Give First

Plated Co-founder

Josh Hix

knows about leading a growing team. He remembers taking the company through Techstars New York City in 2013, coming into the program with about seven people, and leaving wi…

Rajat Bhargava

, CEO of JumpCloud, has started a lot of companies—the first, NetGenesis, while he was still a student at MIT. And his friendship with Give First co-host Brad Feld goes right back to th…

MergeLane, a VC fund that invests in startups and venture funds with at least one female leader, has an unusual aspiration, written in bold on its website: “We want to make MergeLane obsolete.”

As co-…

Jason Mendelson

, co-founder of Foundry Group, can explain what matters in negotiations between entrepreneurs and VCs in just two words: Control and Economics.

It takes enormous expertise to make some…

Today,

Janet Bannister

is a Partner at Real Ventures, but when Founding Partners John Stokes and Jean-Sebastien Cournoyer first approached her about joining to give the firm a presence in Toronto, Ja…

Heidi Roizen

has called herself a recovering entrepreneur.

Wendy Lea

has called Heidi “the epitome of Give First.” Both of these are true, and go a long way toward describing the deeply humane perspe…

Too many people believe that you have to be in Silicon Valley—or some similarly hyped tech-obsessed locale—to be an entrepreneur. Techstars knows this isn’t true: successful entrepreneurship can happ…

Back in 2010, David Cohen and Brad Feld distilled their knowledge about how to #domorefaster into a book, fleshed out with many, many stories from startup founders, investors, and other players in th…

Stride.VC founder

Harry Stebbings

is probably best known for his podcast,

The Twenty Minute VC

, the world's largest media asset in venture, with over 5 million downloads per month. He’s talked with a…

In over 23 years at Silicon Valley Bank, John China has made it his mission to make connections between entrepreneurs, investors, corporations, and more. Many, many entrepreneurs at Techstars and bey…

Today, Sherri Hammons is CTO of The Nature Conservancy, but as she admits, “I took the nontraditional path to CTO land.” This path included eight years as a professional singer before she went back t…

Rebecca Lovell

plays, as Brad Feld says, “a very important role in the center of gravity for the Seattle startup community.” Currently Director at Create33, a resource center for tech entrepreneurs, …

With six full episodes of the Give First podcast under their belts, David Cohen and Brad Feld reflect on their recent interviews and duty as podcast hosts. They also have nothing but praise for guest…

Kesha Cash founded Impact America Fund in 2013 with a goal of investing in software and tech enabled companies that have a positive benefit on underserved communities in America. In 2018, she was nam…

David Cohen was super excited when he realized that

T.A. McCann

—founder and CEO of Senosis (acquired by Google), Gist (acquired by Blackberry) and Rival IQ, a leader in marketing analytics, as well a…

Mary Grove is passionate about community-driven change, and this theme has guided her entire career. She joined Google when it had only 2,000 employees, and by the time she left it was up to around 7…

How does a startup ecosystem grow? #GiveFirst is one essential element.

Troy Henikoff, Managing Director of MATH Ventures and Co-founder of Excelerate Labs, which became Techstars Chicago, remembers …

Have you ever been mobbed in Times Square, like a rock star? Paul Berberian, CEO of Sphero, the company that makes BB8, at one time the number one toy in the world, has.

Paul talks about how mentorin…

Wendy Lea is a longtime entrepreneur and investor, as well as a board member and mentor at Techstars. With David and Brad, she digs into some of her own first mentoring experiences and reflects on a …