My first real interaction with Techstars was in the lobby of the Marriott hotel next to the LAX airport in early 2009. I had applied to the Techstars accelerator in Boulder a few weeks earlier and now I was meeting the cofounder, David Cohen, who had flown in for the day to meet several LA-area companies for in-person interviews.

I had built a few startups already, but I hadn’t found the success I was seeking. Something was missing. We had the talent. We had the idea. We had the drive. But still, we hadn’t been successful. It’s obvious now that we didn’t have some of the critical ingredients, such as mentorship and a network, to be successful. That day at LAX—meeting with David Cohen and learning about the Techstars approach to entrepreneurship—changed everything for me, for my cofounders, and for our company, SendGrid.

We participated in the third cohort of Techstars in Boulder in 2009. Techstars provides seasoned mentors to work with startups. These aren’t just any mentors, but people you can trust, who have your best interests in mind, and who want to see you succeed. Our mentors started adding value right away. They began buying our product for their own companies. They helped us think through pricing and marketing, so we would get those things right from the start. We even met our first nonfounding CEO, Jim Franklin, because he was a mentor at Techstars that summer. We found our first investors because of the accelerator program.

What we didn’t expect was the help we’d get from Techstars after we left the accelerator, during the many challenging years that followed. As participants at Techstars, we are part of a community of people, before and after us, who care about our success and provide ideas and insights. For example, we received acquisition offers and Techstars guided us and helped us avoid selling too early, which would have been a tragic mistake. They helped us focus on our culture and pushed our team to define key elements of our culture, which we refer to as our “four Hs” (honest, hungry, humble, and happy) and that still exist today. Techstars actively helped us recruit Sameer Dholokia, who helped SendGrid from its early growth years through its IPO. Techstars representatives served on our board of directors from the beginning to well past $100 million in revenue. Countless customer introductions have been made by Techstars, which have been invaluable.

As I write this, SendGrid has just completed a public offering (NYSE: “SEND”) and now has more than 150,000 customers.¹ It has been an amazing journey with Techstars since that meeting with David at LAX about a decade ago. To this day, I still mentor at Techstars because I have seen firsthand the impact and power of giving first and doing more faster!

For me and many others, Techstars is for life.

Isaac Saldana
May 2019

Entrepreneurship is hard. Starting with an idea that inspires you and creating a sustainable company is one of the most difficult tasks for people to achieve. Along the way, you will experience joy like you have never felt before and despair so deep that you will question everything about yourself.

It’s not surprising that most startups fail. Even entrepreneurs who have achieved success often have stories of staggering personal challenges and failures where they lose all of their savings and the money given to them by friends and families. Personal relationships get destroyed. Friends’ couches are slept on and much ramen is eaten. The boneyard of unsuccessful entrepreneurial endeavors is wide, deep, and filled with talented, smart, and motivated people who had great ideas but couldn’t overcome the challenges of going from an idea to a sustainable business.

We have been in that boneyard of failed businesses ourselves, which is why we decided to write this book. We started out aiming the book at the startup entrepreneur who has a great idea and wants to build a company around that idea. But we also think the book will provide insights to others, such as entrepreneurs who have been able to create a company but have not been as successful as they hoped. If you are involved in corporate innovation initiatives or product R&D, many of the ideas, tactics, and insights in this book will be applicable to you. Or perhaps you are a person with responsibility for community or economic development in your city or state. You will find the book to be helpful in jump-starting entrepreneurship in your community. Do More Faster was written to help everyone wanting to understand, and put into action, the principles that accelerate going from an idea to a sustainable business.

We founded Techstars in 2006 with one idea in mind: to help entrepreneurs succeed. We believe that entrepreneurs create a better future for everyone and that they, and the companies they create, are the key to economic growth. The healthy startup communities that result from entrepreneurship improve the lives of people well beyond the direct reach of startup companies. Education and healthcare improve because of the increase in economic activity. Other businesses, such as retailers, service providers, and real estate, benefit. We have seen this positive cycle of entrepreneurship and the startup community play out firsthand over the past decade in Boulder, Colorado, where we live.

To get to a deep and lasting community-wide economic impact, startup entrepreneurs need to first be able to navigate the twists and turns, pitfalls, and obstacles that can derail a good idea. Our approach at Techstars has proven to be successful in helping startups succeed. Our mentorship-driven seed accelerators have helped more than a thousand fledgling companies attract more than $7 billion in investments and create tens of billions of dollars in enterprise value. More than 150 of the companies that have gone through a Techstars program have been acquired since we started.

