Here’s a surprising truth most founders learn too late: Money is rarely the thing that breaks a startup. Isolation is.
In a world where it’s never been cheaper to start a company, it’s somehow become harder to build one that matters. Noise is everywhere. Advice is infinite. Capital shows up early, often with strings attached. And founders are left trying to decide which signals to trust.
This is where Techstars quietly earns its reputation, not as an accelerator, but as a compression engine for learning.
In a recent Ignite conversation, Kerty Levy and Keith Camhi, both Managing Directors at Techstars, pulled back the curtain on how early-stage companies actually scale, why most accelerators are misunderstood, and what separates founders who survive from those who stall.
You don’t need to listen to the episode to get the core ideas (but you still should). Here’s what matters.
Techstars Isn’t a Class. It’s a Network With Memory.
Many people still think of accelerators as startup bootcamps. Three months. Some workshops. A demo day. A little capital.
That framing misses the point.
Techstars’ real advantage is its distributed network, thousands of founders across dozens of industries, all connected by shared norms, shared scars, and a simple rule, give first.
Kerty Levy describes it as pattern recognition at scale. When you’ve worked with thousands of startups, you start seeing what works, what fails, and what fails slowly enough to be dangerous.
Keith Camhi puts it differently. Techstars doesn’t just help companies grow faster. It helps founders avoid repeating mistakes that have already been paid for by someone else.
The accelerator is just the front door. The network is the product.
Vertical Networks Beat Geography Once Things Get Real
Early accelerators scaled by geography. Boulder. Boston. London. Singapore.
That still matters. But once Techstars reached global scale, a more powerful axis emerged, verticals.
Healthcare founders don’t need generic advice. They need regulatory fluency, clinical validation, and partners who can open doors that usually stay shut until Series B. AI founders don’t need inspiration. They need to understand compute constraints, data leverage, and where hype ends.
Vertical networks group founders by the problems they’re actually solving, not just where they live.
That’s why Kriti leads Techstars’ AI and machine learning efforts, while Keith runs the healthcare accelerator powered by Permanente Medicine. It’s also why corporate partners, when aligned correctly, become accelerants instead of bottlenecks.
Access matters. Context matters more.
Momentum Beats Metrics in the Early Days
One of the most counterintuitive ideas in the conversation is this.
Early success isn’t about hitting numbers. It’s about momentum.
Revenue can lie. User counts can lie. Even pilots can lie.
Momentum doesn’t.
Are customers pulling the product forward?
Is feedback arriving faster than the team can process it?
Are decisions getting sharper week over week?
Inside Techstars, founders define goals early, but what matters most is speed of learning. A team that blows past its initial plan is often healthier than one that hits every metric but learns nothing new.
Acceleration, in the real sense, is about shortening the feedback loop between action and truth.
Why Team Still Beats Everything Else
Techstars famously evaluates startups on six criteria. The first three are the same word repeated.
Team.
Team.
Team.
This isn’t motivational fluff. It’s pattern recognition.
Keith shares how his own perspective shifted over time. Early in his investing career, he avoided risky bets. He didn’t want to back something that might fail publicly. Over time, he learned that safe bets rarely produce meaningful outcomes.
The companies that move the needle are usually working on problems that look unreasonable at first. The only way to underwrite that risk is to believe deeply in the founders.
Kerty adds another layer. Team isn’t just about skill. It’s about psychology. How founders handle stress. How they fight. How they recover. How they listen.
Most startup failures aren’t technical. They’re relational.
Headwinds Are a Feature, Not a Bug
If the last few years felt harder for founders, that’s not an accident.
Capital tightened. Valuations corrected. Easy money disappeared.
Both guests agree on something most people won’t say out loud.
This is good.
Headwinds filter out weak ideas early. They force clarity. They reward discipline. And they create space for companies that can survive without constant capital infusion.
Keith has lived through multiple cycles as both operator and investor. His take is blunt. Winning in headwinds often means you end up alone in the market when things finally turn.
Tailwinds feel good. Headwinds build companies that last.
AI’s Next Act Is Physical, Not Digital
AI is everywhere. Most of it looks the same.
Kerty is focused on what comes next. AI moving out of dashboards and into the physical world. Robotics. Automation of dirty, dangerous, or overlooked jobs. Systems that don’t just think, but act.
The easy AI startups, wrappers, copilots, shallow tooling, are already crowded. The next wave is harder. It requires hardware, supply chains, and real-world constraints.
Which is exactly why it’s interesting.
Big opportunities usually look inconvenient before they look inevitable.
The Real Point
If there’s a single thread running through this conversation, it’s this.
Great founders don’t win because they have better ideas.
They win because they compound learning faster than everyone else.
Techstars isn’t magic. It’s leverage. Leverage from people who’ve already seen the movie, survived the plot twists, and are willing to hand you the notes.
Kerty Levy learned how to land in unfamiliar territory and adapt fast.
Keith Camhi learned what happens when growth outruns understanding.
Today, they help founders avoid both mistakes.
Different paths. Same mission.
Build fewer companies blindly. Build more companies that endure.
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Chapters:
00:01 Welcome and introductions
02:55 Kerty Levy global origin story
08:55 Keith Camhi early builder mindset
13:05 Building FitLinxx and creating a category
18:05 Venture capital realities and liquidation preferences
20:50 Why Kerty Levy and Keith Camhi joined Techstars
24:20 The origin of Techstars vertical networks
29:15 Distributed scale as Techstars’ advantage
32:40 AI as a vertical and what comes next
34:05 How founders engage with Techstars
36:30 Virtual vs in-person accelerators
41:00 Inside the Techstars 12-week program
46:05 Too early vs too late for an accelerator
49:30 Defining success after 90 days
52:00 How Kirty Levy and Keith Camhi evaluate founders
57:40 Corporate partnerships that accelerate startups
01:00:40 How the startup landscape has changed
01:02:00 What the next few years will reward
Transcript
Brian Bell (00:01.157)
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today, we're thrilled to have two powerhouse leaders from Techstars joining us, Kerty Levy and Keith Camhi. Together, they lead the vertical networks at Techstars, connecting founders with specialized support, mentors, and corporate partners across more than 50 industries. Kerty is the managing director of Techstars Anywhere and leads the AI ML vertical network with 80 startup investments and a global perspective shaped by living ever from Japan and Belgium, Sweden, China, and a bunch of other places. She's led multiple Techstars programs. across different geos. She holds degrees from UC Davis. That's right up the road from us. I'm in East Sacramento and APPS. Yeah. Yeah. love the El Dorado Hills. You probably know where that is. Moved out during COVID. then, Keith is the managing director of Techstars Healthcare Accelerator powered by Permanente Medicine and leads the vertical network there. Techstars, seven years there, 70 startup investments.
Brian Bell (00:58.405)
He brings the founder-turned-investor perspective, having scaled FitLinks, which was number 20 on the Deloitte Fast 500. Pretty cool and great play. And a whole series from Cornell and MIT. Thanks both for coming on.
Keith Camhi (01:13.501)
Thanks for having us this far.
Kerty Levy (01:13.57)
Yeah, absolutely. Happy to be here.
Brian Bell (01:15.619)
Yeah, so I’ll do my best. I was saying before we started recording, I don’t usually have two guests at a time. So this is kind of new for me. I’ve maybe done this one other time. I will apologize in advance for stumbling through. But this should be really, I think having a group is kind of fun. So I’d like to start with you, Kurti. What’s your origin story?
