recent TechStars Cloud class in San Antonio, about as non-startup a city as you can find, the program didn't seem to have any trouble attracting mentors and VCs. Demo day was packed with VCs from around the country and AFAIK a lot of the companies from the latest batch have had no trouble raising seed. (I'm not a TS alum, but I work out of the coworking space TS uses in San Antonio)

btrautsc 13y ago
Point taken, maybe the wrong term/ my lack of specific knowledge. My personal thoughts though are in this industry (and this side of it), a huge advantage to TS & YC is relational. I'm not sure how well or how long relational scales.

dandrewsen 13y ago

I think that the more accurate term is horizontal expansion, rather than franchising.

seats 13y ago

The way that it scales is to not try and spread the 'most high profile mentors' to all cities, but to source effectively orthogonal sets of high value people that support each program. Horizontal vs vertical scaling as dandrewsen mentions.