Why has Techstars been able to help generate so many disruptive and innovative companies? What makes Techstars different from other venture capital firms and seed accelerators? How is Techstars able to expand so quickly and have programs running in over 30 different cities around the world?

It’s the mentorship. We create a bond between thoughtful, successful, serial entrepreneurs and startup entrepreneurs. This community, and the culture of giving first between mentors and startup entrepreneurs, is critical to helping startup entrepreneurs validate ideas, avoid critical mistakes, and position themselves for the best possible outcome. This isn’t a short-term community that lasts only while the startup founder is at the accelerator; it’s a community that persists forever, becoming a construct we describe as “Techstars for life.”

As investors and entrepreneurs, we have worked with tens of thousands of founders and thousands of companies over the past 30 years of our careers. Even though many things evolve and change, we have seen the same issues come up over and over again. We created Techstars to channel the cumulative experience of successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs for the benefit of today’s startup entrepreneurs. But we don’t do it alone; we are helped by over 10,000 of the best entrepreneurs on the planet who are mentors at Techstars accelerator programs.

Organization of the Book

Do More Faster was first written in 2010 to capture Techstars mentors’ unique insights into what it takes to make a startup successful. At that time, Techstars was focused on accelerators to help entrepreneurs succeed and we had only a handful of locations—in Boulder, Boston, and Seattle. We have since expanded to other locations throughout the world and work with global corporations, communities, and business schools to drive entrepreneurship. The chapters in this edition of Do More Faster reflect our early years as a startup in the United States and the challenges that startup entrepreneurs face. Our next book, Do Even More Faster, picks up where this book leaves off and provides insights on scaling up your business. It also reflects our global expansion to Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

We thought carefully about the key issues around early-stage entrepreneurship and organized those issues around seven themes: Idea and Vision, People, Working Effectively, Product, Fundraising, Legal and Structure, and Work–Life Harmony. The recurring lessons have stood the test of time and we’ve freshened up and updated these sections.

Each theme contains the personal experience, insights, and firsthand accounts of the startup entrepreneurs and mentors who are involved with Techstars. The chapters are short, targeted, and focus on common sayings heard around Techstars. Some of these sayings, such as the title of this book, are mantras of ours. A few are well-worn clichés. But all of them are critical ideas that have withstood the test of time and can help you to become a successful entrepreneur. You’ll also encounter what seems to be contradictory advice between some of the chapters, but we view it as a balanced perspective showing the complexities of startup challenges. Entrepreneurship is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor.

Although mastering these themes doesn’t ensure success for every first-time entrepreneur, our experience is that understanding the challenges, hearing personal stories, and consuming advice from mentors and startup entrepreneurs can be very helpful. You’ll realize that you aren’t alone in facing these challenges and will see that successful entrepreneurs have trudged down the same path as you.

While Techstars is focused on technology companies, the principles and advice throughout the book apply to other types of startup ventures as well. They also can be helpful to established companies exploring new, innovative approaches to their businesses, as well as organizations working on economic and community development initiatives. So, whether you’re creating a world-changing app, starting a restaurant, creating a nonprofit, building a startup community, or increasing innovation in your organization, Do More Faster will help accelerate your success.

In the spirit of Techstars, this book is community-oriented and mentorship-driven. It’s also very personal, as we wanted to help the reader put a name to a face. For that reason, we have included many photos to bring the stories to life. The stories form a cohesive narrative, but they also stand alone.

Techstars is a magical thing. We hope you’ll find the perspectives and stories in this book to be powerful and useful to you and your startup. Let us know what you think. Come visit us at Techstars.com or email us at david.cohen@techstars.com or brad@feld.com.

David Cohen and Brad Feld
May 2019
Boulder, Colorado

Techstars started as an idea in 2006, when David Cohen sent an email to David Brown about a novel way to help entrepreneurs accelerate their businesses. Since then it has grown into the worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed. In a little over a decade, Techstars accelerators have funded more than 1,700 companies in more than 30 locations in 13 countries.¹ About 80% of these companies are successful: they have become profitable, have been bought by notable companies such as Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook, and they have gone on to raise more than $7 billion in venture capital and angel investors.

We believe that Techstars represents something special. We’re often told that it feels like an entrepreneurial revival. What’s the secret to Techstars’ rapid growth and success rate of companies going through accelerator programs? The reasons can be distilled into three unique ingredients: practicing the principles of Do More Faster, integrating mentorship deeply within the accelerators, and promoting community by giving first.