Kerty Levy (01:33.718)
Yeah, sure. I’m really, it’s defined by my worldview. I grew up in six countries and went to 13 schools by the time I graduated from college. Started in, my father was in international business and personal care, pharmaceuticals, medical device, and we moved all over. So up until college, they decided where I was going, but. After college, I decided that I was going to head off to China. I spent six years in China. And so by the time I was in my early to mid 20s, I had been outside the US more than inside the US. And what that did for me was it really gave me an appreciation for different points of view. looking at the world through different lenses, I had to figure out really quickly the lay of the land, I had to figure out languages really quickly, I had to make friends really quickly, and for a natural introvert, I forced myself to be an extrovert. very early on, I learned all the big skills to do that. And even today, I feel like that upbringing of seeing so many different parts of the world, so Japan, Sweden, Belgium, Switzerland, has really enabled me to think big. And sometimes when I meet founders, I think I can actually see their visions more largely than they can. So that’s really helped shape my view.
Brian Bell (03:05.253)
Amazing, Keith. And your turn. What’s your origin story?
Keith Camhi (03:08.733)
Yeah, so I grew up in the New York suburbs and it turned to entrepreneurship, guess, I guess for a few reasons. First was that my career expectations of being a pitcher for the Yankees were dashed at about age nine due to a lack of talent. But I was kind of always a techie at heart and and like building things. So I had to take things apart and put them together and also. I guess I had a bit of a genetic predisposition of being an entrepreneur because we can’t find anyone in the family who’s held a job for a long time. So kind of all the stars aligned on that, but I started working. Yeah, yeah. No, no, it didn’t work well for me. It didn’t work. was like,
Brian Bell (03:42.693)
I could totally relate to that. As you get a job, you’re like, I don’t want to do this.
Keith Camhi (03:50.843)
I guess my first couple of jobs reaffirmed that six months each at what turned out to be companies that had very successful Act 1s in Route 128, Polaroid and digital equipment, if you remember back that far, and they didn’t have good Act 2s, as it turned out. So I was in kind of slow moving bureaucratic companies, but I started programming in middle school and building computers in high school. And so I was destined to work on hardware and software solutions on my own.
Brian Bell (04:05.934)
older than I look.
Brian Bell (04:20.485)
But I’d like to, you know, for kind of the next set of questions, talk about your entrepreneurial journeys. I think this is a common thing I see with a lot of folks that work at Accelerators is that you guys have been founders and entrepreneurs beforehand. Kurti, maybe I can start with you. What path kind of through startups and around the world take and how did you end up at Techstars?
Kerty Levy (04:42.764)
Yeah, mine’s a little bit less traditional than Keith’s in terms of startup background. you know, when I graduated from UC Davis, I bucked the trend. Everyone went to San Francisco to look for a job and I put on a backpack and went across Europe and then jumped on the Trans-Siberian Railway and landed in China, in Beijing, China. And it was under martial law. Tiananmen had just happened and it was the Wild West. So... opportunities in those early days. One of my long-term mentors, Roberta Lipson, she had started a trading company, eventually went on to start the first foreign hospital chain in China. And just there was opportunity everywhere. I spent a lot of those early years helping Fortune 100s enter the China market. So literally helping them figure out like, we greenfield? Should we partner with these guys? How big is this market? What should we do so early? customer discovery, figuring out what we’re doing in China. And I couldn’t help but having the itch to start my own thing. I took a left turn though. I had been in China for already five or so years and I’m an athlete. And I don’t know if you guys remember, but in those days, the smog was so thick, you couldn’t see half a block.
Brian Bell (06:04.961)
I was there in 2008 right before the Olympics and they had cleaned it up and
Kerty Levy (06:08.386)
Yeah. Yes, they had. It’s actually cleaner today than ever. Yeah.
Brian Bell (06:12.069)
Oh, and I would go to blow my nose at night and it was like black, you know, just black coming out of my nose. And I got this funny story and I’ll let you continue, which is I’m getting in a taxi in Beijing and I, you know, putting on my seatbelt, you know, I had this in the front for whatever reason. And the taxi driver is like, no, no, you don’t need a seatbelt. I’m like, yeah, I’m going to wear a seatbelt. Okay. I’m from America. We do that. And so I put the seatbelt across my shirt and I get out and my wife’s like, nice sash. I’m like, what are you talking about?
Kerty Levy (06:16.066)
Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Bell (06:39.749)
And had a black tar sash across my white t-shirt because nobody had ever used a seatbelt.
Kerty Levy (06:43.414)
yeah. Yeah, that’s right. And it was that dirty.
Brian Bell (06:48.541)
Yeah, it was just that dirty. Yeah, just generally that was 2008 and you were there in the 90s, which is a whole different thing.
Kerty Levy (06:53.272)
That’s it. It was absolutely filthy. And I decided at that time that if I was going to put myself in a really good position to live healthily, I needed to be more global. So instead of staying and starting a business, I’ll just really quickly tell you my alter life would have been starting a business in learning and development. for the 30 and 40 year olds in China who had never had an education. They went through the cultural revolution. They went through the great leap forward and here they were running companies at this time and they had no idea how to run business. And I would have cleaned up. I was ready to put these centers all over China. But anyway, instead I went to business school, opened up my global options and from there ended up
Brian Bell (07:42.35)
As one does.
Kerty Levy (07:48.239)
eventually going into the startup world in San Francisco in the early 2000s during the dot-com era. So another big transformational time in tech and worked in ed tech. in product development and also in business development helped my first, I was one of the first employees at the first company helped them raise their seed fund and really enjoyed it. Loved it. And I would have stayed. In the Bay Area and probably again founded my own but my husband moved me to Iowa so he joined he joined a family firm and I was the trailing spouse to Iowa and Iowa was also a bit of an opportunity untapped Everywhere. I mean there was there were really really gritty Incredible founders hard-working people here and so much opportunity to really help them think big. so starting, first I came here just working for the Downtown Community Alliance, helping develop new companies in the area, bring events and activities to the downtown. And then I ended up joining a family firm, privately owned company in the ingredient space. Today, if they were in the VC world, they’d be seen as a growth stage probably series C company. That’s the stage they were at when I entered. And it was nine years of literally hold on. Every year was different. We were starting new businesses. We were entering new markets. And so one of the things I did there was started an entrepreneurial venture in the personal care industry. That company made ingredients. It was a biochem company. It made ingredients for food, feed, pet food. and we grew plants all over the world, rosemary, spearmint, et cetera. And I saw an opportunity to bring these natural ingredients to the personal care industry and took a swing at it. And I swung hard and we went at it for about four years. And I learned a lot. I learned a lot about long sales cycles. I learned a lot about testing in order to get through hurdles.
Kerty Levy (10:11.426)
But really what I learned was, wow, there is so much that I would have benefited from had I had someone who could be there as a startup founder next to me helping me through this. And so at some point after about four years, the business was starting to take off. But I realized I would be sitting there in a company where I couldn’t pivot off of, you know, we kind of had this supply. I couldn’t take it exactly where I wanted it to go. And I thought, you know what? I can help founders with all the experience I have in starting businesses more than stay in the company and operate it from here. And so we folded it back into one of the other divisions and I never looked back. I’ve started working with founders as an investor, as an advisor, and that’s where I think most of my skills can be best placed.
Brian Bell (11:04.271)
Amazing. We’ll circle back to the little bridge to Techstars after we hear about Keith’s traditional startup background. And just real quick, what I know Iowa for is the MIU, which is the Baharishi University, because I do TM. That’s really, really big there. Yeah.
Kerty Levy (11:18.188)
yeah, I’ve been down there. Transcendental meditation, I’m certified. Yes. At the basic level, basic.
Brian Bell (11:22.693)
Yeah, yep. Are you really? OK. We could talk about it. Yeah, we have a lot in common. Well, yeah. I have to go do the advanced techniques, and now have to go do the Citi program at some point. So I’ll go to Iowa at some point. Yeah. But I could talk about that for an hour. But let’s hear about Keith’s and his traditional startup background.
