494. The Techstars Refresh, Why Bigger Isn't Better, Investing in the Seed-Strapping Era, and Why Quantum May Dwarf Every Tech Shift (David Cohen)

This episode of TFR is brought to you by Ramp, the spend management platform we use here at TFR. They're offering listeners a $150 just to take a demo. We've never had an offer quite like this. Claim your $150 before this offer is gone at our partner link, ramp.com/partner/tfr. And this episode of TFR is brought to you by the American Arbitration Association, where smart startups and investors turn to for fast, efficient, and cost effective dispute resolution. Visit adr.org/tfr to learn more. Welcome to the podcast about venture capital, where investors and founders alike can learn how VCs make decisions and reach conviction. Your host is Nick Moran, and this is the full ratchet. David Cohen is back joining us today from Boulder, Colorado. He's the founder and CEO at Techstars, the global accelerator and venture firm with over 1,000,000,000 AUM that has backed over 4,000 startups. Across their accelerator and funds, they've invested in 22 unicorns, including DigitalOcean, PillPack, Remitly, SendGrid, Twilio, Uber, Scopley, and Zipline. David also co authored a book, Do More Faster with Brad Feld. And before Techstars was a serial entrepreneur with multiple successful exits. David, welcome back to the show. Hey, Nick. Great to see you again. Also a failure in those startups. I got it all. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Successes and failures. Well, you're not real if you don't have some of those. That's right. That's right. So so, David, last time you were on the show, 06/26/2018. I just looked it up. A lot has happened since then. Bring us up to speed on yourself and, in Techstars. Sure. Well, great to be back, and I'm also back as CEO here at Techstars for about sixteen months now as we're talking today. It's a little over a year, And, that was after about a four, four and a half year stint as chairman. So I had stepped back a bit, and was supporting, you know, the team any way I could, but but sort of working, you know, maybe half time in that period, supporting the CEO. And so came back, you know, again, about about sixteen months ago, and sort of had my three recommitments I brought back to the company, and excited to be back in the seat and jamming again. So we are now over 18 years old. We're we're now an adult here at Techstars. Maybe went through, you know, as as lots of folks do, you know, the awkward teenage years. Drink a little too much, party a little too much, but, you know, now we've grown up and and, you know, are are sort of getting off into the real world again. So it's it's been quite a journey at Techstars, and I'm excited to be back at the home again. So so why did you come back to run Techstars? Well, it was an opportunity to do so. And I think I had that four year break where I was, you know, maybe …