At Techstars, we practice the principles outlined in this book. We run intensive, three-month programs for startup entrepreneurs—not a full year, not six months, and definitely not 9-to-5. Our accelerators remove all the distractions and force the entrepreneurs to focus solely on their startup. We do this once a year in each location that we run an accelerator. We bring together 10 startups (from between 500 and 1,000 applicants) with around 100 local mentors, who are top entrepreneurs and investors, for each three-month program, then focus intensive mentorship on them and tie them into our global network. After 13 weeks, the program culminates with a series of events during which the startups pitch their ideas to hundreds of investors.

Another key ingredient is mentorship. You’ll often hear us describe Techstars as “mentorship driven.” We carefully select people who are interested in deeply engaging with entrepreneurs—not simply to get the inside track on investing or give high-level feedback or tell biographical stories. Our mentors are selected because they want to help entrepreneurs avoid roadblocks that will prevent them from getting their idea to the market. Each of the 10,000 mentors who participates in Techstars accelerators or community programs is asked to focus on a single company or, if she has a great deal of free time, at most two. We carefully avoid fly-by mentorship in which someone successful or famous stops by an accelerator to impart some generic wisdom and give shallow feedback on each company. At Techstars, we’re only interested in deep and engaged mentorship, where mentors want to develop a relationship with an entrepreneur and be involved for the long haul. Our approach results in around five mentors working closely with each company. This is the magic of Techstars—a focused group of amazing mentors paired with each company to help them excel and accelerate.

Techstars is also about community. When we started Techstars, one of our primary goals was to connect and improve our local startup community in Boulder. We wanted more passionate and skilled businesspeople in Boulder, engaged local angel investors, and entrepreneurs. We wanted Boulder to be known to the world as a credible place for talented entrepreneurs. We wanted the best, brightest, and most experienced entrepreneurs to become mentors and work together on new and exciting startups. Fundamentally, we wanted our community to be better. Our mentors help for the same reasons.

We believe that a culture of sustained mentorship is the secret weapon of successful startup communities. Because of Techstars, we’ve noticed that mentorship and community eventually come full circle. The founders of early Techstars companies are now mentors to the founders of newer ones. Some of the founders who have been through Techstars are starting their second, third, or fourth company. Alumni of the accelerators have started making their own angel investments, and several venture capital funds have now been started by alumni. The life-changing value of highly engaged mentorship is now ingrained into the very fabric of who they are. In turn, they give back every day.

Today, more than a decade after founding Techstars, we are on the path to achieving its vision as the worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed. We work with corporate partners like Target, Ford, Barclays, Amazon, and over 50 others to supercharge growth by accelerating innovation and cultural transformation. Startup Week, Startup Weekend, and Startup Accelerators have helped to create tens of billions of dollars in value and tens of thousands of jobs. We currently provide our Startup Weekend in 630 cities in 110 countries with over 70,000 attendees annually. Startup Week takes place in 147 cities in 16 countries with over 100,000 participants annually. And our three-month Startup Accelerators have helped more than 1,700 companies.

In 2019 we launched a new initiative called Techstars Studio, which will allow Techstars to source new company concepts from Techstars alumni founders, community leaders, venture capitalists, mentors, and corporate partners. The Techstars Studio will then build prototypes, test market adoption, and select the most promising concepts for launch. The first Techstars Studio will be in Boulder, just like the first Techstars accelerator was in 2007. As with the expansion of Techstars Accelerators around the world, we expect Techstars Studios to follow a similar expansion path. We are especially excited about the founding team of Techstars Studios. Along with the leadership of David Cohen (the co-CEO of Techstars) will be Isaac Saldana, founder of SendGrid, and Mike Rowan, former VP of SendGrid Labs. We’ve worked closely with Isaac and Mike over the years and are psyched to have another chance to create something with them from the ground floor.

One of the things that sets Techstars apart from others is the consistency of what we do and the results we achieve. We frequently hear from participants in our programs—startup founders, mentors, corporate partners, and attendees at our Startup events—that regardless of location, program, or Techstars leaders, the same high-quality standards and value are delivered. We attribute this to our Code of Conduct, which permeates all that we do at Techstars and is rigorously enforced.² We hold ourselves and all others in the Techstars community to the highest levels of conduct because we believe we are ambassadors for the Techstars community, and we live in the public. Our code has three tenets: we give first, we act with integrity, and we treat all others with respect.