Kerty Levy (11:37.099)
great!
Keith Camhi (11:45.307)
meditation thing sounds pretty cool.
Brian Bell (11:47.333)
I’ve had a meditation teacher on actually. One of the famous ones who taught Ray Dalio and Bridgewater was on the podcast like a couple hundred episodes ago, but yeah, really amazing.
Keith Camhi (11:54.664)
amazing.
Keith Camhi (11:59.067)
Yeah, one of my series A lead, Gustaiya to Trinity Ventures is now kind of a full-time mindfulness practitioner and fascinating backstory there, but it’s...
Brian Bell (12:10.083)
Well, it’s part of my backpacking days, like me and Courtney, you know, backpacking in our 20s or whatever. was like, yeah, sure. I’ll do the 10 day silent retreat. Yeah, sure. I’ll do this like like this and that. And yeah, so I spent a lot of time in my 20s doing that and trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. And meditation was part of that.
Keith Camhi (12:28.399)
Impressive. I am impressed by that because I’ve lasted 15 minutes multiple times at attempting long sessions. it’s, yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s.
Brian Bell (12:37.253)
Oh yeah, you should go do the 10 day sound retreat. It’ll be the hardest thing you’ve ever done.
Kerty Levy (12:39.66)
He said.
Keith Camhi (12:41.085)
I am sure it will.
Brian Bell (12:43.407)
I think I cried for like three days straight. think like days like two, three and four, I just cried. Yeah. Just like boredom and everything else. Yeah.
Keith Camhi (12:49.584)
Amazing.
Brian Bell (12:54.615)
Anyway, so yeah, walk us through your journey, of building fit links, great play, and then eventually getting to Techstars.
Keith Camhi (13:05.277)
Yeah. So, um, you know, after working at a couple of slow moving companies, I went to the other extreme. I’ve been part of four startups, two of which are my own, but the first experience post route one, 28 slow moving companies was with a solopreneur, um, a great entrepreneur named Ron Harris, who was building custom electronic boards and then getting them manufactured for clients. And he needed a number two when a little fintech company he was building for started taking off, uh, named Bloomberg. And he was selling the, hardware that became the Bloomberg terminal and just skyrocket growth and eventually sold that to Bloomberg. So it’s kind of the number two person for him there.
Keith Camhi (14:52.351)
the whole technology journey there on getting it to work, but that was kind outpacing.
Brian Bell (14:55.205)
It’s like a first generation tonal, if you’re familiar with that.
Keith Camhi (14:58.909)
Yeah, well, yes. Yeah, that was the first of what would then be 10 generations of that. But it was kind of this computerized equipment. And I guess the kind of key pivot points along the way were one we had is one of our test users in the basement ended up being the strength coach for the New York Knicks. And that became our first customer. So we went from Miles Basement to back in the Patrick Ewing days. So they were using our equipment in their gym to coach the athletes.
Keith Camhi (16:58.521)
fit, ended up merging with the company that did the sensor for the Nike sneaker. And we ended up exiting as a health tech play many years later. And then I went on to do my second startup, which was an idea from my wife who was working with our children on motor skills and sports skill development. And we made kind of interactive gyms for kids where you would learn motor skills and sports skills by way of play. And big lesson from from fit links was while that was a really fun ride, I learned two new words which were liquidation preference and dilution from working with venture capitalists. And so it was a great ride and they go, we could have taken the early X and done better than this. the, so great play was the keep it small, own it all, more of a lifestyle business, but we rolled out as a franchise system. And so rolled out what became a franchise 500 company with 30 locations. And that’s a beautiful business. We were just kind of collecting royalties and didn’t need any venture capital because the franchise fees let us open up the locations.
Brian Bell (17:31.813)
you
Keith Camhi (17:56.731)
And that kept going for years, the royalty collection kept going for years, even after I turned to focusing on investment myself. And that was kind of the point at which I started advising companies and venture funds and ultimately at Techstars.
Brian Bell (18:09.591)
It’s funny we have in the outline I shared with you guys the biggest mistake you made early on. And you kind of brought out the story of liquidation preference. Maybe you could talk about what were the terms on the cap table and how did that put you in a disadvantage and an exit scenario just for the founders out there listening that may not know when they’re looking at a term sheet.
Keith Camhi (18:26.363)
Yeah. Yeah. And I think it’s relevant to today’s AI situation where funding can be widely available if you’re in certain categories and just be careful that you know what to do with it. Our series A was kind of a classic pre internet bubble round, which was, you know, great. So one X liquidation preference on a $7 million raise, I think it was in the twenties post money and, you know, this is 20 some odd years ago. So that’s maybe 2X value today on what a series A would be. And so that made sense. What didn’t make sense was the internet bubble emerging and crazy uptick in valuations then. So I think we grew, you know, we’re in the 40s or 50s in the next round with J.H. Whitney coming in and another 1X liquidation preference there. When the bubble burst, We were the last remaining fitness tech company to get any funding and we were very fortunate because we also had this health care place. We had UBS capital and then Health South, we had a major strategic player came in for around that was valued probably 100 post. But one of the VCs dropped off. Well, when a VC drops off, you got to punish the VC that drops out. And so you meaning the other VCs for non-participation. they say, about a 4X liquidation preference on this one to punish them for not going along. Now, fortunate, and so what that’s meaning is that, you know, the hurdle before the first dollar exit is starting to add up and add up. In parallel with that, they made a management bonus pool though to make sure we were taken care of. So all of a sudden the stock ownership became less relevant than the bonus pool and the liquidation preference when that starts happening. So it’s kind of an interesting story that we teach founders about today when you’re taking on a lot of capital, just make sure you know how to deploy it to get to the multiples that are necessary to get the valuations that’ll put that in the money.
Brian Bell (20:20.709)
Yeah, I was talking to a private equity guy on the podcast a few episodes ago. And he goes, show me the valuation and I’ll show you the structure. And I think what he meant by that is like, hey, I can get you whatever valuation you want. It’s just a matter of like what the structure on the cap table is going to be for that valuation. So hey, you want to be a unicorn? Great. You’re going to have a 2x look pref on this and other things like that.
Keith Camhi (20:42.578)
Yep.
Brian Bell (20:45.113)
I’d love to get into Techstars. What, for each of you, what originally attracted you guys to Techstars? What’s that origin story?
Kerty Levy (20:53.56)
Well, for me, was serendipitous. I was living in Iowa, as I mentioned at the time, and a good friend of mine, Isaac Cata, who used to run the Techstars Seattle program, said, hey, they’re starting a program. Techstars is starting a program in Iowa with Grinnell College, and I’m recommending you for the job. So I quickly looked up Techstars and, wow. I was just blown away with what Techstars was doing, the original mission, incredible, the give first mentality, the culture of Techstars drew me right in. The group of MDs that I became colleagues with are still, yes, right, exactly, managing directors are still some of the most brilliant, supportive, incredible people I’ve ever met. So, so wonderful to work with. And so,
Brian Bell (21:34.787)
Not medical doctors, managing directors. Yeah.
Kerty Levy (21:48.835)
That’s what brought me in and I’ll talk a little bit later about the spinning up of that program. But it was a no brainer, like helping entrepreneurs succeed. What a fantastic mission. So that’s what brought me in.
Brian Bell (22:03.737)
and what about your keys?
