Brad Feld

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TechStars Data from 2007 to 2009

Mar 15, 2010
Category Techstars

One of our internal mantras at TechStars is to “publish your data.”  We encourage every team to do this starting very early in their life.  To this day, I still get daily performance reports (I refer to them as TPS reports) from many of the companies that have gone through the program.

Last week, David Cohen published all of the historical TechStars data.  39 companies have gone through the program to date (30 through Boulder and 9 through Boston).  The data that David published covers a lot of ground, including status by individual company.  Some of the pertinent summary data follows:

  • In three years, about $16.5 million in seed-stage funding has been raised.
  • 27 of 39 (~70%) TechStars companies have either raised outside funding after the program or bootstrapped to profitability.
  • TechStars companies currently employ 156 people.
  • Four of the first ten companies from the inaugural 2007 class have already achieved positive exits.
  • The most recent group of companies resulted in seven VC-led follow-on funding rounds and three additional angel-led rounds.

At the same time, Shawn Broderick, who runs the TechStars Boston program, just published the age demographics for the newest class of 10 companies that started the program at the beginning of March.  The numbers may surprise you as being higher than you might expect:

  • Youngest: 21
  • Oldest: 51
  • Average: 28.3
  • Median: 27

Our plan is to continue to update this data on a regular basis as we think it helps people better understand the TechStars program.  If there is additional data that you’d like to see, please feel free to suggest it.

Applications for the TechStars Boulder 2010 program are still open until March 22, 2010 at 11:59:59 PM Mountain Time.  If you haven’t applied but are thinking about it, apply now (it’ll only take a few minutes.)