Give First

Started in France, Alban Denoyel knew that the key to his product, Sketchfab, was its influence in the United States. Now a leading platform for 3D and AR models, Sketchfab got a boost while Alban wa…

When Keller Rinaudo started Remotive in 2011 while in a Techstars Accelerator program, he didn’t really know what entrepreneurship was until he read Tony Hsieh's book “Delivering Happiness.” At the t…

Joey Womack is a builder, but he’s not in traditional construction. Through creating ecosystems and making connections, he is helping social entrepreneurs and diverse founders build relationships tha…

Patrick Ewers describes his work as helping people achieve true greatness, or as our host David Cohen calls it, giving people superpowers. But there is a funny thing about the term “true greatness”.

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Shila Nieves Burney, General Partner at Zane Venture Fund, has spent 20-plus years addressing inequity with capital, first in human capital with institutions and education systems, and then sourcing …

After two decades in the corporate world, Preston James was blown away by the innovation of tech startups. Once he got involved as an angel investor, he realized this industry was just like corporate…

If you’ve ever wondered just where Give First came from, or how it became such a central philosophy at Techstars, this episode is for you. Or if you’ve ever wanted to push back and say: does Give Fir…

There are some people whose lives are perfect expressions of the zeitgeist. Matt Harris is one of them. 

In 1995, Matt’s college roommate at Williams started a company out of their dorm room. It was c…

Lolita Taub has always been about community, from her upbringing in South Central LA to now at The Community Fund, which is a venture capital fund that invests in community-driven companies, “connect…

From his service as a Naval Intelligence Officer to an MBA from the University of Chicago to becoming an investor in early-stage startups in healthcare tech, frontier tech, logistics, and marketplace…

Brittany Barreto, Ph.D., started as an entrepreneur, transitioned to VC, and now is building a whole new category: FemTech. Yes, she invented the term, and you are encouraged to use it and spread it.…

Toward the beginning of this conversation between David Cohen and Brad Feld — cofounders of Techstars and celebrated early-stage investors — Brad says, “I believe it takes a hundred episodes before y…

“We get a tremendous amount of traffic to our website every month from people who are just searching for different ways to do things, learning different ways to code. It might not even be on our infr…

“Techstars for nonprofits” is a pretty good description for Fast Forward, an accelerator for tech nonprofits. The similarities are many — like Techstars, Fast Forward provides mentorship, network, an…

Jonathan Levin has had a remarkable career. A London native with an economics degree from Oxford, Levin cofounded Chainalysis in 2014, focusing on bitcoin on the blockchain. The company, a graduate o…

Bruno Morency graduated from college in 2001 and started a company right out of school. It was a tough time for tech startups, but Bruno persisted, and he’s been part of the entrepreneurship ecosyste…

Rob La Gesse has had an interesting career. After high school, he joined the Navy and worked both as a combat medic and a neonatal respiratory therapist. He was a mayor in Hawaii. He taught himself p…

In this episode of the Give First podcast, Brad Feld talks with his old friend Katie Rae, who was once the Managing Director of Techstars Boston. These days, Katie is the CEO and Managing Partner at …

In this special episode, Give First host David Cohen and Talking Through It host Neal Sáles-Griffin take turns interviewing each other: it’s two Techstars podcasts in one. 

David discusses with Neal o…