Keith Camhi (22:05.509)
Yes, similar. So I was living out in Colorado at the time and which is where Techstars is founded and so knew a lot of Techstars folks from the area. And I was starting to advise startups and invest and angel invest. there’s really, if you’re playing in the angel space, there’s no better platform than Techstars to be doing that at scale with the scope of support. funding that goes with it, the peer group and so forth. I, after independently advising a couple of venture funds in the area and being an entrepreneur in residence for them, I moved over to Techstars to do it on their platform. The other thing that I found really attractive was the culture. I wouldn’t do well at most other people’s companies. Like I had been in the signatory of my own paychecks for 25 years at that point. And I told the founders, think this is the only company that I could really work for. And part of it is just the culture they created with the give first philosophy that David Cohen and Brad Feld talk about. And Brad has a new book about, just the founder first mentality. We’re always going to focus on the founder as opposed to any other stakeholder. It really resonated with my own thinking about how I would want to do this. And it’s a really wonderful position to be in to be able to support founders and have the backing of a powerful engine.
Kerty Levy (23:29.326)
And I forgot to mention, Brian, when I left Kemen, the first thing I did was start working with startups in Iowa. So was an entrepreneur in residence for the Iowa Agrotech Accelerator. And I found myself during my second year there being asked by the board to be the managing director of that accelerator. And I thought, wow, this is really cool. And I had not been in that position. So to be the person who’s investing in a number of companies at a time and really putting together a cohort and then shepherding them through and making sure that they were successful on the back end, I already had the bug. So when Isaac called me and told me about the TechStars opportunity in IOI, thought that’s really where I should be.
Brian Bell (24:16.549)
So let’s talk about the vertical networks. What does that give us a high level synopsis of why you guys started doing that? Because of course, it started in Boulder with the flagship accelerator. And then you guys spread geographically around the world. And then there was this this gap that you guys identified in going after verticals. Maybe talk about what the mission is and what vertical networks does there at Techstars.
Kerty Levy (24:41.774)
Yeah, I can start, Keith, and you jump in. vertical, so first of all, we’ve got over 5,000, 6,000 companies in our network, right? And they’re in so many different.
Brian Bell (24:55.641)
These are all companies have gone through the accelerator over the years. Yeah.
Kerty Levy (24:58.35)
We’ve gone through the accelerator and obviously some have not fared well, many have fared well, and there are a lot that are just going concerns, right? And so we were looking for ways to help our companies succeed even more. We were thinking about, and Techstars is structured in a way where we have partner programs and then we have sort of Fund run programs, those tend to be more generalist. The partner programs tend but don’t necessarily need to be more vertically focused. So Keith will talk about his program in a little bit. the partner program I ran in Iowa was a generalist program. Grinnell College was open to anything that really matched the Midwest need. So we started to see that, you know what, for founders to be successful, maybe they want to connect with groups of potential mentors, potential customers, potential partners within their verticals. And we started to look at, we’ve got all the data on them. Let’s figure out how to group them, put together a platform in order to enable them to come together. We started launching round tables per vertical. So 180 founders would sign up and jump in, and we’d break them out into different rooms, and we’d have discussions with them to figure out, know, it was more peer helping peer, but also we learned a ton about what they were looking for. And then we have put on events tied to major industry conferences. Maybe it’s a side event, bring people together who happen to be at health for that conference or money and then bring together our network of partners and. potential customers that these founders be working with and figure out ways to cross pollinate them. So maybe it’s a workshop or a panel or maybe a happy hour. I threw a happy hour in the HealthTech vertical in Boston a couple of years ago and brought together founders from a bunch of different areas with funders but also potential partners in the space.
Kerty Levy (27:07.266)
We’re really looking for opportunities to bring people together and help them succeed. Again, focused on the founder first, and then looking for ways to get more organizations, potential partners, customers interested in this group of founders. I don’t know if you want to add anything, Keith, but that’s the main sort of driver behind the vertical networks is to support the founders.
Keith Camhi (27:34.641)
Yeah, and think I’d agree with all of that and I would add on and maybe my vantage point on this might help make clear what I’m saying. before I became a managing director at Techstars, I actually started at Techstars managing our accelerator. So I was going, I was hiring the people who were in my role today and overseeing them originally just on the East along with Daniel Feld, who’s Brad’s brother who was running the West. and eventually doing that globally. So I was traveling around the world, visiting our partners, visiting our accelerators when we had 40 some odd accelerators around the world. And what I saw from that was that I think our real superpower, our real differentiation in the market is our distributed network. So there are plenty of good local accelerators that are standalone and can do a dozen companies a year. And there’s obviously at least one or two massive scale accelerators that are all in one location. And I think what we do really well is we do distributed scale. And so we’re able to do these little nodes of eight to 10 companies at a time in various geographies and or various verticals, give them a lot of hand holding and attention, often with a partner who can help them during that three month period. And then we’re communicating with each other all over the place. So all of our managing directors are in touch all the time. We’re all on a WhatsApp group together and saying, here’s the latest trend in pre-seed term sheets. And what are you seeing? And we hear from Australia and Tokyo. you know, so this is like this superpower in our pocket of being able to have a pulse on the industry at any time. That’s the distributed network part. To take advantage of the scale, we now have, as Kurtie pointed out, thousands of alumni, know, hundreds going through a year. And to slice and dice and take advantage of that volume, it makes sense to group them in some way. The natural way is geographical. It’s easy to get a geography together. But the other major axis we have is this vertical.
Keith Camhi (29:40.729)
networks. so whether we’re giving investors access to a pool of companies, boy, if they’re a healthcare investor, they would like to kind of optimize to meet the healthcare companies. or if we want them to get peer support on go to market strategy, well, the regulatory burden in healthcare is fundamentally different than a lot of other categories. Let’s get an expert speaker on that or round tables on that. And so this idea had been kicking around Techstars for I think a decade. think David Cohen had old emails on like, hey, we should do this, but always too busy. And so a bunch of us under David’s direction kind of got together and say, what shape would this take? And we had the latitude of being able to focus on that for about a year to come up with some concepts for it. And this is what’s emerging. I think it’s incredibly powerful for the alumni and even filtering into the programs itself and companies are with us on how they tap that network.
Brian Bell (30:30.913)
And it sounds like it’s both verticals, but also it could be some geos, right? Kind of included in the program and maybe even some workload categories like AI or, you know, networking or,
Keith Camhi (30:40.763)
Yeah, well, in.
Kerty Levy (30:42.56)
Yeah, I think.
Keith Camhi (30:42.651)
Yeah, I think the GO happens automatically because we run an accelerator physically in a place for most of the accelerators. Courtney also runs a virtual one. when we’re geographically based in Washington, D.C. and focused on health care. the D.C. part comes about naturally. Our health care part when we’re in program comes about naturally by way of the relationship with Kaiser Permanente’s medical group, Permanente Medicine. So that happens when we’re local. the and the alumni group in D.C. gets together. So the GO we get almost for free. It’s how do you maximize the verticals? And it pretty runs probably our broadest so-called vertical network.
Kerty Levy (31:19.842)
Yeah, I was going to say, it’s, you know, we’re also playing around with this is, I remember I talked about the.com era or the internet was a vertical at one point in time. We’re sort of at that stage with AI. So some of our founders are in the, you know, they have been going concerns. They’re actually doing really well with their businesses, but they need to back work AI into their businesses and they’re going quickly. And so being able to provide them a platform, a place to come and learn, collaborate, figure out what tools are best, how should I go about this? What did you learn, et cetera. And then new founders coming in who are all AI native and who are saying, yeah, you know, let’s I’m, finding credits here. I’m doing this quickly. Here’s a tool I can use. And so being able to help all of our founders across that, we actually made AI ML a vertical for As long as it needs to be, think it will ultimately get split into a bunch of different verticals within AI. So take robotics, physical AI, or whatever, whatever they happen to be. But right now, we want to make sure there’s enough for everyone. And so we are calling it a vertical right now.