By giving first, we mean helping others whenever possible, and appreciating the help others give us. By acting with integrity, we mean being honest and transparent, protecting sensitive information, communicating with our investors, and disclosing conflicts of interest. And by treating others with respect, we mean committing to an open, nonhostile workplace, having zero tolerance for any form of discrimination or harassment, avoiding gossip, and promoting fair pay for equal work.

We believe all companies should operate with these principles, and by doing so they will achieve a harmony that leads to higher levels of engagement and better productivity, and will attract talented people at all levels.

In addition to our global reach, Techstars is committed to making an impact. The mission of our Techstars Foundation is to foster diversity and inclusion throughout the entrepreneurial ecosystem. We work with nonprofit organizations like Student Dream, Change Catalyst, and Patriot Boot Camp to help individuals and organizations make a positive impact in their local communities. Brad and his wife Amy Batchelor’s foundation, the Anchor Point Foundation, actively supports a broad range of efforts by individuals and organizations to improve their communities.

Although Techstars has grown significantly over the past decade, we remain committed to the core idea of Techstars: helping entrepreneurs with an idea to create a sustainable business. We are the worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed.

When startup founders first get to Techstars accelerators, they receive the red-carpet treatment from us. They are introduced to the Techstars team—many of whom have gone through the program, sold their company, and come back to work with us. They get to meet the mentors, many of whom are well-known within the startup community, and have earned national and international reputations. They get to talk about themselves, their idea, their vision and aspirations, and to have interested people ask them thoughtful questions. They immediately start developing relationships with the other founders in the program.

Then, reality sets in.

If we could sum up that reality in one word, it’s intensity. The amount of work that needs to be done—data to collect and validate, meetings with mentors, follow-up contact with people, processing of feedback, and exploration of options—all happens so quickly and in such a short, compressed time, that many founders are shocked by the daunting task ahead.

We have found that the right mindset and approach to being a startup entrepreneur is the key to reducing that shock to hours, if not minutes. The following introductory chapters provide a perspective into what successful startup entrepreneurs are doing and thinking, and how they approach the startup challenge.

Startups do almost everything at a disadvantage. Initially, most startups have less money than their competitors. They have less credibility and fewer customers. They have fewer employees, which means there are fewer people focused on marketing, sales, and product development. Resources are scarce at a startup.

But, as in the martial arts, the best startups use the weight of their opponents to compete more effectively. Bureaucracy slows down larger companies. People do less in larger companies because making a mistake can be politically costly. Risk takers who are wrong get fired or lose power internally. The larger the company, the more likely it is to be slow and fraught with internal politics.

If there’s one competitive advantage that most startups have, it’s that they can do more faster. And because they can do more faster, they can learn more faster. Startups can immediately throw things away that don’t work, because no one cares, anyway. Nobody is trying to protect a brand that doesn’t exist, and there isn’t any reason to be afraid of small failures. Startups know that that’s just part of the process.

If you ask CEOs of major companies what they’re most worried about, one common answer is, “a couple of people in a garage somewhere.” Why would a major company be worried about that? Because their larger and more established competitors have too much to lose to try something radically different. There’s too much at stake for these large companies to try to blow up the market to disrupt the existing players. Relatively speaking, startups have nothing to lose and everything to gain by trying radical or nonobvious things. Larger companies are often baffled at just how much a startup can get done—and it scares them.

One of the things we talk with startups at Techstars about is that they have to do more faster. This doesn’t mean doing random stuff—they still have to be thoughtful. But if they’re not hyperproductive as small, nimble companies, then they’re fighting from a real disadvantage. There is no advantage to being a startup if you can’t do more faster. I’m such a big believer in this that I originally named my own first angel fund Bullet Time Ventures. It’s named after the move from the movie The Matrix, where Neo is so fast that he can easily dodge bullets. To him, his enemies move in slow motion, so he has an obvious advantage over them that can make all the difference in the virtual world he lives in. The same is true in the startup world.

When Occipital was in Techstars in 2008, they were faster than a speeding bullet. As a visual search company, they tried several products before having a runaway hit with RedLaser. All of their products were interesting, but what really paid off for Occipital was their ability to try their ideas quickly and throw away what didn’t work while focusing on what did work. RedLaser was actually the fourth product Occipital worked on over a six-month time frame. On the surface, this may sound disorganized and random, but Jeff Powers and Vikas Reddy were deliberate about assessing progress at every step and vigilant about throwing away ideas and prototypes that didn’t work.

