Alex Poe
Irina Achim
Our journey towards California started in New York, where everyone we knew told us horrified to watch out, not to take the subway and to stay away from shady streets once we get to the West Coast.
We arrived in San Francisco on a Sunday evening. Whereas New York felt like home, here we felt an itch in our stomach, the kind of feeling that tends to appear at the start of an adventure that will most surely test one’s limits.
We started Techstars one week in advance, at Foundercon, the global annual meeting of the alumni, mentors and investors within the strongest founder network in the world. Three days packed with meetings, sessions and a myriad of learning nuggets. Access to this incredible network is the most powerful asset that one can get out of Techstars.
We were logged into a platform where we could ask for intros to over 300 mentors and investors who were attending the event. It worked wonders. Everyone here is willing to help you build a successful company. ‘Give first’ is the mantra and you are invited to both offer it as well as make use of it.
At Foundercon I felt a subtle difference compared to the NYC events. Whereas in New York you had less than 1 minute to pitch what you were doing, here people were willing to wait a bit longer, trying to really get a better grasp of what it is that you’re building.
It felt as if we had been pre-vetted by belonging to the community. Everyone was very approachable, from MDs at other programs, top notch investors, all the way up to Brad Feld, co-founder of Techstars and one of the most influential business thinkers in the world.
I remember him referring to product market fit as the moment when people would form a line, waiting to literary snatch the product from your hands. That was the milestone that we were all aiming for and yet only a handful of us was going to achieve it.
We also met our fellow founders from the San Francisco and Oakland cohorts. We were lucky enough to have not 11, but 23 other startups as companions on the 3 months and a half road that laid in front of us.
I managed to infiltrate the mentor breakfast and almost did the same at the women breakfast, but decided in the end to just have my co-founder, Gabriela, join that one.
Since I arrived in the US I’ve felt inside a big FOMO - Fear Of Missing Opportunities. I just can’t help myself from attempting these guerrilla tactics.
I love, for instance, going with fellow founders to investor networking events, divide & conquer by spreading into various groups, only to regroup 15 min later to debrief over who is worth meeting and whom to avoid. It’s a very efficient way to cover more ground and to bond with other founders in the same time.
I also remember the CEO of Github stating that 80% of code will be written by AI in the following years. There was the usual talk about AI, but only in the case of startups that were using AI to actually bring value to their customers, not because they wanted to simply ride the wave by adding ‘.ai’ to their platform.
So if you position yourself as having an AI startup, you’d better be prepared to receive some pretty scrutinizing questions. We did our best.
I guess for us, Techstars felt not just as the launchpad for Chambr in Silicon Valley, but also as a safety net from the macroeconomic environment. We could rest assured that regardless of the outcome, we at least hit that milestone that deemed us as being ‘Techstars for life’.
And hopefully that will act as a beacon of success during the dark times that are inevitable within every stage of a startup’s life.
As our fellow founder, Arthur, said, we had our head in the clouds, still not believing that we’d been accepted into Techstars after seven gruelling attempts. And we hadn’t even started our journey.
What were the next stages of Techstars accelerator and what that meant for us you can read in a new diary entry that will be online next week.
Till then you can follow me, Gabriela and Chambr on our Linkedin accounts.
And if there is anything you would like to know about being accepted at Techstars, feel free to ask us.