Brian Bell (32:33.849)
Gotcha. So for the founders out there listening to the pod, how do they get started with Techstars? Do they just go to techstars.com and try to figure it out? Like, what’s the best way to sort of engage and kind of take the first step with with with
Kerty Levy (32:46.36)
There are so many different ways. So yeah, for sure. to, know, showing up to an online event, we post those all the time. There are managing directors recruiting twice a year for their programs. And so, I mean, right now we’ve got virtual office hours out there and founders can jump in and learn about Techstars either one-on-one or in a group setting. There is a whole community side of Techstars, which is It focused on founders who aren’t even ready for an accelerator so they can learn about what is Techstars. They a volunteer organization, startup weekends. So people who want to put their toe in the water on what is this whole startup thing about, they can learn there. And then again, we have events at some of these in-person locations. City events. So for example, the city of Boston is hosting a big gathering of alumni and friends. So new founders who want to come, they can come to that on Wednesday night and learn about Techstars that way. So I think we’re there locally in person, we’re there online, we’re there for self-help, know, set up office hours, learn something or listen to a panel, lots of different ways.
Brian Bell (34:05.061)
You dropped the word virtual in there really quick. So I wanted to talk about that, right? Because we all just went through COVID four or five years ago. Now everybody’s back in person. And you hear a lot of like, like, yeah, I’ve had people on the pod who are remote first all the way. It’s the best. And I’ve had, obviously, people said the opposite. What are some challenges of running a virtual accelerator versus an in-person one?
Kerty Levy (34:31.64)
So the big secret is it’s not 100 % virtual. I have my founders meet three times in person for a week each, one at the beginning, one in the middle, one at the end. I am a big believer in in-person relationships can really only be cemented, formed in person. But virtual allows for the flexibility of the founder who needs to be a lot of different places. They need to be near and around family. So that doesn’t rule out founders who can’t move, pick up for three months and be in a certain location. And so the way that we run virtual though, our founders love it. We were in touch all every single week. They get the same amount of attention as they would when they would be in a particular building and who runs an office from a desk in one spot anyway, right? Unless they’re doing it virtually. And so We’re doing the one-on-ones. We’re holding the accountability meetings. We are doing any kind of, you know, optional workshops they want to grab. They’re all there. So for me, it’s all about flexibility and definitely, you know, frequent in-person touches. So once a month.
Keith Camhi (35:48.061)
Yeah. And I’ve done both. think the punchline for founders is that if you’re able to do a full-time in-person program, you will probably get more benefit from that. The peer bonding, the hallway conversations that come out are terrific. But for a large number of founders who simply can’t do that, I think our approach
Brian Bell (36:08.845)
Yeah, I got a mortgage. I got a couple of kids. They’re like, I’m not going to go move to Boulder for 90 days or whatever it is.
Keith Camhi (36:12.475)
100%. I mean, it’s so valuable. I think you can get a large percentage of the benefit with the method that Kurt described without having to relocate. And I’ll give you a concrete example. So I used to run our program with Linda Gates’s Pivotal Ventures focused on the future of longevity. And so the whole idea was with the solutions for the family caregiver. who’s dealing with aging parents and children and disrupting careers. And if they’re the individual that these solutions are meant for, they’re likely to be the founders of these companies and asking them to go relocate for three months is antithetical to the principle of this accelerator even existing. And so that was a important compromise to make is to say, going to only, I’ve come in twice, three times a year, just like Ferdy described and get 90 % of the value. you in 20 % of the time. And I think that that’s a great trade off to be able to make. for founders, you can, if you have the luxury of doing either, in person. It’s really great to be with a group of founders for 13 weeks.
Kerty Levy (37:21.73)
I’ll make the case for Slack being a great hallway conversation place as well. A lot of sharing there. Founders who have gone through my programs, all of my programs have been hybrid, meaning some in person, some not, are very, very tightly bonded. They continue to be the CEOs from my last program are still meeting every Friday morning on a virtual call. They support each other with their celebrations and also when they’re in trouble, you know, hey, I got Let me help you with this. Let me help you with that. So I think you can do both. And this translates not only from program, but to work too for startup founders in general. How do you form a team? Do you go all in in one place? It’s a big question, right? So being able to operate in both, I think is the superpower.
Brian Bell (38:13.359)
So we talked a little bit about how to get in touch and how you kind of support founders before Techstars. So for founders listening, how are you supporting them during the program, whatever it is, the 12-week program I think is pretty standard. And then how do you support them after the program?
Keith Camhi (38:31.357)
Yeah, I can hear that you kind of... Yeah, so we have some common elements of all our programs to sort of have a core approach to this, but any given program might vary a little under the leadership of different managing directors and or partnerships we have in that program on what we focus on. But general flow of third of a week, kind of 12 weeks and then a week of demo day and showing off what you did to the 13th week of storytelling. We’ll generally open with a week of intensive workshops, starting with strategic planning. It’s sort of the slow down to speed up phase of the program. Go really evaluate your strategy from top to bottom, broad vision, the major milestones that are coming up, the change you want to make in the world, what your KPIs are, what you’re going to work on and chip away at. And then Begin the process of saying, am going to explain this to the outside world? So we want to knock out in one week almost the hyper accelerator of plan the business and say how you’re going to explain it to others. What’s the investment memo look like for this? Um, and then, uh, we roll into two weeks of, of mentor feedback, uh, after that, so we get about a hundred mentors involved on average with a typical program and they’ll speed date with the founders for weeks two and three, um, with the purpose of getting feedback on the strategic plan and also matching up to see if there are some mentors who want to work with the company for the rest of the program. And so the goal is to both pressure test your business model and find four or five mentors who are going to continue to work with you for the next 10 weeks. And then we go into a weekly cycle of declaring objectives for the week, going in and trying to accomplish them, measuring them, say what you learned from it, whether or not you succeeded with it, rinse, repeat. We have workshops throughout and work with mentors and it’s really a mentored driven experience for each company, ultimately culminating with investor readiness in a demo day. But so that’s kind of the core element of it. When we have a partner involved, like I’m working with permanent day medicine on my program, also in our, from the healthcare vertical, we also have programs in Baltimore that work with Johns Hopkins and care first and out in Chicago, working with Northwestern medicine, along with partial focuses and other programs like Ohio state, Boston and others. So when there are partners involved, We also get an additional layer of benefits. Like we have 40 some odd mentors who are physicians at Permanente Medicine working with our companies who are trying to find them early opportunities to find product market fit and even potentially identify the opportunity to pilot with an organization like Kaiser Permanente, which usually a pre-seed company will have no access to doing. That’s usually kind of like a series B activity. So that’s the other superpowers when we have a partner involved in getting that sort of access.
Kerty Levy (41:15.758)
And I’ll just add for the the fund programs or the generalist programs, every cohort that comes in, we look at the individual companies and we figure out, which mentors are we going to bring in for this particular group of companies? So I might have a handful in PropTech or supply chain or manufacturing. And then I’m looking out not only through the mentors who have worked with tech stars companies in the past, but also who do I know in my network and who else do I want to bring in to help these companies succeed. And it really, there’s a lot of flexibility for each of us to build exactly the individualized program that we want to. So individualized for the founder, for the company that’s coming in, but also for the cohort each time.
Brian Bell (42:05.029)
So I’m a huge fan of accelerators. mean, as an early stage VC, I invest in pre-seed companies. I see a lot of pre and post accelerator companies. And it’s a pretty night and day difference. think anytime I encounter a first time founder or founding team, I say, go apply to all the great accelerators, including Techstars, and see where you can get in. And it’s more than worth the 5 or 7 % dilution you’re going to take, whatever that deal is. Where do you think accelerators are? still misunderstood today.