There are multiple examples of Techstars companies that learned to do more faster. Next Big Sound built an incredibly beautiful and functional product in under three months. SendGrid figured out how to scale their email delivery infrastructure to 20 million emails a day in under a year. Oneforty rallied a community of thousands of Twitter application developers in just a few months. Intense Debate went from concept to being installed on hundreds of blogs in the course of a single summer. Companies that work seem to move at lightning speed. By contrast, the ones that don’t seem to always be talking about releases and features that are coming “in a few months.” How do the fast companies do it? They focus on what matters and make massive progress in the areas that actually have an impact.

At Techstars and as an investor, I’ve been involved with startups that couldn’t do more faster. They were just as slow to execute as larger competitors. They employed too much process too early, tried to convince themselves that they were absolutely right before taking risks, and thought too long at the expense of getting things done. Their great ideas couldn’t save them. It turns out that giving up your one obvious competitive advantage often proves to be deadly. If a startup can’t do more faster, it usually just gets dead faster.

When I grow up I want to be like Yoda (except for the short green part). Until then, I’ll just do my best to incorporate his philosophy into my life, summarized in the following:

$DO | ! $DO; try

Try: command not found

I’ve always found this Yoda quote to epitomize how I try to live my life. Ever since I was a little kid, I never really understood what “try” meant. There were lots of things I did and lots of things I failed at. However, even when I failed, I viewed myself as having “done it,” even if I wasn’t successful. When I wanted to master something, I did it a lot. I didn’t try to do it—I did it and accepted the failure along with the success.

Throughout the years I have heard many people say, “You should try this,” or “You should try that.” Sometimes it was trivial (for example, “You should try foie gras.”—yuck, I’m a vegetarian); other times, it was complex (“You should try to learn how to play the piano”). My parents taught me early on that “No” or “I’m not interested” was an acceptable answer to the “you should” directive, so I was rarely intimidated when faced with something new. I also started to understand the difference between preference (for example, try foie gras and see if you like it) and accomplishment (try to learn how to play the piano). I realized preference was unimportant in the context of accomplishment, but the inverse mattered—namely, that accomplishment was important in the context of preference. Specifically, you could accomplish a wide range of things whether you preferred them or not, but when you tried to accomplish that thing (playing the piano), it mattered a lot whether you preferred it. Prefer the guitar over the piano? You’ll probably never be accomplished at the piano.

Now, ponder the phrase “You should try entrepreneurship.” What exactly does that really mean? Then there’s “You should try to start a company.” Or “You should try to build a product.” Or even “You should try to sell something to someone.” Try? Really? If you prefer entrepreneurship, or think you have a preference for entrepreneurship, just go for it. You might fail—but that’s okay and is part of the process. If you start a company that ultimately fails, you are still an entrepreneur. And your next step should be to go start another company.

If you don’t have a preference for entrepreneurship (or—more specifically—entrepreneurship doesn’t interest you), you have no business creating a company in the first place. Starting a company is extremely difficult and requires commitment on many levels. Ultimately, you don’t really “try to start a company”—you either do it or you don’t.

Do or do not—there is no try.

Most people think that the core of a startup is a singular, amazing, world-changing, and earth-shattering idea. It turns out that this is almost always completely wrong. Take it from us, we have had thousands of ideas pitched to us and very few are earth shattering! Here’s a sample of email pitches we have gotten.

Good Morning David!

I have an excellent idea that will transform the world and I would like to join your accelerator to make it happen! I can’t tell you what it is but trust me, it will make both of us a lot of money!

Dear Mr. Feld,

I hope this email finds you doing well. I am a chemical engineer and I have created a novel technology that will make coal-fired power plants more efficient, lowering operating costs, which will translate into lower prices at the fuel pump.

Hey David and Brad—

Do you know how many cars and trucks there are in the good old US of A? 253 million! And each car and truck can use the technology I’m developing. Each and every one. I have an idea that will probably take a year to finish up and after that, I’ll be your first multibillion-dollar company!

It’s a value of ours to respond to any reasonable email, but we can’t respond to these inquiries based on the information we have. We’re interested in helping entrepreneurs succeed, and without knowing your idea we can’t possibly know if we can help you. Next, we have no interest in helping anyone succeed in a dying industry. It’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic—the end result is the same regardless of what you do. New coal plant construction has declined nearly 80% globally in the past 10 years, whereas both solar (1,600%) and wind (685%) have increased dramatically in that time frame. Last, pitching the size of the market doesn’t have any bearing on whether your product will be purchased by anybody.