Kerty Levy (42:38.55)
I’ll go, I mean, the point I was just making, I think people misunderstand accelerators as being a class, like a university class or some kind of workshop, series of workshops, whereas I think the accelerator is truly about each company’s journey, where are they entering? And truly where are they accelerating to? So some are going to come in pre revenue and they’re figuring out what is my ICP and then finding, you know, product market fit. then another, sorry. did ideal customer profile and then finding product market.
Brian Bell (43:08.867)
Ideal customer profile for anybody who’s listening doesn’t know this. I always try to like pull the jargon out and the acronyms that the three of us just know like, like the back of our hand, but some listeners might be going, what is ICP?
Kerty Levy (43:21.614)
Smart. And then others might come in with quite a bit of revenue. So there are a couple of things that happen there. One, they might have revenue, but they really need to figure out where do we go from here? What is the strategy? What’s the scale? How do I open this little teeny tiny wedge that I found and make it bigger? Or maybe they need support in product or tech or something. And then there’s a lot of hey, we wanna enter the US market, we have some revenue over here, we figured out this is a thing, now I wanna join an accelerator in the US and take it from there. And we’ve had a number of companies do that.
Brian Bell (44:05.101)
And so, Keith, do you think there is such a thing as being too early or too late for an accelerator? And if so, like, what are those delineations?
Keith Camhi (44:13.053)
I think there’s a lot of flexibility in the stage you’re in. I will take companies into the program who are pre-revenue and even as early as an idea stage, if the team is extraordinary and the market is big, that has to be a really special team. That’s not the norm. That’s the exception.
Brian Bell (44:32.997)
Because in a way, accelerators take a bet on the team in a lot of ways, very often.
Keith Camhi (44:37.689)
yeah, we see our typical mantra is that of our core six criteria, the first three are team, team, team. So it really is all about that team. And, know, I think almost every stage of venture up until very late stages would say team is number one, but team is often the close to the only thing. it’s a traction alone isn’t going to be the thing yet. We don’t have the numbers to back up that this is clear product market fit or is ready for scale, but it’s can this team pull off something in a really large market?
Keith Camhi (45:11.423)
Yeah, so I think that that’s, I think that’s. Well, so, I mean, right now I have a company in the current program that already has $10 million in revenue on the way in and is trying to figure out what their second act is, right? They have a core product line, extraordinary founder, extraordinary solving of a key problem.
Brian Bell (45:11.423)
Too late. Is there such a thing as too late for the accelerator? At what point you’re like, yeah, you kind of don’t need us.
Keith Camhi (45:32.145)
but they’re now, you know, customer concentration risk as well as product line risk. And so how, when, where do I expand and get some visibility and also working with Kaiser. So I think too late is more driven by the company’s decision that it were past the stage of being willing to take the dilution hit of an accelerator. think anywhere up to a pre-seed, know, typical, typically I’ll see companies from zero to a couple million dollars in funding. We’ll still think an accelerator makes sense. up to a few million dollars of revenue could still make sense, but it’ll really be amazing.
Brian Bell (46:03.301)
I get those MFN carve out letters every once in a while. Hey, we got into such and such accelerator. We got to wave your MFN. Is that OK? I’m like, yeah, that’s fine. Go for it.
Keith Camhi (46:11.345)
Yeah, exactly. The accelerator is not really a funding event. you know, like, so our terms are flexible to that. So as long as you look at the accelerator itself is not a funding event, and that makes sense. And then our safe now is an uncapped MFN safe itself. So it plays nicely with any capital source where we used to have terms that would not have played well with other capital
Kerty Levy (46:23.202)
Mm-hmm.
Brian Bell (46:34.405)
So, Kurti, I’ll ask you this question, and I’m kind of going back and forth. So feel free to chime in if you want to follow on on any of the answers. So imagine you come in, it’s just a team and a good idea at day zero, and now they’re at day 90 at demo day. What does meaningful success and traction look like in that 90-day span? Where you’re patting yourself on the back like, we did a good job here, and this team did a good job.
Kerty Levy (46:56.61)
Yeah, it’s different for everyone, of course. We have them during that first week that Keith talked about, every single company sets their goals for the first three months that they’re in the accelerator in forms of goals, objectives, key results, and really sets out to achieve something. We focus less on the actual number achieved and more on the momentum. So if teams are moving quickly and they’re continuing to build that momentum, that means it could be anything. It could be users, could be LOIs, could be, you know, depending on what industry they’re in, it can be revenue, it can be a whole number of things that just show they’re moving from stage to stage really quickly. And it’s a signal that shows that the market that they’re aiming for is engaged and they love what they’re doing. And so we’re really focused on that, whether they hit a certain number that they set out to hit or not is less important than the momentum that they’re carrying through. And a lot of times I’ll have companies blow past that number halfway through program and realize that, it really is not about the number. It’s about what am I, how quickly am I building and listening to what the market needs and then delivering what they need. So they keep coming back.
Brian Bell (48:18.309)
So Keith, you mentioned the first three criteria out of six is team, team, team, which I love. How do you spot great teams and founders who can benefit most from programs like you guys run?
Keith Camhi (48:29.981)
So yeah, it’s an interesting one. So I think part of it is just their aptitude for pulling off what they’re working on. So technical skill in a technical field will sort of speak for itself. And then their ability to explain what they’re doing. We teach a lot about the storytelling aspect of it. So I don’t care if it’s polished, but more like can you explain why the world needs this and why you’re going to run through walls to do it? So it’s this sense that they’re going to relentlessly execute on something and they have a unique vantage point for for pulling it off. And so I think those are the things that come together. And interestingly, as we all recently did a portfolio exercises within our investment team where we went and then Carti and I have fairly sizable Techstars portfolios now. I’ve been here for a while. And we had to leave that voice notes on every one of the companies and what we like, you know, and there’s that process of going through them and then all comparing the notes on them. It’s interesting that I’m increasingly finding, I’m finding myself even more drawn to the big swing for the fences bets. that could be really big or go to zero and it’s okay. You know, some of them are going to fail, the safer bets turn out to become, you know, kind of safe fish, double, triple outcomes. But when we’re looking at the ones that are really moved the needle. It’s the folks working on these really big, unrealistically big things that maybe they have a shot at, but may or may not come together. And then the accelerator can help them do that.
Keith Camhi (50:18.491)
And so a bunch of the ones that early on in my first accelerators, these are the ones that would come in off the wait list for me. like, really like what they’re doing, but this is way too risky. How could I possibly put this in front of a partner? And then they get in off the wait list and like, wow, that turned out to be the best company in the class. I got to do more of that stuff. And it goes back to my own willingness. You know, I’m both a hardware and a software guy. So I’m not, you know, so So I’m willing to do the hard things and do regulated fields and companies that can persevere through those challenges will end up, it’s harder, but they’ll have markets to themselves. And so I find myself drawn more and more to that. so founders who can explain why they would want to do something as hard as they’re working on, it gets really interesting. I got, know, those are my, those are my favorite examples to talk about after too, because they’re just working on really interesting things.
Brian Bell (50:46.159)
Kurt, do you have anything to add to that?
Kerty Levy (50:48.61)
Yeah, just say that the founder makes all the difference and really understanding people’s backgrounds and where they come from and some of the hardships, some of the breakups they’ve gone through before with other founders. Digging in, it gets really personal early on because even if they come in with a little something, some traction or whatnot.
Keith Camhi (50:48.935)
Yes, I think so.
Kerty Levy (51:13.294)
If it’s not the right founding team, breaking up is so easy if something goes wrong. So we spend a lot of time upfront getting to know where founders’ mindsets are, what’s driving them, how do they know each other, where do they feel the other one adds value to the company. So really digging in to personal issues.
Brian Bell (51:37.52)
That’s why being a solo founder is so hard, right? Because you have to do a little bit of everything and having those complementary skill sets on the team is so important. That said, I do back solo founder sometimes, but it’s just, got a lot of work. And Keith, what you said kind of reminded me of, I’m paraphrasing Sam Altman, he said in a podcast at some point, he said, when I look at a startup, I try not to think about, I try to think about if it goes well, Like how big will this be? Will it be a trillion dollar company if it goes well? Will it be a billion to revenue kind of company if it works? Versus like what I think what you said resonates, which is, yeah, some safe, mediocre five or 10 % monthly growth and kind of a well understood field is going to have a, it’s going to be a mediocre kind of outcome. Maybe you kind of get to tens of millions of revenue and it just kind of fizzles out versus like, hey, this is like a moonshot thing. And if it works, it’s a big thing.
Keith Camhi (52:10.717)
Right.
Brian Bell (52:35.663)
And that’s very venture scalable stuff, right? Yeah.
Keith Camhi (52:39.665)
Yeah. No, I agree. And I’d say early on in my investing, especially when I was doing it with other people’s money instead of my own, I was much more risk averse because the fear of failure of any given company, I didn’t want to look stupid for picking this company that crashed and burned six months after graduating. And then I think upon getting more confidence that they weren’t going to fire me for a couple of going sideways and instead thought that it was pretty exciting to have some, have some significant upside potential. think I got more and more comfortable saying that that’s really the main criteria and risk of any given company failing is negligible in importance compared to some of them being able to beat the lottery tickets and big wins. And it’s much more fun too. It’s going for something really big.
Brian Bell (53:20.421)
So yeah, right, right. It’s data centers and space. Yeah, was like, what? I guess you guys could argue you’re the industry leaders in corporate partnerships and fitting these into the accelerator. Maybe you could share some examples or stories of some of these corporate partnerships that really accelerated a startup’s journey. I’m sure you guys got many stories on tap.
Keith Camhi (53:27.385)
Right?
Keith Camhi (53:49.083)
Yeah. Pretty, much. I, I, I, I want you to your own and then I was just looking at our unicorn list of who came from the partners that I, I’m happy to share this as well. But yeah.
Kerty Levy (53:49.914)
You want to go first, Keith? I can. I can. Yeah, no, I...
Kerty Levy (53:58.627)
No, right. So even if the partner is a generalist partner, they can play a big part. the case was with Grinnell College, you know, their main driver for being a partner was to, obviously, they wanted to make a return and even JT, who is the chief investment officer, said, look, half my board wants to see a return and the other half wants to see a return and They want to enhance the startup community in the Midwest. They want to make a name for Grinnell College, and they want to do these feel-good things. But where the partner is really helpful, JT was one of the best partners that I could have had. He was the chief investment officer of a multi-billion dollar fund, and he had every single person answer his call if he needed. And so him being able to do that for our startup founders if we needed it was just fantastic. The other thing was that we did have a couple in workforce and EdTech, especially during the COVID years, and he was able to support. brought in, and I agreed to it, Iowa State and University of Iowa as partners, even though they didn’t participate in any. you know, money way in any investment nature, but they were all in. And so we had open door to go to the Iowa State campus and do POCs over there and the University of Iowa campus. had all kinds of people willing to help out. And so partners can really play an important role in the help us understand whatever you do, how we work with you. all the way to opening doors and also bringing their own expertise to the field.
Keith Camhi (55:52.338)
Yeah. And for my part, know, my, my, I’m seeing already, I mean, we’re, in week, month two of our first accelerator with permanent day medicine. I’m already seeing the difference in having a healthcare partner like that, giving access to the founders is going to have on their trajectory. That portfolio is obviously way too young to talk outcomes, but in terms of just, so, you know, some of our unicorn portfolio we had out of, for instance, in the FinTech space, which was partnered with Barclay for a bunch of it, Barclays, had, both chain and alloy come out of that one. Our RGA accelerator, is on IoT, is latch and outlet both came out of that. So latch being the door locks that are widely seen everywhere. The Kaplan EdTech program had DeGreed and New Zella come out and so on. are several others that are earlier than Unicorn Stage, but we’re seeing one out of the Target program now that’s getting there. So I think that when you have the combination of what we can bring to the founders, to our accelerator platforming, you just add the free additional benefit of a partner coming in. as long as their goals are aligned with yours, as a startup and you get their mentorship and their access to potential POCs if they’re doing for an innovation strategy reason, it’s just an extra superpower. I, so I got a team of 1800 doctors at Permanente Medicine who like to work with, you know, who help vet the companies in the application phase in ways in every specialty. I’ve got everything from cancer pathology studies to eyewear to mental health and to have the physician specialist looking at the applications even for fit up font. and then mentoring the companies and considering potential pilots with them is just supercharges of program. And that’s what we get to see on our partner program.
Brian Bell (57:42.982)
Love it. Well, I’d like to you guys have been doing this for a while. I’d love to talk about kind of how things have shifted over the last five years, five or 10 years. And then maybe each of you can answer that and then also think about maybe answer. What are you excited about in the next three to five years? I don’t want to say 10 years is too far to look out. But what have you seen change over the last five or 10 years? What are you excited about today and what are you excited for the coming years?
Kerty Levy (58:11.672)
Well, even in the six years that I’ve been at Techstars, I have seen the number of startups increase like tenfold. mean, anyone wants to start a company. They come out of college and they want to start a company and not every company and every founding team is ready to. be invested in. They’re not investable. They have an idea. It sounds fun and they don’t want to work for anyone else. And so that’s just grown incredibly. So there’s a lot of noise. And so part of the time I spend just coaching founders like, do you really want to do this? This is a major, major step. Do you want to go? So the other thing is that there’s a lot of noise on the investor side. A lot of micro funds spun up during that time and accelerators, which aren’t really accelerators, kind of started spinning up dev shops that said, Hey, we have an incubator. And really what it was is payout your MVP, right? And then, and then we’ll launch you. And so it just got really noisy over the last six years. And I think that’s been something we’ve had to be more proactive.
Brian Bell (59:09.893)
for Adventure Studio now. Yeah. Yeah.
Kerty Levy (59:23.114)
reaching out to founders who we think really mean business and who are going to change the world. And so that’s what excites me. I spend most of my time on the outbound looking to meet founders who are building solutions to real world problems that they understand that they are driven to solve. They’re going to stick with it for five, 10, whatever, however many years it takes, they’re so driven by solving this problem that they really want to stay in it. And the way we find those people is fascinating. We’re using AI now. We can find people who have a background in technology, who have started companies before or worked in tech before, who happen to be in stealth or even have a small startup under their name right now. and you reach out to these founders and say, hey, let’s have a conversation. I’ve had 50 conversations over the last two, three weeks with founders, whether or not they’re going to be accelerator ready. They’ve been fascinating conversations. These are the people who are really changing the world. And back to Keith’s point, they’re the ones swinging for the fences. They’re not building little. They’re building huge things and they’re trying to figure it out right now. So yeah, that excites me.
Brian Bell (01:00:40.239)
What about looking forward? What are you excited for in the coming years?
Kerty Levy (01:00:42.87)
Yeah, we so my current thesis is actually what I’m most excited about coming up. And for the spring, we’re looking at I think that the time is now for moving into taking the brains of AI and starting to maneuver the physical world. So we’re investing in physical AI robotics, still focused on, you know, AI native in general, but we want it to be something that is swinging toward, you know, this is not a me too, this is something unique, this is something that hasn’t been done yet. And so my whole world right now is what’s new and what’s really changing the world in a positive way.
Brian Bell (01:01:25.189)
Keith, what about you? Changes you’ve seen in last five, 10 years and what are you looking forward to right now?