The “earth-shattering” ideas are mostly in the mind of the unreasonably optimistic startup entrepreneur.

Many successful startups started doing something else. At Techstars, many of the companies that have gone through the accelerator are now working on something very different from their original idea. Some of these companies are working in the same general domain but with a completely different application or product area. A surprising number of them are unrecognizable from the description of the business on their original application to Techstars.

When Alex White of Next Big Sound showed up at Techstars, he was immediately confronted with a chorus of “We love you but your idea sucks.” He dropped that original concept a week into the Techstars accelerator, built something amazing, and Next Big Sound ended up being acquired by Pandora several years later. Jeff Powers and Vikas Reddy of Occipital spent the summer working on some sort of image compositing software before landing on the spectacularly successful RedLaser iPhone app that eBay subsequently acquired. Since then, Occipital has launched a string of successful products and is changing the world of augmented and virtual reality. We aren’t even sure we remember what Joe Aigboboh and Jesse Tevelow of J-Squared Media were working on when they showed up at Techstars, but we had a feeling they were awesome, which they then demonstrated by launching a series of successful Facebook applications on the heels of Facebook’s F8 launch. J-Squared Media eventually became PlayQ, which is now a very successful game studio in the Los Angeles area. In each case, we saw that the original idea will often morph as companies grow, and it’s the people that will drive them toward success. The key is to get going and start creating as early as possible.

Startups are about testing theories and quickly pivoting based on feedback and data. This is one of the areas in which an engaged mentor can help you avoid falling down rabbit holes and pursuing data that doesn’t matter. Only through hundreds of small—and sometimes large—adjustments do the seemingly overnight successes emerge.

The idea and the vision are the fundamental building blocks that entrepreneurs need. In the following chapters within this theme, we highlight some of the ways that entrepreneurs come up with ideas and how those ideas develop as a result of getting good feedback and data.

Earth-shattering and world-changing ideas are a dime a dozen. In fact, that’s being too generous.

I’ve had hundreds of would-be entrepreneurs contact me with great news: They have the next big thing, but they can’t risk telling me (or anyone else) about it until I sign some form of idea insurance, usually a nondisclosure agreement (NDA). Like every other sensible investor on the planet, I decline the request to sign the NDA, forgoing the idea, often to the shock, awe, and dismay of the stunned entrepreneur.

Why do I avoid this conversation? Because entrepreneurs who behave this way clearly overvalue ideas and, therefore, almost by definition, undervalue execution. Brainstorming is a risk-free, carefree activity. Entrepreneurship in the literal sense of “undertaking” is not. Strap on your seat belt if you’re signing up for a startup. It’s a high-velocity experience.

If you have a brilliant idea, it’s safe to assume that other very smart people are working on the same thing or working on a different approach to solving the same problem. Just look at the number of different travel apps on your iPhone or the number of diet and exercise sites on the Web for an example of this.

Overvaluing the idea is a red flag, particularly in the absence of tangible progress. Sure, with this attitude I miss out on investing in some truly great ideas, but that’s okay with me: I don’t invest in ideas. Neither does Warren Buffett. I’ll lose less money than those who do. I can largely control my downside by investing in good people who, even if they fail this go-round, will learn from mistakes and have other fundable ideas (ideas I’ll likely have access to as an early supporter). I do not have this advantage when investing in ideas.

One popular startup dictum worth remembering is “One can steal ideas, but no one can steal execution or passion.” Put in another light: There is no market for ideas. Think about it for a second: Have you tried selling an idea lately? Where would you go to sell it? Who would buy it? When there is no market, it is usually a very sure sign that there is no value.¹

Almost anyone can (and has!) come up with a great idea, but only a skilled entrepreneur can execute it. Skilled in this case doesn’t mean experienced; it means flexible and action-oriented, someone who recognizes that mistakes can often be corrected, but time lost postponing a decision is lost forever. Ideas, however necessary, are not sufficient. They are just an entry ticket to play the game.

Don’t shelter and protect your startup concept like it’s a nest egg. If it’s truly your only viable idea, you won’t have the creativity to adapt when needed (and it will be needed often) in negotiating or responding to competitors and customers. In this case, it’s better to call it quits before you start.

Focus on where most people balk and delay: exposing it to the real world. If you’re cut out for the ride, this is also where all the rewards and excitement live, right alongside the 800-pound gorillas and cliffside paths. That’s the fun of it.

David didn’t beat Goliath with a whiteboard. Go get amongst it, and like the best boxers, prepare to think on your feet, bob and weave, and quickly adapt.