Keith Camhi (01:01:31.217)
Yeah, I guess in addition to what, Kurti said in terms of changes, I’d say that, you know, big, big shift is from tailwinds to headwinds over that period in the investment climate. And, we’ve seen cycles like this before I lived through them in the operator seat through two other cycles and now in the investor seat. And I will say, I think I prefer headwinds. It’s, it’s not as fun at the time. everything’s hard and. The competition gets pre-vetted for you. not the, you don’t have the, these silly companies coming out of nowhere and getting too much capital and big liquidation preferences. but if you can win through headwinds in tough markets, in more limited venture time, you’re more likely to have a market to yourself and have a major expansion opportunity. So I actually think it favors really good strategic, entrepreneurs who can be resilient and fight through. that’s kind of the test. The test will come up at some point. We’re not going to have five winners of a market. So I’d rather shake it out early. And if I’m not going to win this thing, I can go on and do something else as opposed to get this prolonged experiment with too much capital for a while. So I think we’re in a headwinds time, which isn’t inherently a bad thing is the point.
Brian Bell (01:02:41.765)
We’re kind of, yeah, I’d say we shifted a little bit towards tailwinds with AI over the last couple of years. But yeah, I was definitely, I was investing back in 2020, 21, which very much felt like tailwinds. then, and then everything kind of all the brakes kind of slammed on and 22, 23. I was raising a fund at the time, very difficult, but also a really great time to be an investor in early stage companies, because if they were succeeding with all those headwinds, they’re pretty great companies.
Keith Camhi (01:03:09.115)
Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Bell (01:03:10.341)
And now, yeah, I feel like the winds have shifted a little bit. yeah, like you said, you’re just getting a dime a dozen AI startup that, you If I see another AI SDR startup pitch deck, think I’m just going to throw my computer out the window. Let’s.
Keith Camhi (01:03:27.133)
I got one, I got one of those for you if you want. We get along doing that. They’re really good at it though. But yeah, the aggregate capital formation still isn’t, you know, is not back up to full levels. And if you’re in a specific category, you’ll certainly feel those tailwinds and the pull. So that’s attractive. I think, yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what happens.
Brian Bell (01:03:47.376)
Well, let’s wrap up with some rapid fire. I’ll ask a question and Curdie can start and Keith will answer second. Best piece of advice you wish someone had given you earlier on?
Kerty Levy (01:04:02.329)
Go for it. Trust your gut. Take greater risk.
Keith Camhi (01:04:07.613)
I wish I had, don’t chase the shiny object when you’re thinking about go to market strategy. Actually get mentors and research the go to market before choosing one.
Brian Bell (01:04:18.15)
What’s a recent book or resource that shaped your thinking?
Kerty Levy (01:04:21.942)
It’s going to sound really weird because I read about founders all the time and I love their founder stories. So I read bios all the time, but outlive by Peter Attia. I’ve completely changed the way I move, eat and exercise.
Keith Camhi (01:04:38.269)
Great book, yes, yes, I love that one. So I’ll say a book that changed my thinking, but it changed it before it was written and now I see it. One of our co-founders, Brad Feld wrote a book called Give First, but that’s been the mantra of tech stars all the way through. Now it’s immortalized in a book of the same name, but it’s been our tech star’s mentor manifesto for years and I think it’s what we all live by here.
Brian Bell (01:05:04.769)
most underrated skill for startup founders today.
Kerty Levy (01:05:09.014)
listening, observing.
Keith Camhi (01:05:12.849)
Did a yeah, you got to go first. That’s a hundred percent. No, no, you stay. You stay. love it. That way, you know, making it up. yeah, no, it’s a hundred percent. do workshops on it. It’s it’s our sales workshop today was all about like, keep listening, keep listening. And it was an outsider who I didn’t even know us, but it was yes. Exactly.
Brian Bell (01:05:16.069)
Keith, I’m going to have Keith go first next time. Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Bell (01:05:32.933)
All right, Casey, you get to go first next. Hot take. Will AI create more opportunities than it destroys in the next three years?
Keith Camhi (01:05:40.509)
Well, if you’re talking about employment, will destroy more. it talk about broad, certainly in the short term, we’ll see what happens next. But in terms of broad opportunities from a consumer perspective and from an economic perspective, I think it’ll create more.
Kerty Levy (01:05:57.123)
I think three years is a really important turning point. If you listen to some of the experts out there, but I think more for three years and then we’re gonna have a very sharp change after that.
Brian Bell (01:06:11.545)
What’s the sharp change?
Kerty Levy (01:06:13.678)
I think that we are going to, people are going to find the seats to jump into for the greater opportunities and after about three years, there aren’t going to be very many seats.
Brian Bell (01:06:26.661)
I’m hopeful that there’ll be a Jevons paradox at play here where it gets cheaper than ever to build a company and take your idea to like a company where you can just talk to an AI and it’ll become your whole organization. And then it just accelerates to use a kind of a pun intended there. But it just accelerates our ability to create value, you know, because I can just talk to an AI on Replet and just start vibe coding my way to a solution. that I want to see in the world, right? I’m hopeful it’ll generate more opportunity, but it’s going to, think it’s going to be hard to retrain everybody that’s used to just being told what to do nine to five to become much more like, Hey, what should I do? And what do I like? And what do I want to, what do I want to create and build in the world? And I think that’s going to be a tough transition for people, even, even guided by AI, you know, credit, can go first on this one. What’s an industry ripe for disruption, not yet disrupted.
Kerty Levy (01:07:24.936)
Home maintenance and dirty job automation. That’s my next company.
Brian Bell (01:07:33.925)
Goodbye, you kid.
Keith Camhi (01:07:35.837)
Yeah, it’s still healthcare. So I’m a kid in a candy store with all the opportunities here. There’s so much to do.
Brian Bell (01:07:44.907)
And last question, Keith, if you weren’t in startups or VC or an accelerator for this matter, what would you be doing instead?
Keith Camhi (01:07:53.917)
Oh, I think, I think my Yankee spitting career could come back here with new healthcare. You know, I gotta get the arm working a little bit. Um, no, I can’t imagine doing anything else. Either I’m going to be starting one, supporting someone who does or investing in it. So I really have no good answer.
Brian Bell (01:08:08.229)
not.
Kerty Levy (01:08:10.574)
Fair, but I’ll give it a little twist. I invest in real estate on the side and I would probably do that whole time, full time, but I love space making. So creating like new spaces within old spaces, but also whole neighborhood transformations. So I’d probably be doing that.
Brian Bell (01:08:30.309)
And this has been a great conversation. Where can founders in particular find you guys online and find out more about Techstars?
Kerty Levy (01:08:38.862)
LinkedIn is really easy for me. Reach out. Kerty Levy on LinkedIn. think I’m the only Kerty Levy on LinkedIn.
Brian Bell (01:08:49.605)
It’s a nice problem to have. There’s a lot of Brian Bells. You search Brian Bells like, oh, I don’t know which one it is.
Kerty Levy (01:08:53.806)
And definitely our website, we do get inbound and we look for it, especially right now. I am looking for inbound. I’m looking for founders who are really creating unique things that are incredibly big swings and they’re incredibly game changing.
Keith Camhi (01:09:12.753)
Yeah, same. me on LinkedIn is a great way to find me. You can email Casey at techstars.com if you want. I will look at them after our demo day in December. We’re heads down in program right now, but love to catch up with founders working on interesting things.
Brian Bell (01:09:27.461)
Well, it’s been an awesome conversation. Thanks so much for coming on.
Keith Camhi (01:09:31.037)
Thanks for having us.
Kerty Levy (01:09:31.225)
Thank you, Brian. Thanks for having us.
